- Title: Smallville – Metamorphosis
- wiki: link
Smallville Saturday takes us back to the second episode of the show’s First Season. While playing on some threads from the first episode, including Lex (Michael Rosenbaum) further attempts to befriend Clark (Tom Welling), and Lana (Kristin Kreuk) discovering the scarecrow prank Whitney (Eric Johnson) played, the main storyline involves the introduction of the show’s second meteor freak in Lana’s stalker Greg Arkin (Chad E. Donella). After being bitten by a swarm of Kryptonite-infused bugs, the entomology nerd gets buff and crazier, taking on increased strength and nefarious designs on his Smallville classmates.
While there’s still some more lighthearted moments, such as Clark floating above the bed while dreaming of Lana, and Chloe‘s (Allison Mack) oh so cute concerns Clark may have outgrown her as a friend, “Metamorphosis” fits firmly into the horror genre given Greg’s overall creepiness, origin story, molting, and attacks. With Lex recovering Lana’s necklace (leading to multiple characters asking Lana what the hell she’s doing with Whitney, for which she has no answer), and his later trouble in the factory filled with meteor rocks, Clark begins to understand the glowing stones and their power over them as well as the protective nature of lead. The show relies on Greg’s disappearance, apparently turning into a mass of bugs after dying, to both end his threat to Lana and keep Clark’s secret safe, although the character would return several years later for a single appearance.
Although the episode skirts the issue, Greg’s pre-transformation stalking of Lana is only slightly more invasive than that of Clark who continues to spy on his neighbor with his telescope. Each coveting Lana from afar is an interesting angle that the show decides not to explore, possibly to not paint some of Clark’s more troubling behavior as too similar to that of the episode’s villain. Also of note, we get the show’s opening credits for the first time in this episode (which in some countries was packaged with the pilot episode as a two-hour premiere), we get a reference to a Fortress of Solitude for Clark in the loft above the barn, and we see Clark and Chloe doing Wall of Weird research to understand just what happened to Greg.
