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DVD, Smallville S4 (Blank)

With Ma and Pa away Chloe becomes Clark's guide and protector. Great idea, let down a little bit, but we'll come to that. Having Chloe be the one to enlighten Clark on his abilities was priceless, as was her tricky covering for him, which becomes more overt than the mere suggestions she's been handing out as explanation for various things since she found out about him. The last thing she says, the only thing Clark did differently when he lost his memory was trust her, is the most affecting moment.

Usually I hate it when they leave out the 'adults', but this time it improved the episode, because we know how Jonathan and Martha would react - they'd be explaining things clearly to Clark and not giving any leeway for confusion. Chloe does a good job and it's a great pairing as they go about discovering the truth of what's going on. Much of it is in the vein of older episodes, with the parent of the freak-of-the-week being the true villain, Clark and friends investigating, and of course breaking and entering, followed by an impressive crowd-pleaser of a finale as Clark gets to show Lois and Sheriff Adams what they've been missing and we get to see their reactions!

The outcome was telegraphed from the beginning - with memory loss the maguffin this time it was likely that people would see Clark perform and then get it erased from their minds, or that Clark would unlock his missing memories by the end, but I was hoping for a little bit of a shaking up by Clark perhaps remembering Chloe's help and knowing he doesn't have to hide his secret from her any more, but sadly it didn't happen. Sadly is the right word as it does give them the old sadness of Chloe being on the outside as before.

Clark or other people losing their memories (whether it's from being knocked unconscious or by application of meteor powers) has been done to death, but the scenes with the mind-sapping mutant worked because he became a sympathetic character. I had less sympathy for the romantic twaddle that was spouted between Lana and Jason, and I could never believe that Lana would ever be interested in becoming Clark's girl again after all the upset of the past. Lana's usually too sensible to be affected by someone's anger and she'd never turn back to Clark. It leaves me wondering if it was she that lost her memory right back to the middle of Season Two!

Lex' turn to the dark side progresses further as he and Clark visibly don't trust each other any more, with almost no room for manoeuvre. It wasn't surprising or hard to believe in the memory zap, but it was hard to believe that everyone took it for granted that a guy could create some experiment to remove or restore memories on that scale, and for what? Was his shooting of his son an accident? And wasn't Chloe zapped at the end too, so how come she remembers babysitting Clark? And are he and Lana really going to return to the old days as if nothing had happened? It's all going a bit crazy again, but at least these things didn't quite manage to take away from what is an episode that just slips into the 'good' category. But only just.

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