Zero

DVD, Smallville S1 (Zero)

One of the best episodes of the season, for sure, and a personal favourite for its excellent melding of Lex' Metropolis past, his current life in Smallville, and mixing in the characters well. The two main story-lines mesh superbly, and that's important in making an episode that links thematically to create a more satisfying watch than a simple mystery-of-the-week. While Clark is warned off Lex' own past, he is at the same time trying to keep Chloe from delving too deeply into his own for a school project. It makes for great tension, mixed with comedy as Clark and his parents deal with Chloe's bulldog tenacity for finding out secrets. But it ends on a somewhat sinister note with a device that would be used a number of times on the series: the arrow cursor of a mouse travels back and forth between Delete and Save, the document being information on Clark's adoption. It's ripe for continuation without being a specific cliffhanger, it's not flashy or melodramatic, but simple and contained, and no less powerful for it because we know Chloe's devoted to him, but why does she choose to keep this compromising document? Elsewhere, we see Lex in all his manipulative glory, be manipulated, and although I'd seen the episode a number of times I'd completely forgotten the twist at the end! Although such devices as the mouse cursor or the 'Three Years Earlier' flashing back may seem a little outdated and overdone nowadays, they were certainly fresh and exciting back then, and the style of the episode was terrific, producing a strong visual flavour to the Club Zero scenes.

The mystery is in who shot Amanda's fiance just before their wedding, and with Corin Nemec at full creep mode (before he joined the 'Stargate SG-1' team for a season as fine, upstanding Jonas Quinn!), it really is a question of how he can still be alive. Uniquely, it's a story that doesn't have anything to do with meteor freaks and shows once again how well they could pull off the world they'd created, and how inventive the series could be when it chose to play outside of the established formula. We'd seen it once or twice already, but this is the most fully formed. As well as having a good actor for Jude Royce, it ingeniously features the dead Phalen, a thorn in Clark's side in 'Rogue' earlier in the season, back when he had more hair and seen playing the role of Lex' protector against the law thanks to Daddy Lionel's money. It's truly fascinating to see a little of the kind of life we've heard rumours of Lex living before he came to Smallville - he was just the same then, with an almost fanatical devotion to his friends. You can tell he set up the evening so Amanda would find Jude at Club Zero cavorting with women, so that she knew just whom she was about to marry. It shows both his good and bad sides of personality, in that he will go to extremes to prove a point and is ruthless in following it through, even though it can often be for good reasons. That's why this version of Lex is such a strong one - we believe he believes he's right, and we see the direction this character flaw can eventually take him, even if his more naive young friends don't necessarily understand it and are more willing to judge only on what they see.

'Jude' warns Lana to stay away from Lex (not the best way to get a job: warn your potential boss about her boss, but then the application was just an excuse to spread discord in Lex' world), not the first or last to unleash negative innuendoes on him and his character. There are some inconsistencies or flaws in the writing that come through, despite it being a great story: the fact that Chloe somehow took a huge mugshot of 'Jude' when he was in disguise as the CEP man that kidnaps Lex - unless that was an amazingly good blowup of another photo, but I didn't get that impression. So Chloe was able to take a photo without him noticing, but nobody ever saw Lex being zapped into the van? And there are occasions where characters go somewhere just to say something and never fulfil a good reason for being there, or leaving without good reason. For example, Lex goes to meet the contractor at the Talon as it prepares for its big opening, but he meets his old acquaintance from Club Zero outside. After entering he rushes out to try and find Jude who had just been there and never goes back in for the important meeting, dashing off in his car. I can understand him being shaken, but Lex is usually better than that! And Clark makes a 'pitstop' at his house to find his parents being interviewed by Chloe - he makes his excuses and goes, but why go there in the first place, just to say hello? (Thanks, 'Always Hold Onto Smallville' podcast - I've begun to notice more details like that because of you!).

I like the structure of the story where we go three years before to see one view of what happened in the club, then back to current events where Lex is hanging suspended, shot by 'Jude,' apparently. It's a super opening and you wonder how they're going to get out of it, but after the opening credits we then travel back a week before to see how he got to that point, so it's really quite clever in that way. I also really like the three different perspectives through the episode on who actually did the shooting. Like Garak on 'DS9' we're never entirely sure of the truth - was Lex trying to put Amanda's brother off by making out he was only trying to save her, or was that the true playback of events? I'm more sympathetic towards that view than the others simply because Lex' whole purpose for being there appeared to be for Amanda's interests (though we don't know if he and Jude had enmity or a score to settle for other reasons), and it is the kind of thing he would do, according to what we've seen of his character. It isn't an act when he shows willingness to go far for a friend, but on the counter side it also shows how far he can go against an enemy. Clark isn't a big part of the story, but he does get to save Lex in the most fabulous use of powers and special effects: Lex is shot through a fish tank and over a railing to fall to his doom, but Clark super-speeds in, pushes a settee perfectly under the falling Lex, dashes upstairs to fling the bad guy unconscious against a wall, then speeds back to the doorway as if he'd just run in. It's brilliant, and perhaps the best use of powers on the series, ever!

The third story interwoven with the two main ones (unless you count the shocking loss of the Kents' entire field of cows to a LuthorCorp 'environmental disaster'), is Lana's plans to open the Talon which are moving ahead. Despite the hand of Lex' former Club Zero owner turning up as a grisly warning (why didn't Clark use his x-ray vision to look inside the box? Obviously because they wanted to preserve the shock for the audience on Lex opening it, but it could have been a bomb!), Lana successfully holds the grand opening and even Whitney gets a haircut for the occasion. He must be keeping a low profile after the events of 'Kinetic' and doesn't even show a shred of jealousy over Clark giving her a charming old photo of the Talon back in its black and white days, nor about Clark doing a school project on her! Maybe we just never saw those conversations? When Chloe and Pete are suspecting it was rigged you have to wonder if it really was for Clark to get Lana as his subject! Maybe he used x-ray vision when picking out his piece of paper, assuming that's how they were assigned? Chloe's dismay at so offending Clark is really sad, but it also opens up serious questions for him, since he hasn't really thought too much about the adoption. He knows about the spacecraft in the storm cellar, and he wonders about his birth parents all the time, but he's had a happy childhood so it makes sense that he wouldn't have done any digging as Chloe does. Of course we later learn Lionel Luthor had everything to do with the adoption, and even more bizarrely that he even knew Clark was coming to Earth (which was all a bit stupid, so let's forget about that!).

At this stage of the series we're seeing a real confidence in what they could do with the format so that you believe it could become almost anything. So it's a sad thing to realise things were never going to be as good as this again for much longer. They were still casting well (the contractor was also played by an actor who had a recurring role on 'SG-1,' and Mitchell Kosterman's Sheriff Ethan gets the odd line here), and while Pete and Whitney still draw the short straw most of the time, the way Clark's parents are integrated into the ongoing saga of his growing friendships with Lana and Lex is a delight to behold. It's not all about special effects, they use them sparingly and to… good effect! The nature of Lex is explored well and it's just a rollicking good story with plenty of strong character moments. Zero consequences couldn't be further from the truth, and the title is almost irony itself - I'd give it a much higher rating than zero!

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