Thanks for your comments, everyone. They are very much appreciated.

Noelle, thanks for commenting. Since Ching and Clark tend to call each other on their nonsense, I thought it was fitting to have Ching be the one to point out how illogical Clark is being. I'm glad you liked the characterization of Clark. No matter what else changes, he knows one thing about who he is that is constant - he is the man who loves Lois Lane. But he still needs to figure everything else out.

Terry, you're absolutely right that Clark is starting to heal by reconnecting with people - both friends and strangers. As for Sur Ahn, I find her an interesting character because her flaw isn't arrogance, lust for power, or sheer sadism, like so many other villains. Her hamartia is simple weakness. It's a flaw that can hit a little closer to home than the others, I think, because good people can still be weak. Most of us will never know how strong we are, or what will cause us to break (thankfully). Like Lok Sim, we'll wonder how we'd react to the life or death situation, but unlike him, we'll probably wonder idly. This doesn't mean that weakness can't have the same devastating effects as evil.

Ann, thank you for your very thoughtful comments. To be honest, you give me far too much credit. My Kryptonians have always differed a bit from the ones we were presented with on the show. I got rid of the weird system of nobility (because feudalism and technological advancement are basically antithetical and it was unworkable and unappealing from a writing standpoint) to instead give them a quasi-parliamentary system with a permanent executive. I got rid of concubines and did away with birth marriages for everyone except the First Ministers along with jettisoning a host of other distasteful customs just because I didn't like them and didn't think they were necessary to the story. Their legal system looks a whole lot more like the common law system of the Anglo-American tradition than the weird farce/pantomime they had on the show because well, I know the common law system and it works pretty well. So when it came to the death penalty, I just did what I felt like doing (as usual). The Kryptonians have never sentenced anyone to death in this story. A lifetime of exile and hard labor seems to be the harshest penalty they have (and frankly, that doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me - especially since they exile you to a place called the outerlands, on a planet that is already as inhospitable as New Krypton). I figured that the Kryptonians on Krypton could well have done away with the death penalty since they were an old, advanced society that could probably neutralize the most vicious criminals without killing them. They could very easily have gone the way of Sweden and done away with capital punishment.

For the New Kryptonians, reinstating the death penalty may have made sense, given how hard it was just to scrape out an existence, without worrying about whether you could successfully incarcerate people like Nor. But I think that part of their farce, of pretending they were still a civilization in the truest sense of the word, meant that they couldn't change their legal system just because the situation they faced was drastically different. I think they needed to maintain the trappings of their old civilization, even after the near extermination of their kind and even when they stood on the brink of total annihilation.

What I think the Kryptonians learned from Clark was that the facade wasn't enough. Civilization means more than just your traditions and your history. You can't just rely on the pretense. For all their formal processes and protocols, the Kryptonians were constantly acting out of fear. They were guided by their own terror and they'd lost sight of why their traditions and their way of life mattered.

Oh, and happy birthday, Ann. I'll be posting your present shortly.

ClarkLovesLois, thanks for commenting. I'm glad Ching was able to smack some sense into Clark, too. Frankly, I think Ching takes every opportunity he can to smack Clark, be it literally or only figuratively. They have a very odd friendship.

Since I'll be out of town this weekend, I'm posting a touch early. More coming up.

Regards,

Rac