Smallville - Plastique (Episode 802)

Still in Kansas, but not in first grade anymore, Toto.

It's a historic day in Superman canon: Clark Kent's first day at the Daily Planet.  And what does our hero wear to commemorate the event?  A "nice" red plaid shirt and blue jeans, carrying a red knapsack. *eyeroll* Sometimes the writers take Clark's farmboy sensibilities a bit far.  He's dressed up often enough, and what's more, he's been to the Planet hundreds of times and knows perfectly well that the dress code is businesslike.  Sigh.

Fortunately Lois spies him before his appointment with HR and thinks quickly, borrowing a spare dry cleaning bag from Mr. GQ in the corner.  ("Personal space, Lane!  Remember?" GQ whines.  Heh.)  Lois marches Clark over to the very phone booth in which they made out like fiends a couple of Valentine's Days ago, and shoves him inside to change.  When he emerges in a dark blue shirt and black pants, Lois is momentarily gobstruck, and the ground shakes and the skies fall.  No, really, there is some kind of explosion right outside the building that knocks everything askew.  What did you think I meant?

Clark zips outside to find a city bus on its side, on fire.  I guess banking on everyone inside being too panicked to realize what he's doing, Clark bends back the top of the bus and begins ushering out the passengers.  He finds one woman lying unconscious in the back and carries her outside.  She wakes up in his arms, and -- it's Tess Mercer, a little gobstruck herself.  Because the CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations frequently take public transportation.

Oh baby, you can drive my bus anytime, baby.

A little later, Chloe arrives on the scene.  She spies a teenage girl stumbling along the side of the street, covered in ash and coughing.  Chloe crosses the police barricade to go help her and calls for aid from a passing paramedic.  He rushes over and set up an oxygen tank while he checks the girl -- Bette -- for injuries, and Chloe is amazed he even heard her call for help over all the noise.  "You're hard to miss," he mutters shyly, barely missing a beat in his examination of Bette.  Humina, humina.  Oh, I should mention that the paramedic is Sam Witwer, the mystery man in the new opening credits.  He helps Bette to his ambulance, and he and Chloe introduce themselves.  His name is Davis.

Dammit. At this point I should just chuck it all and change my official 'ship to Chloe/Anyone With A Pulse.

Clark continues to help the wounded find medical attention, and he and Chloe spot each other.  Davis witnesses their embrace from across the chaos.  Clark explains that he took the job at the Planet so that he'll hear about crises as they happen.  He misses her, though, and wonders if she'd consider coming back, now that Lex isn't the man upstairs.  Chloe says she wants to try something new, but that Clark should watch out for Lois's nose, re: his powers.

Clark wanders back into the bullpen all sooty and heroic, but Lois just wants to know if he did any investigating while he was running around playing savior.  Clark says that the police think the bomb misfired, since there were no casualties, but when Lois asks, Clark does not have the name of his source.  She berates him for breaking Rule #1, Always Know Your Source.  A lackey appears to fetch Clark for the new head honcho, Tess Mercer, and Lois covers her disappointment by advising him of Rule #2: "Make a good first impression and don't screw up with the boss."  Yeah, she wouldn't know anything about that.

Up in Tess's office, Clark is surprised to find that she's the same woman he rescued that morning -- especially the part about a CEO taking the bus.  She smiles goodnaturedly and says she's going green -- and if you'll buy that, she's got ocean-front property in Arizona.  She believes meeting him was fate, as she already had Clark on her "to-do list" for today.  Ooh, dirty.  She learned from Lex that Clark has a hero complex, and she was hoping that, as Lex's friend, he might know where to find him.  Sure, that makes sense.  Because if they were still friends and Clark knew where to find him, he wouldn't be lost, now would he?  Clark says the Lex he knew disappeared years ago -- aww, sniff -- and he recommends that Tess not allow this job to consume her life, as it did Lex's.  After he leaves, Tess tells her assistant that Clark is a liar, and vows to keep an eye on him.

At Metropolis General Hospital -- which looks remarkably like Smallville Medical Center -- Chloe greets a discharged Bette with meatloaf and a friendly ear.  Bette is wary of answering questions, but she says she's "between homes" at the moment.  Chloe excuses herself to get Bette a soda.  She runs into Davis and explains Bette's situation, thinking she'll take her to the city shelter, but Davis says a 15-year-old girl won't be safe there.  He approaches Bette and offers to get her an application for a home that teaches girls skills and helps them find jobs.  Chloe chimes in that Bette can stay with her tonight while she thinks about it.  Davis watches them leave, clearly impressed with Chloe and bummed that she's taken.  Isn't that always the way?

Back at the accident site, Lois probes Clark for information about their new boss.  Clark thinks Tess was just welcoming the new recruit, but Lois thinks she must have had a secret reason to talk to Clark.  Attempting to prove she has nothing to be jealous of, however, Lois approaches the guard at the barricade, only to be told firmly that press aren't allowed.  Clark smirks at her, and while Lois tries sweet-talking, he super-listens in on the CSIs at the wreckage.  They've found no trace of explosive material or a detonator.  He shares this with Lois and suggests that since there was no bomb, they should interview people who were on the bus.

At Chloe's Talon apartment, Clark bursts in without knocking.  Does the sense of entitlement come with the hero complex, I wonder?  Bette is understandably freaked out, but remembers he's the one who pulled her from the bus.  Clark proceeds to undo her tenuous ease by asking whether she saw anything funny on the bus before the blast.  Chloe pulls him aside, and he tells her he thinks that since there was no bomb, the explosion might have been caused by a meteor power.  Bette asks what a meteor power is, and when Chloe explains, she says her friend Tommy found a green rock the other day, and now when he gets angry things heat up.  She offers to show Clark where Tommy hangs out.

Clark and Bette drive up to a homeless hangout.  Clark hails Tommy and asks to talk, but when Tommy sees Bette, he takes off running.  They corner him in an alley next to some barrels of fuel -- naturally -- and even though Clark and Bette try to calm him, Tommy becomes more and more upset by Bette's presence.  With Clark's attention on Tommy, we see Bette's eyes smolder, and suddenly the barrels explode and kill Tommy on the spot.  Tsk tsk, Bette.

Liar, liar, barrels on fire!

That night at the Planet, Clark explains to Lois that he thinks Tommy didn't mean to hurt anyone, but just couldn't control his powers.  Lois switches off a digital recorder Clark didn't realize was taping.  Lois: "Don't get your tights in twist; I'll just refer to you as 'sources say.'"  What happened to Rule #1?  Besides, she says, in order to accuse Tommy of being a human bomb, she's going to need physical proof.  Clark suggests checking the coroner's report for signs of meteor rock in Tommy's system.  Lois rewards Clark's investigative chops not by offering to share the byline, but by scoring him Tommy's obit.  Aw, what a pal.

At the ISIS Foundation, Davis stops by at Chloe's invitation to drop off an application for Bette.  He finds her standing on a table trying to replace a light bulb in the chandelier, and good lord, Allison Mack has great calves.  Davis hops up there to help and promptly the chandelier lights up.  One might say there's now electricity in the room, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.  He helps her down and can't resist holding her hand a little longer than necessary.  Damn, y'all.  I'm not sure I've seen two people this hot together on the show since Oliver/Lois.  Don't get me wrong, I love me some Jimmy, but you can't argue with chemistry.

Davis asks about the ISIS Foundation: "What, adopt a pyramid, save a sphinx, that sort of thing?"  Heh.  Chloe explains that it's a counseling center for people with special skills, and Chloe's babysitting until her friend finds someone to take it over.  Davis recognizes that she means meteor-infected people, and having seen a lot of them in his line of work, he agrees that they could use the help.  He thinks Chloe would be perfect to run it herself -- especially since, under Lana's leadership, it was used more to spy on her ex than help the krypto-challenged.  I might have added that last part.

Chloe is flattered that someone who spent his youth running away from foster homes thinks she's qualified for the job.  She admits she Googled him, but backpedals quickly, insisting it was only her reporter's curiosity, because she's TOTALLY ENGAGED, SEE, HERE'S THE RING.

...and my fiance is all class! 

Embarrassed, she stutters that Davis is the first person she's told.  He says he grew up hearing a lot of four-letter words and "love" was not one of them, so if Chloe has found real love, she should hold onto it.  In the mouth of a lesser actor that line would be cheesy as hell, but Sam's earnestness really sells it.

At Luthor mansion, Tess peruses the file on Bette Sans Souci from the same research facility in Montana where Chloe was held.  Yep, she's a pyrotechnic.  An assistant enters to report that Bette has gone off the grid again; he remarks that Lex would have had them terminate her on sight, rather than try to approach her on a city bus and lead her to blow it up.  Tess, however, wants to handle Bette herself.

 Super sleuths!

At Met General, Lois and Clark sneak through the halls to the coroner's office, where Lois flips through her portfolio of stolen key cards until she finds one for the hospital.  AWESOME.  Veronica Mars should have thought of that.  Clark's job is to cover her while she's inside.  The first person to spot him is Davis, and they recognize each other from the explosion site and have much mutual admiration.  Davis, whose last name is Bloome, congratulates Clark on his catch of a fiancée.  When this is news to Clark, Davis says he and Chloe seemed pretty close, so he assumed it was Clark to whom she was engaged.  Clark: "Chloe's engaged?"  Aw, poor Davis.  Need a shovel, hon?  He asks Clark not to tell Chloe he said anything.  Clark looks like someone just ran over his cat.

Chloe comes home with a safehouse application for Bette, to discover Bette ready to leave town.  She would rather take her chances on the street than being locked up.  Chloe misunderstands and assures her the safehouse won't lock her in, and finally Bette gets so upset that a few of Chloe's dishes spontaneously combust.  Oops.

At the hospital, Lois emerges from the coroner's office with Tommy's autopsy report, which indicates no meteor infection.  What's more, Clark notes that the coroner found metal shrapnel from the barrels, which makes no sense if Tommy was the source of the blast.  He realizes that the only other person present at both explosions was Bette.  Lois: "Oh my god, my cousin's babysitting Psycho Spice!"  Hee.  She jabs the elevator down button, but Clark's already zipped away.

Back at the Talon, Chloe sympathizes with the difficulty to control one's powers when upset or angry, but Bette knew what she was doing.  She's been in some corporate research facility for three years, under constant tests.  When something happened a week ago and they were all released, she avoided being tagged, but Tommy sold her out and they cornered her on the bus.  Chloe reveals that she had a meteor power too, the ability to heal -- wait a sec, past tense noted.  Sure, her power didn't work on human!Clark last week, but I figured that had to do with it being Clark, not with her power being gone.  Man, I liked Chloe having that power!  Sad times, y'all.

Anyhoo, Bette can't risk Chloe turning on her too, and prepares to blast her into oblivion.  Chloe runs down the stairs, trips and goes flying, but Clark arrives in time to catch her in mid-air and block Bette's firestorm.  Bette, confused by his lack of fear and convinced she is a monster, listens tearfully as Clark explains that she's been led astray, and that the struggle to hide gets easier after awhile.

Later, Chloe vents to Clark that she was almost killed tonight because Bette didn't trust anyone to help her.  She laughs off Clark's feeble suggestion that maybe Belle Reve will help, especially since Bette's already been a lab rat for three years.  By the way, y'all, I've just noticed the Clockwork Orange poster on Chloe's wall.  That's fucking creepy after last week.  Anyway, Chloe rages that maybe if Bette had had someone to talk to from day one about her powers, this wouldn't have happened.

Suddenly Chloe notices her Cracker Jack engagement ring is missing, and Clark pulls it from his pocket, having found it downstairs after the struggle.  Chloe admits that she accepted Jimmy's proposal when she came back from Montana, and that she hadn't told Clark yet because she wasn't ready for their relationship to change.  She asks if Clark is, and he avoids answering by saying that her happiness is one of the most important things to him, and that Jimmy makes her happy, and she shouldn't worry about anything else.  He hugs her warmly, and they both smile unconvincingly to themselves.  That's the sound of my heart breaking.

Tess intercepts the truck taking Bette to Belle Reve and offers her an alternative destination.  Bette understandably is not eager to go anywhere with Tess after Black Creek, but Tess claims she didn't know what went on there, and shut it down when she found out.  I suppose her plausible deniability is genuine enough, since Regan was the one running that facility, but I'll eat my hat if she really didn't know about it.  Tess posits that Bette deserves to be treated like the powerful person she is, and Tess can introduce her to a "team" of other people like her.

At the Planet, Clark has learned to dress himself, and Lois has learned to be gracious to people who help her succeed: she's more proud of having uncovered the truth about Bette than the actual byline itself, and Clark was a big part of that.  In return, she offers him a proofed copy of his obit.  Hey now.  First of all, Lois is a reporter, not a copy editor; but more importantly, she has famously bad spelling.  Not on, writers!

That night at ISIS, among boxes, Chloe calls Davis.  She leaves him a voicemail thanking him for helping with Bette, and crediting him with a big part in her decision to take up the mantle at ISIS after all.  As she tells him to "stay safe out there," we pan down a dark alley in Metropolis.  There behind some dustbins lies Davis himself, apparently unconscious, but nude, shaking, and in the fetal position.  Unfortunately he is not lying in a small crater, or we would have a really awesome crossover on our hands.  Instead, as the camera zooms in, we see that something weird is going on on his forehead, like some kind of fissure closing, and a scary growly-type noise jars him awake.

I'll never complain about my worry lines ever again.

Oh.  Uh-oh.