Yup, angst is a big draw, all right. You really might as well ask why the episode itself was hugely popular among fans when it was aired. I think it's always been in the top five of any list. And I think that's partly - or mostly - because it's such an emotional episode. I know it's always been one of my favourites.
Mind you, I have to confess that when I wrote my own TOGOM rewrite it was nothing to do with the emotions or angst. It was because the one thing I wanted to see in the episode itself and didn't was when, exactly, Lois changed her clothes after finding out Clark was alive. Given the timeline, I figured it had to have been in the car on the way to the Planet. Once I'd established
that my mind naturally went fertile on what Clark's reaction had been to his partner stripping off in the back seat as he drove.
Since the episode didn't let me savour that one, I had to write it myself. And then the story just naturally followed on from that starting point...
You know, at one point, I had a list of which episodes had rewrites - it was part of the data drawn up for the Archive's search engine. But it's long since been lost. I know that there were some big surprises on it for me though. Episodes that I would have said had never had a rewrite had a fair number.
Might be interesting to compile that list again. (Any brave soul wanting to try it before I find time for it can probably do it easiest by collating data from the
search engine database )
EJ, I've moved your thread from Challenge into here as it's not actually issuing a challenge, just discussing them.
LabRat
