TNMC

Not half bad. Well, maybe half bad is exactly what it is. Yeah, half bad sounds fair.

Episode #5-03, "Hidden"
Written by Kelly Souders & Brian Peterson
Directed by Whitney Ransick
Guest Star: Camille Mitchell (Sheriff Adams), Johnny Lewis (Gabriel).
Air Date: October 13, 2005

After living as a mortal human for one and a half episodes (several weeks in TV Land), Clark is restored to his full or near-full Kryptonian Glory. It all starts when a young lunatic with a mad-on against meteor freaks manages to shanghai a nuclear missile. What’s that you say? My first paragraph has already violated your Absurdity Limit? Oh, then sit back, because there’s more.

Gabriel, the lunatic in question, not only commandeers a nuclear missile, but he kills the men guarding the control room. Now, I don’t know much about military operations outside of that opening scene in War Games, so I can’t really comment on this. However, I will say that it strikes me as beyond surreal that a recent high school graduate could even get into such a building even if his father was a high ranking military officer with codes and such. It just doesn’t work for me. Accepting it, though, it works on its own level. It creates a very large threat, on par with the meteor shower, that a powerless Clark isn’t really qualified to handle. So it’s BIG in all caps.

There were many decent qualities about this episode that I most certainly dug. Lana is pretty tolerable. That worries me. Maybe my well-built defenses are starting to break down. Lionel is, as always, awesome. Remember how he was sort of reduced to gibbering lunacy at the beginning of the season? That had a purpose. Jor-El hijacked his body much like Gabriel hijacked the silo. Since Clark had proven willful and disobedient, Jor-El installed a fail safe in Lionel to keep everything on course. If Clark should ever fall into physical danger, Lionel would activate and rescue him. That’s precisely what plays out when Gabriel shoots Clark for trying to interfere in his master plan.

That plan is to annihilate Smallville in a storm of nuclear fire. Gabriel’s father, the military guy, was seriously anti-meteor. On top of that, the second meteor shower left ten times the Kryptonite the last one left. That’s ten times the suck-ass Freak of the Week factor. Awesome. It gets worse when Gabe’s dad becomes one of the freaks himself and begs his own son to kill him. This drives Gabe over the edge and leads him to nuclear terrorism. Not bad, but the actor playing Gabriel was horrid. He was trying, though. I’ll give him that he was trying very, very hard. However, it was too much. I can’t really dislike him for this, since most guest stars on this show suck beyond suck.

The real clincher comes when Clark dies from his bullet wound and is summarily resurrected by Lionel/Jor-El. Jor-El speaks through Lionel in a very convincing performance by John Glover. He was doing a pretty good Brando here. Brando played Jor-El in the Superman films of the late 70s and Glover had his mannerisms down. The message wasn’t quite so entertaining, though. Jor-El warns Clark that resurrection comes at great cost. There is a balance to these things and the cost is a life for a life. Someone close to Clark, someone he "loves" will be lost because Clark doesn’t heed the consequences of his actions. When Clark disobeyed Jor-El to save Lana in "Arrival", the act that cost him his powers, he set in motion the events that took his life. Clark must now recognize that he cannot simply walk around doing what he wants because there will always be consequences. What pleased me most about this scene is how well it reflects the message Jor-El’s own father was trying to teach him back in "Relic". You may or may not recall the episode where Tom Welling played a young Jor-El walking around in 1969 Smallville. Joe, as he called himself, told Lana’s aunt that his father sent him to Earth to understand that there are consequences to his actions. Nice bit of book-ending there. I just pray it was intentional. Jor-El tells his son he loves him, hugs him, and then it’s back to superpowered badassery.

Clark’s return to his powers manifests in a nice little scene. Clark superspeeds after the now-launched missile, goes into "Clark Time", and apparently leap/flies up to the missile. He slams his fingers into the metal skin and slowly climbs to the cone, where he grabs the nuclear payload and tosses it off into space. Hilariously, he falls back to earth, still riding the cone as it burns up in the atmosphere. Everyone is happy to see him alive, and charred, but no one seems to wonder how it all happened. Sorry, that’s not true. Only Lana doesn’t really wonder. Lex wonders. Chloe and the Kents already know. It’s just Lana who seems oblivious. She’s really trying hard to ignore what’s going on, which is sort of the opposite of what’s come before. I wonder if it will last. Pretty good performances from the main cast. An interesting little story. It was only marred by the ineffective acting of a guest star and the rather silly premise that a teenager could commandeer a nuclear missile. I rather enjoyed it, actually.