Smallville 2.18 - Visitor

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In the last episode Clark found out that his home planet has been destroyed and he's alone on Earth. In this episode he's given hope that there's at least one other inhabitant of Krypton in Smallville.

There's a new boy in Smallville High School. He's a socially awkward boy called Cyrus Krupp. He doesn't want to make friends, because he says he won't be in the school very long. That's fair enough, but he goes out of his way to annoy the other kids. He bumps into them and he unplugs their equipment in science class.

Chloe finds out that he's been passed from one foster family to another as a difficult child. He's also been sent to psychiatrists, because he claims to be an alien from another planet. Everyone thinks he's mad, but Clark gives him a chance. Cyrus says that he came to Earth in a spaceship on the night of the meteor shower.

When Lana's horse is sick, close to death, Cyrus lays his hands on it and heals it. More than that, the horse becomes young again.

There's other proof. Cyrus says that he's received signals from space. The origin of the signals matches the coordinates that Dr. Swann gave Clark in the last episode. Cyrus has also drawn sketches of a spaceship coming to Earth, and it's identical to the ship in Clark's storm cellar.

Cyrus says that Clark is the first person who doesn't think he's mad. After an incident with the school bullies, Cyrus concludes that Clark is an alien as well. Clark doesn't deny it. Cyrus tells Clark that he has to transmit a signal and be picked up by a spaceship at midnight the next day. Why always at midnight? Does all intelligent life in the universe set its watches to America's Central Time Zone? Cyrus asks Clark to join him, but Clark says that Earth is his home.

The transmitter is a crazy looking tower. To build something that big out of scrap metal and electronics equipment you have to be crazy or a genius.

The school bullies must know something is going on, because they arrive shortly before midnight to demolish the tower. Clark stops them, but one of them is badly injured in the process. Judging by the sound, his neck is snapped. It's unusual for Clark to be so careless. I've never known him to accidentally injure someone so badly before, but it's good for the story. Cyrus descends from the tower to save the bully's life, even though it means missing the deadline to return to his planet. After this he has a complete mental breakdown.

The episode ends with a lot of unanswered questions. Was Cyrus really an alien? Maybe he just had psychic abilities, granted by the meteor rocks, which made him tap into Clark's memories. Cyrus doesn't return later in the series, so we never find out.

Clark gets a lot of female attention on the farm. Chloe visits him in her red Beetle.

And Lana visits him on her horse. Actually, it belonged to her ex-boyfriend Whitney before his death. Whitney's mother can't afford to keep the horse and wants to sell it, but Clark offers to keep it on his farm. That will give him a chance to see a lot more of Lana.

Here's something strange. The next day Lex Luthor congratulates Clark on making a move by taking Lana's horse. But how did he know? Maybe Lana told him, but why would she do so? He also knows about Cyrus healing Lana's horse the next day. Did she tell him that as well? Or has he slipped a listening device into her jacket?

Lex's girlfriend Dr. Helen Bryce is involved in two subplots. Martha Kent is worried about her pregnancy, because she's only recently become able to conceive. She tells her husband that she wants Dr. Bryce to examine her, because she already knows that there are unusual things about her family after she examined Clark's blood in the episode "Fever". Jonathan is against it, worried that she'll tell Lex something. Martha visits Dr. Bryce behind his back. She promises that she won't tell Lex or Jonathan anything because of her vow of patient confidentiality, but she says that in order to help Martha she needs to know the whole truth about the Kent family. The scene ends without the viewer finding out exactly what Martha tells her.

The other subplot concerns Helen Bryce moving into Lex's mansion. She has a master key for the mansion, but she finds one door that it won't open. After initially claiming it's his secret lair, he invites her into the room. It's the room that contains his obsessions. It has information about the cave drawings, the octagonal disc and his car crash in the pilot episode. Most importantly, it contains information about Clark Kent. This must put Helen in a difficult position. Lex is obsessed with finding out about Clark, while she knows things that she can't tell him.

How is the Clark-Lana-Chloe love triangle developing? Referring to Cyrus (of course), Clark asks Chloe how she would feel about having a friend who's an alien. She says that it would be really cool. What else can we expect from the girl who's responsible for the Wall Of Weird?

Clark asks Lana the same question, and she says it would freak her out. That's a warning signal. Maybe Clark is chasing the wrong girl.

Now to the podcast. It was recorded on 18th April 2023, which was the 85th anniversary of the release of the first Superman comic on 18th April 1938.

Michael Rosenbaum says once more that he watched the episode on his phone. He should be ashamed of himself. Smallville deserves better. I watch it on my 43" television. I admit that it would look good on a 32" screen, because it was upscaled from a single density recording, but it shouldn't be any smaller. Someone needs to tell Michael that size matters.

Tom Welling has a better quality camera than Michael has in the studio, but it has drawbacks. We can see the fluff on his T-shirt. Or at least, you can see it if you enlarge the picture by clicking on it. Size matters. Or did I say that already?

Tom says that he can't watch Smallville late at night, because he dreams about it. The dreams don't necessarily make sense , but they disturb him. I can understand him, but for me it would be all the more reason to watch at night. I enjoy dreaming. I even appreciate nightmares when I wake up. The dreams might bring back some of the memories of things he forgot about the series.

And Ryan is just Ryan. Sometimes Ryan Tellez seems like an outsider, but it's good to have him in the studio as a new viewer, someone who's never watched "Smallville" before. He brings a fresh perspective into the conversations, even though he doesn't participate as actively as Michael or Tom. Ryan only steps into the limelight when he presents his three favourite scenes from each episode. I bet he doesn't watch Smallville on his phone.

This week the three Musketeers (or Podcasteteers) didn't say anything I didn't pick up myself. I've got into the habit of watching each episode critically. Does that make it more or less enjoyable? I don't know. I watched the series naively when I first saw it, 15 years ago. Apart from that, I was bingeing. Now I only watch one episode a week, so I have time to take it all in. I doubt I questioned Lex's knowledge of Lana's horse 15 years ago.

All three of the Podcasteteers (I'm starting to like that word) agreed with me that the subplots were better written than the main story itself. The main story was actually a good idea. It fitted in well after last week's episode. The problem is that the writers didn't think carefully enough about the details. Were they under time constraints? Did they only have a week to write each episode? Could I have done a better job? So many questions.

At this point in time, "Smallville" was the most successful series in the history of the CW channel, as far as viewing figures went. Whatever criticisms I might have of the writers, they must have been doing something right.

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