Smallville - "Slumber"

Plot Recap: Clark is contacted in his dreams by a comatose girl who just moved in next-door. He and Lana save her from her uncle, who was keeping her unconscious for the insurance money.

It's only the fourth episode of the season, and we've already had two successive eps about Kryptonite freaks. Do I sense a return to the Season 1 motif? Even then, we're given a fairly mundane K-origin (the river she fell in had meteor rock), which again raises the question of why every other person in Smallville hasn't gotten superpowers yet if they're so easy to come by.

That said, the opening acts to the episode were good. They hinted at the truth, but it wasn't until the Lex scene that the unreality of it all was evident. The slow build was well-executed. (I thought it would have been more apropos to show Clark wearing red underwear, though.) And it gave Pete at least one scene.

More of Lana pining for Clark, and Clark intentionally distancing himself. But they seem to have come a considerable way since two weeks ago, so I question how long the writers can drag out this plotline.

Lex gets very little screentime in this episode, and his best scene was a fantasy. It's good to see that the sudden Lex/Lionel merger isn't going too smoothly, given their history, but I wish their conflicts were over something more substantive than fairly standard hiring practices. And I prefer the more subtle foreshadowing of Lex's future. "When you're rich, you're never crazy. You're eccentric."

And then there's the standard gamut of plotholes and unanswered questions. How could the doctors not notice if Sarah's uncle was drugging her so frequently? Why didn't Lana notice that the driver's side of Clark's truck was all but crushed? Why would Lana go alone to confront the uncle? Why did the uncle go psycho so suddenly, and how did he expect to get away with arranging Lana's death? And am I mistaken, or did we see Clark use his telescopic vision for the first time (in conjunction with his x-ray vision) while scanning for Lana?

All in all, not a bad episode, but not a terribly good one either. I give it a C.

Next week: Perry White. I'm really looking forward to that one.