Craving

DVD, Smallville S1 (Craving)

This was the first time I watched this episode and realised who Amy Adams was - she's now a big film star, but I'd never made that connection before as she's not really someone who I know much about, just a name and a face, so it was fun to recognise her now. I could almost say that was the only thing of note in this episode, which I've always considered as one of the weakest of the season, and the first to carry the low point in a stream of good or great ones. Partly it's due to me finding it hard to identify with a teenage girl's weight issues, but it's also because this was the first one that truly felt gross. Sure, bug boy was nasty, and the freaks-of-the-week have each been on that spectrum to some degree or another, but there's something about consumption that's disgusting. If we could only see the digestion processes in our own bodies we'd probably be put off eating, but this episode takes things further, into cannibal territory, and that's a sinister, deviant direction, even for this series. It's not true cannibalism, Jodie isn't biting into people, she's just sucking out their fat, but the image of her mouth extending unnaturally wide as she crouches over her victims is sickening and chilling in the extreme. Unlike some of the freaks she's not a bad lass, she even tries to limit her 'powers' for use on bad people and animals, giving Pete the chance to escape until the instinct to feed on him becomes too strong for her to control. It's a mental issue as much as a physical one, and the episode does a reasonable job of tackling a relevant issue to its target audience, though it is only a surface exploration.

That's the way the 'sin' of the week is explored most of the time, it's mainly as a catalyst to get Clark to a place where he needs to fend off, or protect someone else from, the opponent. Because of this it's often the in-between bits of the series, the lives we're seeing played out on screen, that are more compelling to watch than the main plot of someone going wacky from meteor exposure. The skill is in how well the writers converge these two elements, as well as the ongoing hints of arcs that we get: this time it's the continuing saga of Lex trying to put Whitney out of the picture (when he admits to Lana that he knew the 'Quarterback,' as he calls him, was offered a tryout for a football scholarship out of town on her birthday, you suspect he had something to do with it, since someone else who would have been offered it had to drop out…), by setting Clark up to be her escort for the big 'do' at his Mansion, organised by Nell. It's also about his interest in his apparently perfect health that leads him to wonder about the many stories of weirdness in the town, and to meet Chloe, Editor of the Torch, and proud purveyor of the Wall of Weird and it's theories that give LuthorCorp a challenge to the top suspect in the cause of anything untoward in the area. In that respect it's very interesting: we get another recurring character in Dr. Hamilton, a meteor expert who would grow in importance across the season and into the next one, and we get Lex meeting Chloe. I like that things have been organic as Lex has become more and more embroiled in the high school life of Clark and his friends rather than rushing into it unrealistically.

Not that the series is always that realistic, but it shows that in these early days things were still quite grounded and low key when you take out the dramatic freak-of-the-week stuff. It wasn't globally threatening, it was intimate and cosy, whether that was visiting the various key locales such as the Kent Farm, the Luthor Mansion, or any other recurring places, and they weren't just placeholders to jump to as they became in later seasons. Again, it's the strong feeling of community and bright, sunny, young American life that helps to make the series a draw, not a series of growing puzzles and mysteries to be solved. There's enough ongoing to leaven a sense of mystery in some of the characters, particularly Lex (I noticed you can sometimes see the Apple logo on the back of his laptop, and other times it's blocked out with a covering sticker as if they weren't sure they wanted to show product branding or not, even though in this case it'd make sense as Mac was the more luxuriant and expensive brand for those with taste), and Clark. Their friendship continues to be a fascination, and I like how the adults are included, too, it's not all about the 'Scooby Gang' of Clark, Chloe and Pete, solving mysteries and battling monsters, so there are multiple levels to the stories and they can pick and choose what to include and what to focus on from week to week.

The 'fat' makeup Amy Adams wore was pretty effective, and it's clear they were trying to address the issues of anorexia and bulimia which perhaps weren't quite as well known two decades ago as they are now. Her issue is with vanity, sparked by the unkind comments of her contemporaries, but she seems to be liked by Pete at least, even before she made her meteor-infected veggie shakes, something she's not that attuned to because she's so obsessed with thinking she looks bad. I wondered if the chubby guy that calls her names and that she later takes revenge on was also wearing a fat suit as we see him almost skeletal-faced after his fat's been sucked out, though this could have been CGI. The computer graphics range from very good (the widening jaw of Jodie), to pretty bad (the brief shot of the deer she bumps into), but if the thin-face of insult boy was CGI that was quite accomplished. Things do degenerate a little, and once again it takes Chloe and gang a while to get to the conclusion there's a 'fat vampire' around, despite the heads-up they've had by all the other weirdness in Smallville, and it turns into Clark having a small confrontation in the poly tunnel of meteor-infected soil. But because Jodie is always a sympathetic character it's not like it's a fair challenge - he's hardly going to throw her around, and indeed it's the sight of her own grimacing reflection that stops things, where Clark then has to prevent her suicide.

Things do pick up in the last scene where Clark gives Lana her touching birthday present: bringing her favourite memory to life of watching cartoons at a drive-in as she did with her parents as a young child, a truly great ending to a patchy episode that is at times hard to like. It's not that it's bad, it's just too disturbing occasionally, and a bit slow to go anywhere, plus it doesn't really do much for sufferers of either food-related conditions that it seems to address. There are plenty of things here and there that make it not all that bad an episode, and certainly by the standards of later seasons it would be higher than average, but judged by this season it's certainly the weakest so far.

**