THE SMALLVILLE FILES SEASON 3
Score: 7.5 / 10 
4: A Nightmare On Kal-Elm Street
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.
Superlad opens this episode by taking his shirt off and preparing to go for a quick dip in Smallville Lake. Naturally enough, Lana shows up and one-ups him by taking all her clothes off. The pair skinny-dip brazenly (but not before Superlad pretends to have drowned - ha ha ha!!) and are about to go all kissy-kissy when there are screams from the shore.
Superlad runs to the rescue of the screamer, a wide-eyed insane young girl. He tries to rescue her but is restrained by the necessity of keeping his erection covered. So, obviously, she is sucked into a quicksand hole and disappears.
Strange, isn't it, how the simplest of erections can hinder a rescue attempt and cause a young girl to be doomed forever?
Anyway, Superlad goes back and tells his story to Bo and Boring Old Ma.
"Yeah, look," says Bo. "We don't care about that. I have a new truck to give you."
And they go outside and give him a new truck. So, clearly, Bo's not always about the lies and deceit.
"We thought you deserved something fantastic considering how much of a turd you've been, running around Metropolis like a super-powered jerk," adds Boring Old Ma.
Superlad can't spot a flaw in this reasoning, so jumps in and drives off to school. He sees the Screaming Girl again - apparently she helped herself out of the quicksand mess, because while she's all screamy, she's also one of these modern resourceful chicks. So that's good news. In news of a less good nature, there's a big spooky Death Creature after her. Superlad catches a glimpse of the Death Creature but when he turns around it disappears.
Good Ol' Pete rocks up. "Yo, S!" he says. "You AWOL'd the chillin' history exam."
"Did you see the Death Creature? Or Screaming Girl?" asks Superlad, because now they've both disappeared.
"You hell whacked out!" says Good Ol' Pete.
"Get out of my show until you learn to talk properly!!" yells Superlad and runs off to visit TIAC.
"Hey, TIAC," says Superlad. "There's something weird going on. And when I think weird, I think you. Something came up at the lake yesterday."
"News of your woodies invariably spread rapidly ..."
"So I heard," says TIAC, enjoying the ribald connotations of erection double-talk. "News of your woodies invariably spread rapidly throughout High School."
Superlad feels secretly proud at this and smirks in a self-satisfied way.
"But I don't do weird stuff any more," continues TIAC. "I'm abandoning that for more traditional journalism - ie doing cross-promotional work for the media mogul that owns my paper."
So Superlad abandons TIAC and her ramblings and heads over to the Luthor Mansion. Sinead, clearly missing his duels with Porthos, takes a sword off the wall and swings it as Superlad. Naturally enough, it shatters on Superlad's invulnerable hide, as 9 out of 10 swords do.
"Aha!" says Sinead. "I knew there was something vaguely Kryptonian about you. I would have hidden your secret forever, but because you've lied to me I will found the Legion of Doom and destroy you."
This is no good, so Superlad runs home where he bumps into that bloody Screaming Girl again. The Death Creature who is in pursuit of her shows up again too. Superlad tries to punch it - because any form of reasoned conflict resolution is beyond him - but is flung against the wall. Then Death Creature envelops Screaming Girl in his cloak and swallows her.
And then Superlad wakes up and it was all a dream.
Phew!
And that's the end of the episode.
Oh, except for the bit where we discover that Screaming Girl just moved in next door and is somehow responsible for Superlad being asleep for the last day and a half.
At first, Bo thought it was some kind of elaborate trickery on Superlad's behalf to avoid his chores but, on reflection, he decided that spending thirty-six hours asleep just to get out of mending the back fence was overkill even for the renowned lazy-butt of Superlad.
So now that he's finally awake and available for chores again, Bo takes steps to ensure that Superlad doesn't have any more convenient two day snoozes. He accomplishes this in typical Bo fashion by forbidding Superlad to visit Screaming Girl next door.
"I wasn't going to," says Superlad.
"Well, don't," says Bo.
"Well, I won't," says Superlad.
"Good."
"Fine."
And then Lana comes along. "Hey," she says. "Let's go visit Screaming Girl next door."
"Okay," says Superlad.
And they go next door where they find that Screaming Girl is in a coma. She's being tended to by her Uncle Freddie. He explains that she was in a car crash (obviously! This is Smallville) into a river that killed her parents.
So TIAC explains how the river that Sleeping/Screaming Girl fell into is a hotbed of Kryptonite which explains how she can suck Superlad into her dreams. Or whatever the heck she's doing.
"Ipso facto, Uncle Freddie is the Death Monster."
And then Lana and Superlad check the public records that all small towns that are the basis of an ongoing teen soap are required to keep for plot purposes. These records explain that Uncle Freddie is in charge of Sleeping/Screaming Girl's trust fund which has zillions and squillions of dollars in it and as long as Sleeping/Screaming Girl stays asleep he keeps the money. Ipso facto, Uncle Freddie is the Death Monster.
Superlad runs over to visit Sleeping/Screaming Girl and spy on Uncle Freddie.
"Do you want something to drink?" asks Uncle Freddie, because even a villain can be a good host.
"Anything with amphetamines," says Superlad.
"I think I have some Diet Coke," says Uncle Freddie and disappears off set for a moment.
While he's gone, Superlad pokes around in his cupboards and discovers some kind of sleeping juice that Uncle Freddie has been using to keep Sleeping/Screaming Girl asleep. He runs off without even showing Uncle Freddie the common courtesy of a goodbye.
So Superlad's driving home, and because he didn't take any uppers, he falls asleep and crashes his truck. Bo and Lana and Boring Old Ma run to his rescue. Bo pulls him out of the overturned truck.
"I'll call an ambulance," says Lana.
"Don't bother," say Bo and Boring Old Ma, simultaneously.
"Hahahaha!" says Bo. "That is, we can't afford an ambulance."
"I'll pay for it," says Lana. "He's just totalled a truck. He needs medical attention."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" says Boring Old Ma. "But my diagnosis is a mild case of ouch-head."
"Exactly," says Bo. "Now off you scoot." Lana does so. A more suspicious person would puzzle at the Kents' lack of interest in medical treatment for their son. But Lana notices a hair follicle out of place and rushes off in search of a mirror.
She remembers that her old house had a mirror so drops in there. Then she remembers about the Screaming/Sleeping Girl and how she needs to be rescued and all that. Sigh.
Uncle Freddie sneaks up behind her and injects her with some sleepy-juice. Y'know, Lana was fighting off militarily-trained uber-assassins last week with both hands literally tied behind her back. This week, dopey old Uncle Freddie's too much for her, apparently.
Just saying, is all.
Also, back in Superlad's dream, Screaming/Sleeping Girl finally gets it into her head to just, like, beat up Uncle Freddie the Death Monster. Which works well. Superlad helps with a burst of his ubiquitous heat vision. And then wakes up and rescues Lana from Uncle Freddie's nefarious clutches.
While all this nonsense was going on in Smallville, back at Luthorcorp, Porthos wants Sinead to take a psychiatric test. Sinead doesn't want to take it. Then in the end he agrees to do so. Not exactly the finest subplot the Luthors have foisted upon us, but even a run-of-the-mill Luthor subplot is immeasurably enhanced by the undercurrent of hatred and rivalry and deception and pure evil. And, heck, neither of them spent the episode sleeping, so thumbs up Luthors.
That's more or less it. A reasonable kind of episode for those who are enormous fans of dream sequences, which I can only imagine is all of us. After all, a dream is a nutty old place where just about anything can happen. Just like an episode of Smallville.
Next week: Perry White shows up and before you can say 'Great Caesar's Ghost' he's on Superlad's back about, y'know, all the superpowered shenanigans he goes on with.
Begone,
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