Smallville 1.07 - Craving

Click here to view the podcast.

The freak-of-the-week in "Craving" is Jodi Melville, played by Amy Adams. She's an overweight teenage girl who's bullied by the other kids in school. I'm trying to avoid using the word fat, but maybe I shouldn't. It's the word that she uses to describe herself the first time we see her.

She's tried many different diets, counting calories, but nothing helps. Now she adopts drastic measures. She only drinks a smoothie made from the vegetables in her father's greenhouse. Nothing else. That has to work, doesn't it? What she doesn't know, or blissfully ignores, is that the soil around her house, including the soil used in the greenhouse, is contaminated with meteor rocks. There are so many little green rocks in the soil that she hardly notices them when she collects the vegetables.

This fad diet has an immediate effect. After drinking her first glass, she stands on the scales and watches her weight drop from 168 pounds to 139 pounds. The digital display counts down before her eyes. The next day, after her next glass of the veggie meteor smoothie, she sees her weight rapidly decrease to 112 pounds. 56 pounds is a good weight loss in less than 36 hours, but it comes with a price.

Jodi has a ravenous hunger. She eats everything in the fridge, stuffing it into her mouth as fast as she can. But it's still not enough. That evening when she's driving to Lana Lang's birthday party she hits a dear. She rushes out of the car and devours the dead animal. She doesn't eat it by biting and chewing the flesh, she sucks the fat out of the body. That's the only thing that satisfies her.

But it's not just animal fat. She sucks the fat out of a fellow student, and she would have killed him if Clark Kent hadn't intervened.

In this episode Lex Luthor's doctor tells him he has an unusually high white blood cell count. Rather than rely on traditional medical tests, Lex seeks advice from Dr. Hamilton, an eccentric scientist who's dedicated his life to studying meteor rocks. Dr. Hamilton is played by Joe Morton, a prolific actor over the last 50 years, but I'll always remember him for his role as Miles Dyson in "Terminator 2". Dr. Hamilton is unwilling to help Lex, but Lex blackmails him, threatening to reveal that he lost his job because of an affair with a student.

Lex looks for more clues on Chloe's infamous Wall Of Weird.

And this is the episode in which he meets Chloe herself for the first time. I never thought anything of it when I first watched the show, but it is a bit creepy that the owner of the town's biggest factory is spending his time socialising with high school students in their mid teens. Chloe politely addresses him as Mr. Luthor, but he insists on being called Lex.

In the podcast Michael and Tom highly praise Amy Adams as their guest actress. It was the beginning of her career, but her talent was obvious to them, and they knew she would go far. This is what she looked like before her diet.

This is after her diet. More beautiful, more deadly.

It's been suggested in previous podcasts that the effects of the meteor rocks aren't random. The rocks give each person what he desires the most. I don't like this theory in principle, because it makes the rocks sound mystical, but it does seem to be the case.

Apart from the pilot episode, Tom Welling has been joining the podcast from home every week. He's a family man. He doesn't want to spend too much time away from home. If I understand correctly, Michael Rosenbaum makes the Talkville podcast in New York City, but Tom lives in North California.

It's taken them a few episodes, but Michael and Tom are no longer talking about their general experiences in the series. They concentrate on the episode itself. What fascinates me most is the things they remember and the things they'd forgotten. For instance, Tom remembers the scene when he was watching Jodi eat in the school cafeteria, but he'd forgotten the scene when Pete Ross threw a football at a boy's head in the school hallway. At least he isn't like the actor Phil Daniels, who says he can't remember a single thing about making "Quadrophenia", even when he watches the film today. That's strange. (He made that statement only 25 years after "Quadrophenia" was made).

I notice that Michael Rosenbaum always speaks of the freak-of-the-week concept as if it's something bad. I think it works. Most early television series, even classic series like the original Star Trek, followed a freak-of-the week pattern.

I enjoyed "Smallville" when I first began to watch it, about 15 years ago – yes, I started late! – but I'm enjoying it even more now. I'm getting deeper into each episode with the help of Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling.

	Order from Amazon.com
	Order from Amazon.co.uk
	Order from Amazon.de