I'm a little surprised no one has posted about Smallville this week, but I was talking to someone else about it this weekend, so I thought I'd open a thread to see what people thought of the episode.
At first, I was annoyed when I saw the set-up because I was expecting that we would find out that Jor-El was the bad guy who killed the woman (maybe accidentally) which would make Clark the "loser" in the flashback sequence (like in Fly Hard, where the "Lois" character betrays the "Clark" character in favor of "Lex" -- such a Thania St. John episode!). So I was pleasantly surprised when Jor-El turned out to be such a nice guy, the tragic ending notwithstanding.
Yet I can't figure out how they are going to justify this storyline, that Jor-El picked the Kents to raise his son and has positive feelings for at least some of the people of Earth, with that of the S1 finale/S2 premiere, where Jor-El is abrasive, egotistical, domineering, aggressive, etc. Why would this nice sweet guy "Joe" years later send his son to take over the world? Is he bitter that they took his lover from him? Sorry, buddy, but you were going to leave her behind. (And I have to admit, I did get a kick out of him telling Louise, "don't leave me!" when she's dying in his arms ... yes, Louise, don't leave him ... he wants to be the one to leave you, apparently, when he goes home.
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But there were some other interesting parallels to L&C besides the Fly Hard-type flashback. Did anyone else notice the "flying into the moon" thing? Gee, I guess they liked it so much when our L&C did it that they gave Joe the same idea. <g>
But what really blew me away was that they would do the episode in the first place. If I remember correctly, this was an exact storyline that L&C's producers wanted to do early on (maybe the first or second season?) and as I heard the story, DC Comics gave them an emphatic "no way". Apparently, TPTB had proposed doing a flashback episode where Jor-El comes to Earth and meets the Kents and basically scopes out where he wants to send his son, but DC had a fit when they heard and wouldn't let them do it. Of course, apparently it was also supposed to be Lana Lang that L&C met up with in GGGoH (instead of Sheriff Rachel Harris) but the way the story went at the time, they were told they didn't have the rights to use Lana Lang because she belonged to the Superboy series. Now how this all worked when it came to S3 and "Tempus Anyone", I'm not sure ... when TPTB were asked at that time, their answer was something along the lines of "Gee, we didn't ask ... we just did it" so I guess these things change quickly. <g>
The other L&C parallel I saw in this episode had to do with Lionel Luthor. I suspected exactly where they were going with it when he said that his parents had died in a fire; all I was waiting for was for him to say he was only 13 at the time or whatever. <g> But that is definitely one part of this show that I find very interesting, that Lionel is the classic "Lex Luthor" character and Lex is his more sensitive son, trying to fight against his genes. Hmm, maybe if "Mr. Smith" character in L&C hadn't been deformed, this is how he would have turned out. <vbg>
Anyway, I was just curious what everyone else thought, and if they'd noticed the L&C parallels.
Kathy
