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Clark soon awoke, and helped Lex and Jason down. All three went to the temple and inspected the robe, Clark at a safe distance of course. What they had all believed on the map was a river was actually a different sort of map. The river was actually the branches of a tree, and looking through the same tree would give you the true location of stone. Lana knew this, and she performs a spell at this spot and pulled a statue of a horse from the ground that bore more than a small resemblance to Seths Cohen's Captain Oats.

I had been sort of wondering the whole episode why any of this was taking place in China, and I would soon find out. After breaking the horse in half, the sacred stone was revealed, and Clark raced in just in time to grab it. Isabelle used another energy beam to knock Clark out, but the fighting would not end there. The two find themselves inside of the temple, and the Countess is pissed. She finds her inner Ang Lee and they start doing some low budget Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon moves. Clark takes a sword through the shoulder, it bleeds profusely (although nobody will ask about the blood later, of course), but it doesn't stop him. They fight, some more until they collide, conveniently knocking both of them out, and restoring Lana to her original state. She of course has no memory of what was going on, and all three of them head back to Smallville.

Once home, Lex immediately goes after his dad. He thinks that he set him up, and blames him for what happened. We have been getting more and more hints that Lionel is really his old self, but the time in prison seems to have made him patient. He is now fine with letting other people get worked up about it. Although he tells Lex not to go crazy with the search for the stones, you know he is secretly counting on Lex to try even harder to find all of them.

We aren't quite sure how long everybody was gone, but you can be assured that his parents weren't happy to learn that he had been missing in China, especially with all of those college apps to finish. He went to get the stone, but in the aftermath of his struggle with Isabelle, he wasn't able to find it. To make it worse, he received a posthumous e-mail from Dr. Swann stating that he was going to return the one piece of the stone he had to Clark, but Clark never received it, of course. What's worse, whoever Bridgett Crosby was, nobody knew about her, certainly not the people at the Swann institute. (If this seemed like a strange twist, the NY Times article was mentioning that Margot Kidder was not going to be on the show again with a "contract issue" to blame. I guess this was their way of writing her out of the season).

Not everybody came out of China empty handed. The stone was not lost in the battle of Clark and Lana, Jason had picked it up. He tells this to Lana, and all of a sudden, everything is right in there world. He lied, she was pissed, but this stone was the perfect make up gift, at least for their current relationship. There is that whole thing about the Countess determined to exact revenge on any of the Dutchess's heirs that they are going to have to work through.

Overall, an up and down episode. I like that we got more information, but the whole China sideshow was a little forced. Everybody was tortured, and although it takes some people years to overcome the scars of abuse, the folks of Smallville are fine just a day later. Still, after the killer krypton dogs, I can live with a few more episodes like this.

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Posted by J-Unit on February 24, 2005 12:23 PM