SMALLVILLE Minicaps / Season 1, Ep. 21 and Season One Highlights

Smallville season one minicaps aren’t planning to ditch you at the spring formal.

Stewart here, and be warned of spoilers within…

Things aren’t so rosy going into this last episode of the season. Lex’s dad seems to be upset his son isn’t moving back to Metropolis, Whitney’s dad dying is certainly a blow to Whitney and Lana, and Lex found some alien metal in the crash site of infant Clark’s ship, which happens to fit in the ship now in the Kent storm cellar. But, the spring formal is coming up, and Clark asked Chloe to be his date, and nothing could possibly go wrong there, right? Well…

First, some pandering to the female readers of these. You’re welcome.

“Tempest”

Well, let’s see what this season ending cliffhanger has for us. Lionel shuts down the Smallville plant, mostly to spite Lex, who tries to keep all those jobs from being lost. Whitney enlists into the Army, leaving Lana without a date to the spring formal. Clark takes Chloe to the formal, before she leaves for an internship over the summer. Clark’s parents have to contend with the tabloid reporter Lex hired stumbling onto Clark’s secret. And then there’s the twister that’s barreling down on the town.

So how do things end this season? Well, we go out on a lot of cliffhangers. Lana gets sucked into the twister, with Clark following after her. Lex has to decide on saving his dad from a horrible death. Jonathan chases the reporter out into the storm. And Clark’s ship turns on, thanks to the reporter bringing that alien octagon piece he stole from Lex with him. How all of this turns out is something best saved for the next round of minicaps…

Aw, there’s absolutely no way this can go bad for Chloe…

…AND he’s gone.

–So, yeah, Clark running off like that to save Lana probably isn’t what he meant by promising Chloe a “night she won’t forget”.

–Reckless gamble for that reporter to decide to blow up that truck with Clark in it. On one hand, it proved Clark was different to him, and if it didn’t, he would’ve just brutally overkilled a teenager.

–Good lord, Lionel is really hard-up to get Lex back to Metropolis, besides closing the plant and then buying out the savings and loan that the partners he’s lining up make payments to. Then he decides to show up in the middle of a massive storm to chide his son. Hard to blame Lex for taking an extra second to think about whether he should save him.

Yes, yes, I’ve royally boned this town! No need to thank me!

–Remy Zero’s appearance at the Formal pretty much screams, “Hey look, it’s the guys who do our theme music!”

–Well, say goodbye to Whitney as a regular, because he doesn’t return until briefly in season two (sort of)…

–More foreboding dialogue with Lex saying how relationships built on lies are doomed to fail, and Clark’s response to that: “Lucky us.”

So before we say goodbye to season one of the Smallville minicaps, let’s take a look at the best and worst that we’ve seen this season:

BEST EPISODES: “Pilot”, “X-Ray”, “Jitters”, “Rogue”, “Leech”

WORST EPISODES: “Hothead”, “Hug”, “Reaper”

BEST METEOR FREAK THIS SEASON: This is a hard one, but I have to go with Tina from “X-Ray”. And this has absolutely nothing to do with my celebrity crush on Lizzy Caplan. What? It doesn’t.

WHO GETS HOSPITALIZED MORE IN SMALLVILLE: Almost everyone gets put in a hospital bed once, save Martha, Pete, and Whitney, but Chloe wins this one with two trips this season. Hooray?

LESSONS CLARK LEARNS THIS SEASON: He’s an alien, he can see through things, and can survive a couple of dozen bullets shot at his chest. We’ll discover next season if he can survive a tornado though.

WHY YOU SHOULD HATE LANA LANG: She’s a freshman in high school who was a cheerleader now turned manager/co-owner of a coffee shop/revival house. What freshman wouldn’t feel inadequate at that point?

WHAT HAPPENS FREQUENTLY IN SMALLVILLE: People getting amnesia/dying not being able to reveal Clark’s secret. Actually, this will happen regularly in the series, so maybe this isn’t a category worth following up on.

WHO SHOULD CLARK HOOK UP WITH: Chloe. Yes, overachiever Lana would be the right answer for some, but she’s taken (for now). Now if Chloe could stop being so damn pesky about Clark’s past…

HOPES FOR SEASON TWO: Stop saying stuff about “destiny” every episode and stop being reliant on meteor freak stories. Spoilers: the first one gets less frequent and the second one won’t be a problem in future seasons.

You should start running, Lana. Like now. Like "two minutes ago instead of staring a them" run.

You should start running, Lana. Like now. Like “two minutes ago instead of staring at them” run.

SEASON ONE ANALYSIS: Even with the early hiccups of relying on too many “meteor freak of the week” stories, this season turned out to be quite enjoyable. There’s some nice ongoing mysteries set up in Clark’s spaceship and Lex’s investigation into the meteor shower, plus some more hit than miss stories involving meteor freaks in the mix to pad things out. Like most first seasons of any TV show, its not until midway through that Smallville seems to find a good balance of teenage melodrama and superheroic stuff.

Although, I could go one episode without hearing someone refer to “destiny” in some manner. I get it, something big is going to happen for Clark and Lex, but we don’t need to have it reminded to us like we have Alzheimer’s. We got plenty of time (let alone some speedbumps) along the way before we get to that. Speaking of speedbumps, we still got to deal with Clark running into a twister to save Lana and the whole alien ship coming to life, which we’ll deal with…

NEXT TIME: We start season two with Smallville recovering from a twister in “Vortex”, Clark discovers heat vision when a mysterious biology teacher comes into town in “Heat”, Pete discovers the truth about Clark in “Duplicity”, and some red meteor rocks turn Clark into a bad boy in “Red”.