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Smallville
Reaper
airdate 04-23-02
Nothing like fathers and sons for some instant drama. Just add water (usually a lake, with fish) and boom! Pathos.
Clark and Jonathan, Lex and Lionel, and Whitney and his dad all play out the age-old tragedy in their own way. Clark doesn't want to go on the traditional Kent boys fishin' trip, but doesn't want to hurt Pa's feelings. Lex and Lionel fence about finances. After his ailing father has a heart attack, Whitney avoids visiting him in the hospital.
I don't mind admitting that the last one hit pretty close to home. Realizing that he may be looking at life without his father, Whitney's trying desperately to hold on to the memory of the healthy man he knew, but that will mean sacrificing their last days together.
Clark is simply trying to grow up, which will also require some separation, but not as drastic. To a parent, however, it's just as wrenching. The pain involved in losing someone close to you, however it happens, is always hard to endure.
Which is where this week's Krypto-freak comes in. Tyler is a good son who tries to end his mother's suffering, and sadly begin smothering her with a pillow after she asks him to help her die, so that she can go home and be buried in Smallville.
He's caught in the act, and falls to his death in his escape, embedding a meteor-fragment bracelet in his arm. When the coroner removes it, somehow Tyler wakes up with the glowy-green ability to turn living things to ash with just his touch.
With his newfound power, Tyler reaches out, literally, to the world to save the elderly and ill from their pain. But, as Ma Kent points out, the true pain is loneliness, and death is no real cure. Furthermore, as Clark says, it's not Tyler's choice to make. (Ahem. Physician, heal thyself.)
Tyler does make a move to dust Whitney's father, but Clark steps in to take Tyler to see his mother, who survived the opening ordeal. Suddenly realizing the error of his ways, he clasps his hands together and disintegrates. It's not explained particularly well, something about pain-killers plus kryptonite, but it doesn't need to be; like some earlier episodes, the freak of the week is the subplot to the human drama of the fathers and the sons.
The Luthor men, of course, have never had anything but pain between them, at least as far as Lex is concerned. Lionel may torment Lex, but Lex baits him in return, and even winces at his father's compliments. I'll say again that John Glover is so excellently, inherently evil that Lionel's compliments do seem double-edged and his feelings are likely to remain a permanent mystery.
Lex isn't above using his father for threats or connections, though. The name "Luthor" may be distasteful to some (such as Jonathan) but it has its benefits; he brings the Metropolis Sharks to Smallville so Whitney can play quarterback in front of his father. It also strikes fear into a lot of hearts, and with good reason. "Try and remember who I was raised by," as Lex points out to his father's underling.
Clark and Jonathan reconcile pretty readily, with the added bonus of utilizing Clark's X-Ray vision on their fishing trip. (I'd like to declare a moratorium, however, on the following exchange: "Dad?" "Yeah, son?" … "Nothin'." Realistic though it might be, it's a cheap crutch. Yes. They love each other. They're sorry they fought. We get it.)
Whitney's dad, I'm afraid, has probably signed his own death sentence by watching his son fulfill a dream. Or those damned WB promos are misleading me again. We'll find out soon enough.
