The 100th episode is still a few weeks away, so we're going to have to wait for a few weeks before we get an answer for our big death, but the election isn't going to wait, so we might as well start there. And speaking of the election, has anybody ever seen a campaign like the one Jonathan and Lex are going through? This is for the state senate, meeting in the capital, as in Topeka, not the Capitol, as in where Ted Kennedy and Bill Frist hang out. I know the writers are trying to give a little flair to the politics, but I guess they have to be dramatic and have big rallies and whatnot so the assassination attempt doesn't look so out of place. That's right, as Jonathan finishes up his speech (why do shooters always wait until the speeches are finished?), it looks like somebody is planning to take him out. And as we pan around to take a look at who it is, the shooter turns out to be none other than Lois Lane.

I am sure that as soon as you saw that Lois was at the trigger, everybody had flashbacks to last year's prom episode, where we saw Chloe wielding an axe, looking to blow up the school's boiler, and all of the kids merrily dancing in the gymnasium above. Before we got to see what happened in the end, we had to rewind a few days to see the setup. The writers decided to pull that shit on us again, and we are transported to the Smallville 48 hours prior for the back story on Lois' Lee Harvey Oswald impersonation.

Before we saw that Lois as the shooter, I was thinking that this assassination attempt had to be set up by Lex. He had told that guy Griff to come up with whatever he could to put away Jonathan Kent, and used lots of various explosion analogies to demonstrate that he was willing to go very far to win the election, but killing Jonathan? That seemed like a lot, even for Lex. Besides, two days earlier, he was looking pretty calm, and not like he was going to kill anybody. He was doing the campaign thing at his mansion, and he even found time to give a very rousing speech to Central Kansas Students for Lex Luthor, who are the stereotypical Young Republicans, and you expected that somebody named Chase, Francis, or Thornberry was going to ask Lex to sign his bow tie.

Despite all of the nice eye candy, Lex has a job to do, and it looks like Griff has done his job. He wanted to meet at an undisclosed location and give Lex the goods. Once Griff gets off the phone, he turns around to see that Lionel is there. Lex offered Griff some money, but Lionel offered him more. Being the lowlife that he is, Griff took the money, and Lionel promptly burned the evidence that Griff was planning on giving to Lex. Now I don't know if Griff didn't know that Lionel wasn't in on the plan, but he definitely didn't expect the evidence to go up in smoke. Then again, he got his money, so who cares.

The reason that Jonathan was running is that his old friend, the ex-state senator was about to get caught up in a scandal once the stripper that was his mistress showed up dead. He had nothing to do with it, but had to bow out. Luckily, Jonathan got to inherit almost his entire campaign staff. The only problem with that is the campaign manager appears to be trying to turn Jonathan Kent into a stiff in a nice suite. It might be good for some politicians, but Jonathan wasn't going to win by smiling and making his family look uncomfortable in front of cameras, or at least that is what Lois had to say, and Jonathan agreed. He fired the old guy, and hired Lois. She might not know anything about running a political campaign, but she sure does look a lot better than Karl Rove so why would I complain?

Posted by J-Unit on January 15, 2006 9:46 AM