THE SMALLVILLE FILES SEASON 2
Score: 7.2 / 10 
16: Superlad Crashes A Car
Starring Clark Kent (Tom Welling) as Superlad, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) as Sinead, Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) as TIAC, Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) as Bo, Martha Kent (Annette O'Toole) as Boring Old Ma, Lionel Luthor (John Glover) as Porthos, Kara Kent (Laura Vandervoort) as SBH and Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) as herself. For more information on these people and more, consult the scorecard.
The episode commences with Boring Old Ma wandering down to the ol' spaceship cellar to bury a flour tin that also coincidentally contains the octagonal key to the spaceship.
This all seems a little bit too interesting for Boring Old Ma, so Superlad pops his head down. "Yo Ma," he says. "You doing something mildly compelling?"
"Not at all, Superlad," says Boring Old Ma. "I'm just trying to plant an octagonal spaceship key flour tin tree. Now off you scoot!"
"Okey-doke," says Superlad, and disappears while Boring Old Ma digs up radioactive particles that invade her lungs and make her collapse in a tedious heap.
Well, how thoughtless, but not totally dull.
Boring Old Ma is taken to hospital where Dr TotalBabe wields her dubious medical nous. Bo decides to laze around the hospital for a while and sends Superlad home to do his chores.
Superlad gets to work on his chores, most of which seem to revolve around behaving snarkily to TIAC, so he's not overly concerned.
Back to the hospital and Dr TotalBabe has let it slip that Boring Old Ma is pregnant! Boring Old Ma, growing less and less boring by the moment.
"Pregnant?" says Bo, baffled. "There must be some mistake. Boring Old Ma is as infertile as the Smallville soil that powers my bankrupt farm!"
"Yes, well that's as may be," says Dr TotalBabe. "Your wife's still totally knocked up."
She strides out babeliciously and bumps into Sinead, who has taken to lurking around small town hospitals in his spare moments between organising fully-fledged corporate takeovers.
"What's up with Boring Old Ma?" asks Sinead.
"I can't tell you," responds Dr Totalbabe, coming over all Hippocratical for a moment.
"Fine!" says Sinead. "See if I care. And I can't tell you about my patients either." He pokes his tongue out.
"You have patients?" asks Dr Totalbabe. "Whatever for?"
"I can't answer that question." He runs off.
And then Dr TotalBabe reveals that she's been offered a research scholarship at The Medical Centre For Sustained Plot Contrivance. Which would have been a more effective revelation if it had been made before Sinead's departure.
By now Superlad's finished ridiculing TIAC so he's back at the hospital where Bo reveals the whole pregnancy thing.
"Is it yours?" asks Superlad.
Before Bo can answer, those nasty hooligans from the Poisons Enforcement Agency come in and demand to have access to the entire Kent farm, including, but not limited to, 'any places where extraterrestrial modes of transportation may be held'.
Superlad is forced to dash home and load the spaceship into a truck and drive over to Good Ol' Pete's house with it. In a groundbreaking first Superlad loses control of the car and crashes into a ditch! We are supposed to believe this is as a result of Superlad being infected by the same alien particles that are killing Boring Old Ma, but I choose to instead believe that Superlad is a victim of Peer Group Pressure. Further evidence for this theory is provided when we see Superlad being incapable of single-handedly lifting the truck out of the ditch - just like all his friends.
"They also confiscate Bo's hair dye."
So the Poisons Enforcement Agency bust in and confiscate most of Boring Old Ma's homemade pies on the grounds that they are 'extremely nasty'. They also confiscate Bo's hair dye.
They also make it to the barn and find the flour tin.
"What's this, Bo?" ask the PEA.
"It's clearly a flour tin seed."
"Well, what's this then?" asks PEA guy, showing Bo the octagonal key.
"That's some kind of regular polygon. Eight-sided if I'm not mistaken."
"Well, it's very suspicious!" says PEA guy.
"In what way? Because it's Kryptonian?" says Bo, then covers his mouth. Oops!
"6-7-8!" says Superlad, counting off his fingers. "Yep, it's got eight sides all right."
Bo heads back to the hospital where Boring Old Ma has regained her tiresome consciousness.
"Where, exactly," begins Bo. "Do you get off hiding pregnancies and spaceship keys from us? Do you know how interesting that is??"
"I'm sorry, Bo," says Boring Old Ma. "I just got a fix for the interesting character traits while working for Porthos. I won't do it again! You have my word."
"What about the baby? How could you possibly get pregnant?"
"Ummmm... the spaceship impregnated me."
Huh?!?
Meanwhile back at the farm, Superlad has a chat with Lana which culminates with him being so totally bored silly that he falls down unconscious in protest. Huh! thinks Lana, then sashays off prettily.
But it turns out that Superlad is not only bored, but sick, so Dr TotalBabe comes over to examine. She goes to take a blood test.
"I wouldn't do that, Doc," says Bo. "Superlad is a special boy."
Dr TotalBabe continues swabbing. "All children are special, Bo. Even Hanson in their way."
"Dr Totalbabe," says Bo. "You can't take blood from Superlad."
"Is this some kind of religious thing?"
"No, I mean, literally you can't do that. For one thing, Superlad's skin is tougher than ste--" But he stops mid-sentence when he sees that Dr TotalBabe has already injected and extracted the blood.
"You were saying?" says Dr TotalBabe.
"Um... Hahahaha ahhahahahhah hahhahahahha!!" laughs Bo, mildly insanely.
"... the blood cells have tiny little 'S's in the middle of them."
Dr TotalBabe takes the blood back to the lab and looks at it through a microscope. "Oh my God," she says, for the blood cells have tiny little 'S's in the middle of them.
The next day Superlad is in his sick bed so TIAC comes over to see him. She has written a note to read to him.
"Dear Superlad," it says. "You are so hot and buff. I would very much like to bear your children because you're so cute and, like, groovy and far out and mega-wicked. Also, your butt is so tight. Is it wrong for me to fantasise about you dressed in tights? Love, TIAC."
"Hmm??" says a (supposedly) half-asleep Superlad. "Lana?"
TIAC holds back tears and runs off.
Superlad starts giggling wildly to himself. Funny stuff from the Kryptonian Kid.
So anyway, around about now Bo discovers that Boring Old Ma's going to die the next day. He comes to the inexplicable conclusion that the only possible deus ex machina for this turn of events is for the spaceship to cure her.
So, naturally enough, he's off to break into the Poisons Enforcement Agency and steal the octagonal key back. He forbids Superlad to help him for plot purposes and drives off in the General Schwarzkopf.
"Just a good ol' boy," he sings melodiously to himself as he drives. "Never meanin' no harm..." He effortlessly breaks into the PEA pseudo-military compound past any number of soldiers and guards and then walks straight over to the box that holds the octagonal key. His sheer bravado reminds me of Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop One.
Of course, Eddie didn't have a disobedient super-powered kid to show up and help him when things got tough. And nor did he have Good Ol' Pete to offer himself as an idiot decoy to distract the oh-so-easily fooled PEA soldiers. So the analogy tends to fall apart. But this failed analogy does not prevent Bo from taking the spaceship back to the hospital and opening it up.
Meanwhile, in the aforementioned hospital, Boring Old Ma has gone into a mildly compelling cardiac arrest and flatlined. Dr TotalBabe zaps her, but to little avail.
"Time of death," says Dr TotalBabe. "3:45 am."
Then the spaceship blasts a ray of white light into the hospital and cures Boring Old Ma!
She sits up and asks if she could have 'a Snickers or something'.
"Oops!" says Dr TotalBabe and changes the 'd' to a not particularly convincing 'br'. Yes, she thinks. Time of breath. That'll keep the hospital board off her back.
Also, she has to change the time as well because she forgot about daylight savings time. "Do the clocks go forward or back?" she asks a passing nurse.
"Who are you??" says the nurse.
Anyway, that's pretty much (as we like to say around these parts) that. Dr TotalBabe tries to get the Kents to be open about, well, anything, but they respond with their usual web of lies. Meanwhile, Sinead has bought some medical records off the wayward nurse from the previous scene. Just for the hell of it. Then he convinces Dr TotalBabe that she should move in with him and become his live-in maid because (let's face it), she's not doing too well on the whole 'being a doctor' front. Lana finds TIAC's funny note about how hot she is for Superlad and tries to ad lib an equivalent parry of her own. "Um," she says to Superlad. "Glad you didn't die and that." Oh, and Good Ol' Pete slaps on some random bling and is now apparently a DJ. No explanation was offered for this.
Fine stuff. Boring Old Ma's foray into interesting territory was a noble one, but ultimately doomed to failure given her innate dullness. Still, this episode will always be memorable for Superlad joining the bad driving brigade of Smallville. Welcome aboard, kiddo.
Next week: According to the DVD liner notes, Christopher Reeve shows up, presumably to gloat about how infinitely more entertaining his 'Clark Kent' was.
Begone,
This here item has so far scored 7.2 / 10 on the patented Astonishing Tales Funny-o-meter.
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