Smallville “Harvest” 

Halloween episodes can go one of two ways…they can either be kitschy and thus be relegated to only being watched during Halloween time or they can be genuinely spooky and demand multiple watches year round.  Thankfully, Smallville decided to go the route of the latter this year with the episode “Harvest”, a thought-provoking thriller that surprised me in a good way.Wanting to keep Lois safe from an anti-vigilante rally, Clark whisks Lois away out of town for the weekend.  However, those plans are thrown by the wayside when a flat tire leads them to an Amish like community that believes that a human sacrifice must be made in order to sustain the bountiful harvest (and now the title makes sense) they have been experiencing.  Clark, much to his dismay, soon learns that the outrageously good water supply is due to it being saturated with blue kryptonite, which renders his powers useless.  When Lois is chosen to be the sacrifice they have to work together to escape the village of the damned.

I’m glad that the problem of this episode wasn’t some stupid spirit or Halloween-inspired ghost.  It was a group of very real, very dangerous people in a cult whose strong beliefs almost cost our heroes their lives.  This fact, along with stripping Clark of his powers, allowed us to really be invested and feel the gravity of the situation.  Watching Clark get sliced and burned and not be able to immediately bounce back gave us a few moments of “Oh man…maybe they won’t get out of this”.  It’s tough to build suspense in a show when your protagonist is invincible, and this episode pulled it off swimmingly.  I also liked the fact that the cult wasn’t destroyed or the police weren’t called…Clark and Lois just got the hell out of dodge and didn’t look back.  It gives you that unsettling feeling that those crazies are still out there and are just a flat tire in the middle of nowhere away…

One other aspect that I enjoyed about this story was that Lois refused to be the damsel in distress.  I enjoyed that not only did Lois refuse to be the helpless woman who couldn’t do anything on her own and submit to Clark wanting her to stay out of trouble, but she worked WITH Clark to get them out of there.  The teamwork aspect was so refreshing and nice to see since we’re all so used to Clark handling all the heavy lifting.  It seems that almost every woman in Smallville has to be knocked on the head and rendered unconscious before Clark can come in and clean house, so it was nice for once to see Lois be a badass and do her part.  Very classy and very welcomed.

The other story going on was between Tess and little boy Alexander, the Lex Luthor clone she saved in the pilot.  He’s already aged to the point of being a 12 year old and it appears he seems to share the same memories as Lex.  Personally, I love the Mommy Mercer storyline and for once it’s made Tess not only likable and relatable, but also relevant to the show.  Cassidy Freeman is really impressing me with her acting this season.  I don’t know if it’s because she’s just kicked it up a notch or she has better material to work with, but whatever the case may be, the storyline between and her Alexander has been a highlight of the season so far.  At the end of the episode we got a chilling visual of Alexander claiming that he was Alexander no more as he shaved his head bald and christened himself “Lex”.  If he keeps growing at this rate, could we be seeing a return from a certain Michael Rosenbaum?  Time will tell…

My only criticism?  No Oliver this week!  I need my weekly dose of Green Arrow and I didn’t get it this week.  I’m telling you, there NEEDS to be a Green Arrow spin-off show.  I don’t know one Smallville fan that doesn’t want that.

But you want to know the best part of this whole episode?  NO CAT GRANT THIS WEEK!  THERE IS A GOD!