Smallville 3.06 - Relic

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There's a change in the podcast this week. Ryan Tellez is missing from the show, and he's been replaced by Bryce (last name unknown) who's usually backstage as one of the show's engineers. Ryan has gone camping with his father. Michael and Tom spent time discussing it. Michael says that he gets on with his father, but going camping with him would be too close. All I can say is that I would have loved to go camping with my father. I'm not just saying that because he's dead. I would have done it while he was alive. He wasn't perfect, there were things I didn't like about him, but I fondly remember the times we sent together. When he worked as a night watchman in Little Aston Hall I used to sit in his office in the cellar and read comics until I fell asleep. That's when I was aged five to eight, maybe younger. When he was decorating Hydesville Tower School in Walsall (in the summer holidays) I sat in the headmaster's office reading the Narnia Chronicles and the Doctor Dolittle books. I was about 12 to 13 at the time. And then I lived with him for a few years after my mother left us. We never went camping, but I would have jumped at the opportunity.

In three days it's the 40th anniversary of his death. That makes me sad. While I lived in England I used to visit his grave every year on the anniversary of his death. I'll miss the anniversary this year, but I'll visit him at the first opportunity I get. I always stand and speak to him. Thinking logically, he can't hear me, but it somehow seems right.

Getting back to Bryce, he contributes more to the podcast than Ryan. He talks more, and he seems to know more about Superman in general. Ryan is a newbie, as far as Smallville is concerned. He's never seen the series before, so he has a fresh attitude. I wonder if Bryce has watched Smallville. He seems more knowledgeable. 

Dex McCallum has been in prison for 40 years for the murder of his wife, Lana's great aunt Louise. He feels that he's close to his death, so he needs to tell someone he's innocent. He tells her that he heard a shot and entered his barn to find her dead. Foolishly he picked up the gun, and the sheriff came in and found him holding the murder weapon. Dex blamed a drifter for the murder, but he couldn't be located.

In the old photo Louise looks identical to Lana. But check out the news report. The sentence beginning "The funeral for Mrs. Louise McCallum" is repeated twice in the second column. It's repeated again in the fourth column. Curiously, the sentence begins in the third column, but it's interrupted and continues in the 14th line. And shouldn't the word "Farmers" be spelt with an apostrophe? That's sloppy journalism.

Another newspaper report from 1961 also has errors in the second column, but what's interesting is that the drifter looks similar to Clark. He's also wearing a pendant with a Kryptonian symbol. The plot thickens.

Clark thinks he remembers the symbol, so he visits the Kawatche caves with his father. He finds the exact symbol on the wall.

Clark touches the symbol, and a hole opens. Clark puts his hand inside and finds the pendant itself. This is the relic mentioned in the episode's title.

Clark confides in his best friend Pete, who has surprisingly little understanding for him. When they're walking along Main Street, Clark touches a mailbox, and he has a flashback to 1961. Clark sees himself as a person who looks identical to himself. 

The Talon was still a cinema. Clark knows that it was 1961 because of a banner hanging in the street. Unfortunately, the banner is spelt wrong. It should be "Founders' Day". 

Clark rescues a woman who's being robbed outside the cinema. The woman is Louise McCallum, and she really does look identical to Lana. The man is Lachlan Luthor, the father of Lionel Luthor. In the flashback, Clark introduces himself as Joe.

It's no surprise that Louise looks like Lana, because she's also played by Kristin Kreuk.

There are a series of visions, every time Clark touches something that existed in 1961. He begins to realise that it isn't himself in the visions, it's his biological father Jor-El. In the visions we see that Jor-El and Louise had a love affair, even though she was married. But it wasn't her husband who killed her. It was Lachlan Luthor, sent to kill Jor-El on the instructions of Sheriff Tate, who was also in love with Louise. When he shot Jor-El in the barn, one of the bullets missed and killed Louise. The Sheriff was waiting outside. Jor-El was already gone, so he arrested Dex, even though he wanted to pin the murder on the mysterious drifter.

Jor-El went to the Kent Farm, where he was taken in by Hiram and Jessica Kent, Jonathan's parents. Jor-El takes Hiram into the Kawatche Caves, though it's not obvious why. Jor-El uses the octagonal key (that we later see in Kal-El's spaceship) to make a hole in the cave wall. He hides his pendant in the hole, then seals it and paints a symbol over it. Hiram promises him that he'll always be there to help him.

Clark deduces from this that it wasn't a coincidence that Jonathan and Martha found him after the meteor shower. Jor-El chose them to adopt Clark.

There's an important subplot about Lachlan Luthor. Lionel has always told Lex that his grandfather was a hard-working businessman, but now it's been revealed that he was a murderer and a thief. Lionel claims that he lied to protect Lex. There's also talk about Lachlan's death. Supposedly he died in a fire, but Lex finds out that there was an explosion in his house. He says that he wants to find out who murdered his grandparents, with or without Lionel's help.

The episode contains a lot of passionate kisses between Tom Welling and Kristin Kreuk. Are they using their tongues or not?

In the podcast Michael Rosenbaum complains that the kissing scene lasted too long. Why? It's only 90 seconds. It's obvious that Kristin and Tom were enjoying it, tongues or not.

This is the reaction you get when you try to persuade a sheriff to investigate a 42-year-old murder. She stomps off with her coffee in her hand.

Have I ever mentioned that I like Sheriff Nancy? Only a hundred times.

What about Lana Lang? I just counted: I made 14 screenshots of Lana and another three of Louise. I shan't include them all in this post.

This week it was a very interesting podcast, especially when the participants got off topic. Tom and Bryce were exchanging parenting advice. Tom has two sons, aged four and two. Bryce has a one-year-old son. Tom says that the father is side-lined for the first three years of a boy's life. The boy just clings to his mother all the time. When the boy is three he clings to his father and wants to do everything with him. That's a big generalisation, but it's probably true, based on my own experiences.

There wasn't a guest star in the podcast, but there was an eleven minute phone call with Al Gough. It's always a pleasure when he contributes to the show. He has such a good memory of the episodes, unlike Michael and Tom.

Al says that it was a deliberate decision to deviate from Lex Luthor's origins in the comics. In the comics Lex was born into a poor family, but in the series his father was born into a poor family. The poverty has been shifted back a generation. The matter of Jor-El choosing the Kents to adopt Clark is something that was part of a Superman novel written in 1978, but it was never part of the comics.

Now let me give you my opinion about this episode. It's a pivotal episode which introduces new developments for both Clark and Lex, but I found the way it was written disappointing. Why should the relic be able to give Clark visions of the past? And why should he look identical to his father? It all seems so artificial to me. I'm not a screenwriter, but there must have been a better way to tell Clark's backstory. This is the 50th episode of "Smallville", but it's the episode I like least so far.

Always hold on to Smallville

and...

Bring back the Blu-rays.