Can’t Touch This

I think any fan of Smallville will say that they really enjoyed watching the show as all of the characters went through high school. What comes next is open for debate. The list of television shows that have been broken as their characters graduate from high school is long. I think the Smallville writers see that challenge coming and have tried to set up a post-high school lives for almost all of the characters on the show. We’ll have to see whether this helps keep the quality of the episodes from eroding after graduation, but I guess I shouldn’t complain too much for at least giving it a chance. Let’s just hope these little diversions don’t make the lives of our current characters suck at a faster rate.The writers must have been doing their research on what goes on at college, because the opening scene has a bunch of guys sitting around a table doing shots until they pass out. All of these huge guys seem to have no chance against their unseen opponent. Who could it be? A football player? A hockey player? A lacrosse player? No, no, and no. At Metropolis University, it turns out that the shot champion is none other than…Lois Lane. Yes, that Lois Lane, the one who told us the week before that she hated being on campus during Greek Week because all of the fraternity guys apparently loves getting drunk with these fraternity guys. Maybe she loathes them because she won’t let them join. I say she should simply join the women’s rugby house and call it even.

Lois had been challenged to show off the power of liver while she was on her way to brush her teeth. What other reason is there to be a party in your pajamas and teddy bear slippers? In a scene very reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark (wouldn’t we all love to see Karen Allen make a comeback), it is Lois vs. a football player with everybody else cheering them on. Although we all know that Lois is going to win, the football player tries to continue, even when a teammate (played by Chris Carmack of The OC fame) tries to get him to stop. He loses, and Lois is the champion. For her reward, she gets to try and walk home without getting caught by campus security. The football player, who everybody calls “Coop”, has a different idea of how the evening should end. Lois drank with him, right? Thinking a dozen shots equals true love, Coop tries to put a move on Lois, who is too tired to argue and so she knocks him out with a kick to the chest.

Game over, or so we would think. It turns out that Coop simply wasn’t knocked out, he was paralyzed, and so they bring in Lois for questioning. To me, it would seem that Lois had a good case for self-defense, and considering she is a college student and her dad is a general, she wouldn’t have to post bail. Apparently not, because Lois not only has to max out her credit cards for the bail, but she returns to Smallville to ask Chloe for some help. Chloe has to go to Metropolis University to get some paperwork done for her financial aid, so why not help her cousin beat a manslaughter charge?

Coincidence would have it that Clark is also visiting Met. U on a football recruitment trip. Clark’s athletic prowess not only opened the floodgates for his popularity, it also have him an easy road to paying for college. Schools all over the place were trying to recruit him and get them to play football for them. Met U. sent another product of the Smallville High School football team to pick Clark up for the recruiting trip. If you guess that it would be Chris Carmack, you would be correct. His name is Geoff and he was a star at Smallville before he became a star at Metropolis. He is a local legend, and takes Clark back to campus in an Escalade.

You think that we would also be given some sort of idea what Lana was planning after college, but we are still left guessing. Jason told her about meeting Lex, and how his job would basically be to get more information on the countess Thoreau. That would mean he would basically be spying on Lana and his own mother, Genevieve. Lana can’t believe that Jason would even think about the job. He might have told her what was going on, but she had already seen one of her relationships ruined by lies, and she is desperate not to have it happen with Jason. She confronts Lex about the idea, and learns that things *really* aren’t like they seem.

When Lana was getting possessed by the spirit of the Countess, she had been doing research. She would have been better served to simply ask Jason, whose crazy mother had been immersing him with the life of Countess Thoreau since he was a small boy. Suddenly, Lana is not so sure that she met Jason by accident in Paris, and starts to wonder just how much Jason knows about all of the things that are going on.

Clark’s recruiting trip was much like the ones J-Unit remembers from the halcyon days of his youth, although things were slightly different for me. Instead of being picked up in an Escalade by a football star, I drove with my dad in our Accord. Instead of being greeted with my name in lights and cheerleaders calling out my name on the football field, I got a tour of campus and the reserve reading corridor. Instead of meeting boosters, I think I saw some TAs running around. Clark was given the promise of sorority girls at his beck and call (and they baked him a cake), I was told I would have my onw 100 megabit connection to the internet and only had to share a bathroom (one stall, one shower) with seven other people on my floor. Isn’t it great to feel wanted?

It was at the sorority house that Geoff left Clark to fend for himself, which involved a tour of Alpha Alpha Alpha (I guess the Tri Delts didn’t give them permission to use their letters). You would think that the young Mr. Kent would be used to having girls draped all over him now, and would be a little bit more like the other side of the pillow when a couple of young women take their shirts off and wrestle him to the bed. Before the girls are able to do something terrible like pleasure Clark in ways watching the cows on the farm get it on never could, they hear a noise in the close. Clark goes over to investigate and finds that Lois is also at the sorority doing some investigating of her own.

Clark is able to get his half-clothed tormenters away by saying he needs some food and drink. He is then able to ask Lois what the hell is going on. Earlier, she had been visiting the paralyzed football player in the hospital and thought she might get a clue about what really happened by investigating some of his loved ones. Coop’s girlfriend Monique happened to be a sister of AAA, and she happened to keep a diary. In that diary, she mentioned that Coop seemed bothered, and that he had an appointment with a newspaper reporter later in the week. Knowing that Geoff was Coop’s roommate (is Chris Carmack being typecast as somebody who must sleep in the same room as somebody named Cooper?), they decide to pay him a visit.

Most of you are smart enough to realize that they wouldn’t have Chris Carmack cameo if he wasn’t going to be a main character, and you pretty much knew from the menacing looks he gave and the wild adulation he received that he was probably had more to do with strange events than people might have guessed at first. When we learned that the character Geoff was from Smallville, you begin to wonder if maybe he somehow had a meteor power as well. It turns out that he did have a meteor power. Yes, you guessed it – he is able to paralyze people with his touch. The effects are temporary, and by the time he visits his roommate in the hospital, they are starting to wear off. Unfortunately for Coop, Geoff can’t afford to let him leave the hospital. Coop was going to talk about Geoff and expose his secret, although indirectly. Geoff had been passing drug tests by using somebody else’s sample (apparently Tom Sizemore didn’t tell him about the whizzinator) to hide the fact that he wasn’t playing fair. Therefore, Coop had to die, and Geoff suffocates him.

All of the pressure is obviously getting to Geoff. During Coop’s wake, he is chugging beer like crazy. He nearly freaks out when the guy who has been selling him his pee shows up. He takes the guy outside, and Clark notices that when Geoff touches him, the guy goes down very easily. Knowing that he must have some sort of meteor power, Clark tells Chloe and Lois, and they decide that they have to get some more information on exactly what it was that Coop was going to tell to the reporter. While Lois is talking to the person Geoff bought his pee from, Geoff overhears her and begins to get paranoid about what she might know. He can’t be too careful, so Geoff decides that Lois is expendable as well. He does his little paralyzation trick on Lois, and then drives off to take care of this little problem.

Chloe and Clark notice that Lois is missing, and they realize that Geoff must have gotten a hold of her, but they aren’t quite sure where he was. Luckily for them, his Escalade had a GPS system and so they hack into the “TripStar” system to find out his location. He had driven to an industrial park, placed Lois on the ground in a room, and then flooded the room. Clark made it in time to save Lois (of course), and Geoff is sent to jail.

Geoff really crushed one of Clark’s dreams. He was hoping that he could go on to play football, but it turns out the scrutiny of the thousands of people in the stadiums, and millions watching on TV, and the pressure from the boosters to win would have been too much. They didn’t really explain why somebody with a meteor power would show up with tainted urine, but Clark would have had to fake his drug tests, even if he wasn’t going to use his powers. That pressure was enough for Geoff to use his powers (even though he didn’t use them at Smallville), and Clark realizes he can’t jeopardize his identity by playing football.

His choice to stop playing was obviously a hard one to reach, and it surprised a lot of people, including Chloe. When she found out that Clark had powers, she thought that he was selfish for using them and still playing football. She thought he was using his powers to gain popularity. When she heard Clark quit, she realized that he wasn’t selfish and has a new found faith in him. He might have to find another way to pay for college, but he really was the Clark she remembered falling in love with (or at least having a crush on). I wonder just how long she is going to be able to keep her secret. Clark is starting to get an idea that she knows something, and you wonder how long it is before she slips, or just can’t take the knowledge anymore.

Clark has saved another life, but it is of little consolation to him. His parents struggled to make ends meet when he was in high school, and he can’t think of any way he is going to be able to ask them to pay for college. Before he lets himself get too worried about that, Lois comes in to thank him. She has been cleared of all criminal charges, but still ended up getting suspended from school. She has been caught drinking before, and considering she was sent back to high school to finish some work, you might guess that she isn’t a stellar performer in the classroom. After being kicked out of Metropolis University, her dad decided on the “tough love” approach and wants Lois to fend for herself. She gives Clark a sob story about having to live out of her car, and how Chloe’s house is too small for her. If only she knew somebody who lived on a nice farmhouse with an extra bedroom and a hot shower. Before Clark knows what hapens, he has invited Lois to live with him and his parents.

At the end of the episode, Clark takes one last look at the life he is about to throw away. It’s when he is on the football field that I just realize that his red jacket looks awfully like a cape, only took me about 90 episodes to figure that out. Anyway, the writers took us on a little bit of diversion, but look like they are setting us up to get back on track and will spend a good part of the rest of the season tying together just how Clark, Lana, Jason, and Genevieve all relate to the story of Krypton. And I’m not sure exactly how the Lois living with the Kents thing is going to work, but I am sure Clark doesn’t want his parents to leave him alone with her.