- Title: Smallville – Zero
- wiki: link
Superman Saturday takes us back to Smallville, Kansas. Teased multiple times over the show’s First Season leading up to the episode, “Zero” delves into Lex Luthor‘s (Michael Rosenbaum) bad boy days in Metropolis before being relocated to Smallville by his father. Secrets of the past haunting a character also bleed over into the episode’s B-story as a school assignment leads to Chloe (Allison Mack) poking around in the Kents’ adoption of Clark (Tom Welling). Just as Lex asks Clark to leave his past alone, Clark finds himself asking the same of Chloe.
The episode is notable for being more of Lex story than a Clark story, with a good amount of time for Lana (Kristin Kreuk) thrown in as well in the final preparations to relaunch the Talon. We see flashbacks to a fateful night out three years prior at Club Zero which led to a death, Lex’s involvement, and Lex’s father covering up events. As to what really occurred, the episode plays a bit fast-and-loose with the truth suggesting multiple variations, without truly ever confirming which one was the actual series of events, that leads to someone looking an awful lot like the dead man to begin harassing Lex and others.
While the show allows for quite a bit of cutting corners where logic is concerned through the use of meteor freaks, “Zero” asks for a pretty big leap of faith in Roy (Eric Breker) randomly coming across someone who looks exactly like Jude Royce (Corin Nemec) who is also perfectly comfortable with kidnapping, torture, and murder to gaslight and harass everyone who had knowledge of what happened at Club Zero. Clark’s sudden awareness of the man is also a bit sketchy when Chloe drops of a photo that, instead of being about an issue he caused to the farm, is basically a headshot of the man she didn’t have a reason to shoot.
Other notable pieces of the episode include it confirming that the Kents do raise cattle as we see a bit more of a working farm than normal, Clark and Lana finding a comfort level that isn’t being threatened by anyone else over the course of the episode, Lana having another moment to second-guess herself getting into bed (so to speak) with Lex, Lex loosing any ground he had made in winning over Clark’s parents, and Chloe choosing her reporter instinct over friendship (despite what she tells Clark) in not letting go of her questions about his adoption foreshadowing a thread to be picked up later in the series’ run.
