February 14, 2025 • 25 mins
From creepy bug boys to classic Clark Kent growing pains, the Podcast Full of Kryptonite is diving into Smallville’s second episode, “Metamorphosis”! This week, we’re talking about Lana’s necklace of doom, Lex’s increasing obsession with Clark, and the show’s first real taste of Smallville’s signature “freak of the week” formula. Is Greg Arkin the most tragic bug-loving villain ever? And how does Clark handle his first real test of heroism? Join us as we break it all down—because before there was a Superman, there was a teenage farm boy just trying to survive high school… and a town full of super-powered weirdos.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
Yeah, what are you Clark Man or Superman? As she
picks up her Nietzsche book, and they'll just sound so
intelligent because they're hyper intelligent, really culturally savvy kids all
on the CW shows. I'm not gonna be starky about
this because I love this show, but there's some stuff
to be you know, kind of I can lovingly poke
fun at it. I am John Reid. I am your
(00:33):
host of the podcast Full of Kryptonite. It is great
to have you back here again for our next episode.
If you've been with us for a while, you know,
we started as a show with Dee and Jason from
the Sureley You Can't Be Serious podcast where we were
reviewing Superman and Lois. We did some other Superman stuff
here and there, and wanted to keep it going. Hadn't
rewatched Small Villa in a while, so I'm like, Okay, well,
(00:54):
how do we keep this going? And what's gonna give
me some runway to be able to keep doing our
podcast and just having a lot of fun and can
keep doing this for as long as I want to. Basically,
it was there's a lot of Superman shows out there,
so if we just focus on some Superman TV. There's
ten seasons of small Will, there's four seasons of Lois
and Clark, There's I'm going to blank on it. I
(01:16):
think there's maybe three seasons, maybe more than that, of
the super Boy show from the eighties. There's the cartoons,
the Superman animated series, There's Krypton, There's all kinds of stuff.
So there's plenty. And I'm sure by the time I
cover some of these shows, there's gonna be more Superman
shows out there. So there's plenty, plenty, plenty of Superman
that is out there for us. So if you are
(01:38):
a fan of Superman, a fan of Smallville, excited to
have you here with us. This is basically my opportunity
to go back through rewatch these and just get excited
again for a show that I really really loved when
it was on its first run back in two thousand
and one, and watch through all ten seasons of the
show and just was such a big chunk and actually
(01:59):
was coming out during a time when those were kind
of the kind of really interesting and almost you know,
formative years of my young adult life, because I started
watching this when I was just about finishing college, and
this went through to ending like right as my second
child was born. So I mean there was there was
a lot of life in between the beginning of Smallville
(02:21):
and the end of Smallville, and this was just consistently,
you know, looking forward to this week in and week
out as just appointment television. And it has several several
friends too that really enjoyed this show and would watch
it with me, And when we'd get to like season finales,
we would sometimes put out. I was teaching at that point,
(02:42):
and I had a projector in my classroom, and so
sometimes after school hours were over, we'd pull up the episode,
put it on the projector, and we kind of watched
through it a bit and and just had a lot
of fun. We actually did that with the series finale,
and that was a lot of fun to do. So, yeah,
this is Smallville was kind of a big part of
that decade of my life, in the you know, early
to end of the two thousands. All right, we are
(03:05):
on the second episode. We did the pilot last week,
second episode this week. It is metamorphosis. This is much
like the X Files. We are in our freak of
the week stage in Smallville as we get started here,
and I think, and this is something that I've mentioned
you know this this podcast before. This is something that
I think Michael Rosenbaum talked about on Talkville back when
(03:27):
they had first started and they were covering some of
these episodes. Is the nice thing about the Freak of
the Week early on is it's given you some runway
to start to get to know these characters, and then
you can kind of move away from that for the
most part and really start developing each of these characters individually,
go more in depth on things, start to work on
the interconnectedness of their stories between you know, Clark and
(03:50):
Lex and Clark and Lana, Clark and his parents, and
then the peripheral characters of Chloe and Pete and everybody else.
And so that's fine when the show gets started. This
is kind of an easy way to get it off
the ground, to get people hooked. And so we get
kind of more of the meteor lore of Smallville as
we learn more about the Freaks of the Week and
(04:12):
what it was that caused them to gain their powers
in the first place. So we start this episode kind
of where we had left off. We had left off
with Clark kind of spying. He's a little bit of
a peeping tom he's a peeping tom. That was not
a very good Marty McFly impersonation, but I tried, and
we get We had ended the episode with Clark kind
(04:35):
of spying on Laana a bit because she's she lives
across the way and he's got his telescope, and.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
This is the.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Beginning of this episode, is picking up right after the
end of the last episode, and we see somebody else
is spying on Lana as well, and she gets into
her bedroom and is starting to put away her things
from the dance and notices that there's a little gift
box on the bed, and when she picks it up
and opens it, these multicolored butterflies fly out of the box,
(05:06):
and some creepy kid with glasses is looks like he's
videotaping this whole thing, and yeah, so, I mean, that's
not serial killery at all to give somebody a box
of fly butterflies, and not too ironically, he drives a
Volkswagen Beetle and I think the license plate, if I remember,
was like bge something so buggy something, So yes, this
(05:29):
is will affectionately call him bug Boy. And he gets
home and finds that his mom has found his stuff
has found his stash of some of the videos he's
taken of the different people he's stalking. So that's a
little awkward. You know, when your mom finds your stash
and you get confronted with it. It's unpleasant, unpleasant confrontation
(05:50):
that's going on here. And she sees these videos of
Lana and she's like, look, I know Lana's aunt. I'm
I'm gonna go tell her that you're doing this because
this is super creepy.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
So our bug boy is Greg Arkin.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And he is played by Chad Danella, and he had
been in several is in several movies here and there.
He was in one of the Final Destinations Disturbing Behavior,
and then he's in a bunch of episodes of TV shows.
He was in an episode of Er, an episode of
The X Files, he was in Let's See. He was
(06:25):
in that movie Shattered Glass with why am I suddenly
blanking on his name with Hayden Christiansen. That's with Darth
Vader himself. So yeah, he's been in a bunch of
TV shows, a few movies here and there at Law
and Order, Lost a bunch of those. Then he was
in this episode of Smallville, and then he's done some
other TV shows and stuff since then. Was in a
(06:46):
TV series that ran for several years called blind Spot.
That's probably the thing he's been in most, but usually
just kind of one off episodes there. And so Greg
Arkin is the bug boy, and his mother was played
by an actress name Gabrielle Rose.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
She was she was in several movies and TV shows.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
I mean, there's Let's See a Firefly Lane, I know,
that's one that my wife watches based on a book.
She was in an episode of that, but again kind
of like one off episodes here and there. She was
played Judge Harris in the twenty twenty version of the Stand.
So yeah, she's been in several things too, but a
lot of times kind of one off episodes of or
two or three episodes here and there of a TV show.
(07:27):
And so yeah, we get the sense that their relationship
is not great. Greg goes to his room and it's
full of bugs, full of glowy bugs that you know,
like when you go to the pet store and they
have those fish that are the really unnatural colors because
you know, somebody fed them I don't know, uranium or something.
That's kind of what all these bugs look like. So
he packs up a bunch of his bugs, takes them
(07:49):
with him in his car, and then the one of
the bottles cracks or breaks open or they get loose,
and then they all start to kind of swarm around
him and he is just repeatedly stung and bitten by
this swarm of bugs. He crashes his VW bug into
a pole, and yeah, things things not so good for
our boy, our boy greggy boy. Here we get a
(08:10):
scene where his mom comes to check on him in
his room, thinking that he should be there, and then
we see a scene of him like hanging from the
ceiling with a hole, but he's had no clothes on.
He's got a bunch of weird bug bites all over him.
And this is the first time we cut to the
Somebody Save Me theme. We cut to the opening theme
with Smallville, the Remy Zero theme, and then that's kind
(08:32):
of we get the introduction the opening credits of this
where we get to see all the major actors that
are in it. So that was a fun theme for
the show. Now, I think later on, I want to say,
in the season one finale or at some point later
in the season, they're at there. I think it's prom
and somebody, I mean, they were always WB was always
(08:53):
doing this, like if you had a featured musician or
something like that, you were always kind of name dropping them.
And it was product placement, like all over the place.
And I feel like at the very end of season one,
they're at their prom and somebody says like, Hey, isn't
this that band Remy Zero, And yeah, man, this is
a great song. And that happened a lot in Smallville
(09:15):
and all the WB shows, so not surprising at all.
Then we come back from the opening credits and Clark
is having a bit of a dream about Lana, and
he has a dream that he is floating over Lana,
and when his mom yells up at him that he's
going to be late for school, we realize that he
is floating above his bed and he comes crashing down
(09:37):
and actually breaks his bed, comes crashing down, and he's
a little confused because people don't fly, and so this
is this is kind of a new thing for him.
We see that he's at there at the farmer's market
they had taken. I guess he wasn't gona be late
for school. They're gonna be late for the farmer's market
because they had taken their stuff to the farmer's markets
as they are farmers, and he's there to help us
(10:00):
family out. And again, as usual, he spots Lana and
they have a little chat and he tries not to
implicate Whitney and you know, him trying to turn him
into the scarecrow. And so they had little conversation and
his dad comes over and is like shaking hands with Whitney,
and Clark's not super thrilled with that because Whitney's the
bad guy in this situation and this is just going
(10:20):
to continue to be kind of an awkward thing between
him and Lana. Whitney tries to go kind of talk
to Clark and it's like, hey, you know, no hard
feelings is just kind of a hazing thing. Hey, by
the way, I need that necklace back. And Clark is like, well, yeah,
I don't know where he is. It's in a cornfield somewhere.
So if you don't want to get in trouble with
your girlfriend, I guess maybe you just need to go
find it. Lana gets confronted by Greg, and Greg is
(10:43):
cool now? And how do we know Greg is cool now?
Because he has powers we don't know that yet, but
what we do know is Greg has a black leather jacket,
and in the late nineties, early two thousands, I feel
like that is the sign for when you.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Know someone is cool.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
First of all, his face is cleared up, so being
stung by all those bugs, being given superpowers it is,
I mean, at clear, clear remedy for acne. But he's
he's got the black shirt, he's got the black leather jackets.
So this is this is how we know that he's cool. Now,
I do want to comment real quick that they've already
(11:17):
kind of made a change in some of the Letterman
jackets I talked last episode about in the Letterman jackets,
the S on the jacket looks very much like the
Superman symbol.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
It's got the almost like baseball plate.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Shape around it with the S in the first episode,
and already in this one the jacket Whitney is wearing,
it's just an S, like a straight up, you know,
kind of Letterman patch s on the jacket. There's no
shape around it at all. So they've kind of already
made that change. But that was a fun thing for
the first episode to have that in there. Lex shows
up at the farmer's market and he's had chatting up Clark,
and then we cut to a scene where Whitney is
(11:51):
driving down the road in his truck and bug boy
attacks and tries to kill Whitney. Clark runs out and
realizes that Whitney's truck is about to catch fire and
might explode. Clark grabs him and kind of hunkers down,
covers Whitney with his body, you know, blocks some of
the trapanel that flies out, And of course, again his
parents don't necessarily know that he's that invulnerable, so they're
(12:14):
panicking because they think Clark is blown up with him.
They go around and find that really Clark is mostly untouched.
I mean he's jackets a little singed. But Whitney's fine,
he's fine. He's just he's he's smoking and you know,
as any dad will tell you, like you shouldn't smoke,
it's not good for you. Different kind of smoking though,
and so he's fine. And the next scene we see
(12:37):
Clark is he's like looking at himself and he's like,
I have no marks on me at all, Like, how
do we even explain this? I think Mom's a little
freaked out. And then he talks to his dad about, hey,
by the way, last night I was I was floating,
So how do we deal with that? And Jonathan in
true John Schneider Jonathan fashion is like, yeah, Son, I
(12:59):
don't know, I got no clue, Like this is all
new for me too, but.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
We got to hide it from everybody.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
So that's kind of his constant message to Clark is
we got to hide this, like we can't let anybody
know about this. We get a scene where Lex is
this is where Lex is going to start interfering in
Clark's life. He does show up and shows up actually
at Lana's at the barn where she's keeping her horse,
and she makes a little comment about how, hey, you know,
(13:25):
I actually know you too. I've seen you somewhere before
and it was in a bit of a compromising situation.
So yes, I know exactly who Lex Luthor is. He's
trying to kind of bring I guess since Jonathan Kent
wouldn't let Clark keep the truck, Lex's deciding that he's
going to do the next best thing. If he can't
get Clark a truck, he'll he'll get him a girl.
And so he's trying to play matchmaker between Clark and
(13:47):
Lana here and trying to encourage her to maybe spend
a little bit more time with her good buddy Clark.
Greg's mom comes home and it is a complete mess,
and his bedroom looks like something out of a combination
of Aliens and Iraq noophobia. It's all very unpleasant, and
(14:08):
this is where missus Arkin not really going to be
here so much anymore, because he vomits what looks like
spiderwebs all over his mom, so kind of creepy. We
find out that Lex loves tabletop games, especially tabletop games
where he can re enact the Trojan Horse, and.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Clark is admiring that. As he's at Lex's house, they talk.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Lex is constantly going to be talking in every episode
he's in at this point about Alexander the Great and
how he's basically Alexander the Great, and again that he
and Clark their friendship will be the stuff of legends,
and you know how it's just there. No one will
be able to keep them apart. And so Lex actually
(14:47):
gives Clark the metal box that has Lana's necklace in
it that he found, and so Clark is gonna bring
this back at some point later, Greg tries to meet
up with Lana again at the school. She trying to
kind of, you know gently, you know, let him off
the hook, but he's he's being very stockery. We get
a scene where we kind of get to see the
(15:08):
effects of kryptonite on Clark. He opens up this metal
box kind of out in a field and he's just
kind of holding his hand close to it to see
what happens, and it starts to kind of age his
hand very quickly, and it starts to hurt, and and
so he's just I think he's just experimenting to try
to figure out, like, what is it that causes these
meteor rocks to kind of, you know, make me feel
(15:28):
this way, to make me feel sick and kind of queasy,
and it's just not good. Goes back to the bar
and Lana is there, finds his stalker Telescope, and you know,
she tells him that she found out that Whitney did
the whole Scarecrow thing and that's not cool, and and
that she found out through Lex Luthor, and Clark is
in the back of his mind he's like, yeah, okay,
(15:49):
I don't really want Lex interfering in this, Like I'm
not trying to step in between, you know, Lana and
her boyfriend who could possibly beat me up, even though
I'm in vulnerable.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
So Clark is feeling a little awkward about that.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
But and then we get some more scenes with There's
a really kind of creepy scene of Greg and he's
taking a shower and he's starting to shed his skin.
We get a scene in the barn of Clark and
his dad working and he kind of starts to hear
something and there's like somebody crawling around in the rafters
and it's really kind of creepy. He ends up Jonathan
(16:24):
ends up falling off of one of the top levels
of the barn and was about to land on some
sharp farm equipment. Clark runs over and grabs his father,
like runs super fast, grabs his father real quick, and
he's able to save him, and then Clark is basically
untouched by these They find some like green slime all
over the place where Greg has been scurrying around. Again
(16:46):
super gross. And then they have a little leybe take
some time to have a little father son chat and
go from there, and then then we have Clark and
Chloe are back at the wall of weird and she is.
They're kind of going through you know, what is what
is it's going on with these people? Like why do
(17:08):
we get all these weird people? And Chloe's got her
hypothesis like, well, maybe maybe he got attacked by his
bugs and maybe his bugs were you know, somehow infected
with radiation or I don't know, that's well, you know,
maybe that's how he got powers. So she's always kind
of doing these like off the wall theories of you know,
what's going on in this town and what's causing these
(17:30):
people to become the freaks that they are. We get
some pretty gross kind of body horror type stuff where
we see skin that was left behind by Greg in
one of these scenes, find out that he is also
stocking Lana much like clark is, but nobody wants to
talk about the Clark thing. They find missus Arkins's dead
body hanging from the spiderwebs in there, and they realize
(17:53):
that Greg is it's going to go after Lana, probably
try to kill Whitney in the process because he wants
him out of the way, And they realize that because
Greg is probably infected by these bugs, Greg may have
some similar attributes to the bugs, meaning the bugs have
a short lifespan. Greg may have a short live span.
What do bugs do when they have a short lifespan?
They need to mate, and so Greg needs to mate
(18:17):
and Lana is not going to want to mate, and
so this is all bad stuff. And sometimes when bugs
mate and they like bite their mate's head off, so
that's also bad. Who knows if that's going to happen,
but that's it's pretty bad. And so Clark realizes that
he thinks he knows what might be happening here. He
goes and he finds Lana in a treehouse and she
is covered by some of his spiderwebby stuff, very much
(18:40):
a kind of sleeping beauty kind of thing here, and
he confronts Greg in the treehouse and they have a
little bit of a tussle. Clark falls out of the treehouse.
They end up going to have a fight in kind
of an industrial area. There's some meteor rocks there, which
makes Clark weak, and Greg is able to throw him
around like a rag doll for a little bit while
(19:01):
they're doing this whole fight thing. Clark kind of finally
gets the upper hand and Greg gets smushed like a bug.
Hes this heavy equipment falls on him and when he
gets smushed, like all these just hundreds upon hundreds of
like little beetle type things just goes scurrying around all
over the place. Since Clark was busy doing all that stuff,
(19:22):
Whitney gets to swoop in and make it look like
he's the one that saved Lana and he pulls her
out of all the spiderwebby stuff and they are, you know,
they're back on again, and Clark is you know, he's
having a rough day. But Clark does bring the metal
box with the necklace leaves it on Lana's doorstep. Now,
if Clark was vindictive and not the kid with the
(19:43):
good moral compass that his parents have raised him to have,
he could have put the necklace in a flaming bag
and left it on the doorstep. But he's a nice guy,
so he just hangs it on the doorknob and then
you know, goes about his business. That is the end
of the second episode of Smallville of Metamorphous. So this
was another, like I said, another freak of the week episode,
(20:04):
kind of establishing the pattern that we're going to have
at the beginning of the season. And this it was
just always kind of fun to see, like, what are
some different ways we're going to get the meteor rocks.
Eventually we'll alert that is the media rocks that's mutating
all these people, and when they get exposed to it
in different ways, they get different types of powers. You know,
it's a clever enough way. It's kind of like when
(20:25):
you get to the Flash TV show and they explain
it through the particle accelerator explosion and dark matter and
that's what causes all the meta humans. You know, similar
kind of explanation. But that's kind of what we get
for you know, how we're going to get these different
quote unquote supervillains every week that Clark is going to
have to deal with, which is going to train him
(20:46):
in turn, how to become the superhero that he's going
to be someday. And as we go through the seasons,
the threats will get more and more sophisticated, and obviously
that helps Clark grow in it.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Well maybe glow.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
It's a glow up for Clark helps him grow into
the superman that he is going to be someday. These episodes,
especially kind of these early on episodes, you know, it
was just fun because they would pretty constantly drop little lines,
you know about you know, somebody would say something about
somebody being super or somebody would say something about flying,
or it was always, you know, there was always a
(21:19):
little kind of tongue in cheek, a little little wink
to the camera, you know, especially if you were a
Superman fan and you knew what these characters were destined for.
That was a pretty constant thing in these early seasons,
but very fun, you know, as a fan of of
Superman stuff, as a fan of the comic books and
the lore, it was always fun to watch these episodes
and just kind of play along with it, like you
(21:40):
knew it was going to be. You knew as a
CW show, so you knew kind of what the formula
was and what this was designed to be. But it
was just it was fun weekend and week out.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
It was fun.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
We haven't quite reached the point yet where I start
to get a little frustrated with kind of as we
get into you know, later in the season and in
later seasons, there's a lot of times where somebody you
end up going off on this train of thought for
half of a season or maybe even more, just because
somebody didn't say something to somebody like there's a big
(22:11):
there's a secret, not even maybe a big secret, somebody
just they don't communicate well. And then you go like
an entire twenty two episode, twenty four episode season where
they're upset with each other and if they had just
maybe talked for a moment, then things would have been resolved.
That's one of the things I'd loved about Superman and Lois.
They did that for maybe like an episode, maybe two
(22:31):
episodes at most, but then eventually somebody was like, hey,
you know what, I'm kind of upset about this, or hey,
we should really talk about that thing that happened, and
then they talk through it and everybody's good and we
move on to the next thing. So, I mean, that's
one of the things that while I love Smallville it
was one of my favorite shows, it is one of
my favorite iterations of Superman, there are some kind of
frustrating things that they were doing to try to build
(22:54):
tension and build up the drama in the show, and
that's kind of one of them. I think that's a
pretty typical, you know, CWWA be teenage show kind of
trope where that would that would happen, and that would
like cover an entire season of misunderstanding. So you know,
we haven't quite gotten into that yet, but but we
will pretty soon. So we're just having fun with the
(23:14):
standard basic freak of the week kind of a thing here,
building the relationships between Clark and Lana, building the relationships
between Clark and Lex and that really is going to
be I think one of the strengths of the show,
and which is why I love that the podcast that
they do together, they do together that it's Tom Welling
and Michael Rosenbaum, because I think their chemistry with each
other is what really, you know, made this show, especially
(23:36):
as they progressed into looking more like what their characters
would look like later in life. Just a lot of
fun to watch them do it. And and and such
good actors on this show too, Like there's not a
in all of the main cast, and oftentimes with the
supporting cast too, you know, not there's not too much
cheesy acting from the main cast from time to time
(23:58):
a little bit, but you know, pretty solid actors all around,
with everybody involved and always you know, one of the
stars of this show, I think was the relationship between
Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum and the relationship between Tom
Welling and John Schneider, that father son relationship they had,
and I think John Schneider just made probably one of
my favorite Jonathan Kent's in any version of Superman. If
(24:22):
I try to think about it now, is there a
Jonathan Kent that I enjoy better than John Schneider?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
And I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
I think he had several years to develop that character
and he did so well, so it might be. I
got to think about that one a little bit, but
John Schneider might be one of my favorite Jonathan Kent's
in all of the Superman history.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
All Right, that's gonna do it for this episode. Thank
you everybody so much. Again.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
As always, you can always reach out leave us a
review on your podcast service of choice, where we should
be available on all of them out there.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Would love to.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Hear from you if you have got any questions, if
you've got any comments, any thoughts about the episodes that
were covering by the show in general, all ten seasons
of Smallville. If you want to go back to something
we mentioned when we were doing Superman and Lowess or
anything Superman related, please feel free to leave that in.
If you're leaving a comment, somewhere, please feel free to
leave that in there, and would love to answer that
and kind of interact with that on the show because
(25:16):
I'm just I'm a huge Superman fan. Doesn't matter what
it is, I'm more Superman, more better, and so if
you are too, I would just you know, it would
be so much fun to just chat, just have a
little chat back and forth and just gush about all
the things that we really really enjoy about this character.
All Right, everybody, We'll see you back here next time
for episode three. This one is called hot Head, So
(25:39):
we'll be here back here next week for hot Head,
and in the meantime, up up in a way, we
will see you next week
Yeah, what are you Clark Man or Superman? As she
picks up her Nietzsche book, and they'll just sound so
intelligent because they're hyper intelligent, really culturally savvy kids all
on the CW shows. I'm not gonna be starky about
this because I love this show, but there's some stuff
to be you know, kind of I can lovingly poke
fun at it. I am John Reid. I am your
(00:33):
host of the podcast Full of Kryptonite. It is great
to have you back here again for our next episode.
If you've been with us for a while, you know,
we started as a show with Dee and Jason from
the Sureley You Can't Be Serious podcast where we were
reviewing Superman and Lois. We did some other Superman stuff
here and there, and wanted to keep it going. Hadn't
rewatched Small Villa in a while, so I'm like, Okay, well,
(00:54):
how do we keep this going? And what's gonna give
me some runway to be able to keep doing our
podcast and just having a lot of fun and can
keep doing this for as long as I want to. Basically,
it was there's a lot of Superman shows out there,
so if we just focus on some Superman TV. There's
ten seasons of small Will, there's four seasons of Lois
and Clark, There's I'm going to blank on it. I
(01:16):
think there's maybe three seasons, maybe more than that, of
the super Boy show from the eighties. There's the cartoons,
the Superman animated series, There's Krypton, There's all kinds of stuff.
So there's plenty. And I'm sure by the time I
cover some of these shows, there's gonna be more Superman
shows out there. So there's plenty, plenty, plenty of Superman
that is out there for us. So if you are
(01:38):
a fan of Superman, a fan of Smallville, excited to
have you here with us. This is basically my opportunity
to go back through rewatch these and just get excited
again for a show that I really really loved when
it was on its first run back in two thousand
and one, and watch through all ten seasons of the
show and just was such a big chunk and actually
(01:59):
was coming out during a time when those were kind
of the kind of really interesting and almost you know,
formative years of my young adult life, because I started
watching this when I was just about finishing college, and
this went through to ending like right as my second
child was born. So I mean there was there was
a lot of life in between the beginning of Smallville
(02:21):
and the end of Smallville, and this was just consistently,
you know, looking forward to this week in and week
out as just appointment television. And it has several several
friends too that really enjoyed this show and would watch
it with me, And when we'd get to like season finales,
we would sometimes put out. I was teaching at that point,
(02:42):
and I had a projector in my classroom, and so
sometimes after school hours were over, we'd pull up the episode,
put it on the projector, and we kind of watched
through it a bit and and just had a lot
of fun. We actually did that with the series finale,
and that was a lot of fun to do. So, yeah,
this is Smallville was kind of a big part of
that decade of my life, in the you know, early
to end of the two thousands. All right, we are
(03:05):
on the second episode. We did the pilot last week,
second episode this week. It is metamorphosis. This is much
like the X Files. We are in our freak of
the week stage in Smallville as we get started here,
and I think, and this is something that I've mentioned
you know this this podcast before. This is something that
I think Michael Rosenbaum talked about on Talkville back when
(03:27):
they had first started and they were covering some of
these episodes. Is the nice thing about the Freak of
the Week early on is it's given you some runway
to start to get to know these characters, and then
you can kind of move away from that for the
most part and really start developing each of these characters individually,
go more in depth on things, start to work on
the interconnectedness of their stories between you know, Clark and
(03:50):
Lex and Clark and Lana, Clark and his parents, and
then the peripheral characters of Chloe and Pete and everybody else.
And so that's fine when the show gets started. This
is kind of an easy way to get it off
the ground, to get people hooked. And so we get
kind of more of the meteor lore of Smallville as
we learn more about the Freaks of the Week and
(04:12):
what it was that caused them to gain their powers
in the first place. So we start this episode kind
of where we had left off. We had left off
with Clark kind of spying. He's a little bit of
a peeping tom he's a peeping tom. That was not
a very good Marty McFly impersonation, but I tried, and
we get We had ended the episode with Clark kind
(04:35):
of spying on Laana a bit because she's she lives
across the way and he's got his telescope, and.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
This is the.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Beginning of this episode, is picking up right after the
end of the last episode, and we see somebody else
is spying on Lana as well, and she gets into
her bedroom and is starting to put away her things
from the dance and notices that there's a little gift
box on the bed, and when she picks it up
and opens it, these multicolored butterflies fly out of the box,
(05:06):
and some creepy kid with glasses is looks like he's
videotaping this whole thing, and yeah, so, I mean, that's
not serial killery at all to give somebody a box
of fly butterflies, and not too ironically, he drives a
Volkswagen Beetle and I think the license plate, if I remember,
was like bge something so buggy something, So yes, this
(05:29):
is will affectionately call him bug Boy. And he gets
home and finds that his mom has found his stuff
has found his stash of some of the videos he's
taken of the different people he's stalking. So that's a
little awkward. You know, when your mom finds your stash
and you get confronted with it. It's unpleasant, unpleasant confrontation
(05:50):
that's going on here. And she sees these videos of
Lana and she's like, look, I know Lana's aunt. I'm
I'm gonna go tell her that you're doing this because
this is super creepy.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
So our bug boy is Greg Arkin.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And he is played by Chad Danella, and he had
been in several is in several movies here and there.
He was in one of the Final Destinations Disturbing Behavior,
and then he's in a bunch of episodes of TV shows.
He was in an episode of Er, an episode of
The X Files, he was in Let's See. He was
(06:25):
in that movie Shattered Glass with why am I suddenly
blanking on his name with Hayden Christiansen. That's with Darth
Vader himself. So yeah, he's been in a bunch of
TV shows, a few movies here and there at Law
and Order, Lost a bunch of those. Then he was
in this episode of Smallville, and then he's done some
other TV shows and stuff since then. Was in a
(06:46):
TV series that ran for several years called blind Spot.
That's probably the thing he's been in most, but usually
just kind of one off episodes there. And so Greg
Arkin is the bug boy, and his mother was played
by an actress name Gabrielle Rose.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
She was she was in several movies and TV shows.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
I mean, there's Let's See a Firefly Lane, I know,
that's one that my wife watches based on a book.
She was in an episode of that, but again kind
of like one off episodes here and there. She was
played Judge Harris in the twenty twenty version of the Stand.
So yeah, she's been in several things too, but a
lot of times kind of one off episodes of or
two or three episodes here and there of a TV show.
(07:27):
And so yeah, we get the sense that their relationship
is not great. Greg goes to his room and it's
full of bugs, full of glowy bugs that you know,
like when you go to the pet store and they
have those fish that are the really unnatural colors because
you know, somebody fed them I don't know, uranium or something.
That's kind of what all these bugs look like. So
he packs up a bunch of his bugs, takes them
(07:49):
with him in his car, and then the one of
the bottles cracks or breaks open or they get loose,
and then they all start to kind of swarm around
him and he is just repeatedly stung and bitten by
this swarm of bugs. He crashes his VW bug into
a pole, and yeah, things things not so good for
our boy, our boy greggy boy. Here we get a
(08:10):
scene where his mom comes to check on him in
his room, thinking that he should be there, and then
we see a scene of him like hanging from the
ceiling with a hole, but he's had no clothes on.
He's got a bunch of weird bug bites all over him.
And this is the first time we cut to the
Somebody Save Me theme. We cut to the opening theme
with Smallville, the Remy Zero theme, and then that's kind
(08:32):
of we get the introduction the opening credits of this
where we get to see all the major actors that
are in it. So that was a fun theme for
the show. Now, I think later on, I want to say,
in the season one finale or at some point later
in the season, they're at there. I think it's prom
and somebody, I mean, they were always WB was always
(08:53):
doing this, like if you had a featured musician or
something like that, you were always kind of name dropping them.
And it was product placement, like all over the place.
And I feel like at the very end of season one,
they're at their prom and somebody says like, Hey, isn't
this that band Remy Zero, And yeah, man, this is
a great song. And that happened a lot in Smallville
(09:15):
and all the WB shows, so not surprising at all.
Then we come back from the opening credits and Clark
is having a bit of a dream about Lana, and
he has a dream that he is floating over Lana,
and when his mom yells up at him that he's
going to be late for school, we realize that he
is floating above his bed and he comes crashing down
(09:37):
and actually breaks his bed, comes crashing down, and he's
a little confused because people don't fly, and so this
is this is kind of a new thing for him.
We see that he's at there at the farmer's market
they had taken. I guess he wasn't gona be late
for school. They're gonna be late for the farmer's market
because they had taken their stuff to the farmer's markets
as they are farmers, and he's there to help us
(10:00):
family out. And again, as usual, he spots Lana and
they have a little chat and he tries not to
implicate Whitney and you know, him trying to turn him
into the scarecrow. And so they had little conversation and
his dad comes over and is like shaking hands with Whitney,
and Clark's not super thrilled with that because Whitney's the
bad guy in this situation and this is just going
(10:20):
to continue to be kind of an awkward thing between
him and Lana. Whitney tries to go kind of talk
to Clark and it's like, hey, you know, no hard
feelings is just kind of a hazing thing. Hey, by
the way, I need that necklace back. And Clark is like, well, yeah,
I don't know where he is. It's in a cornfield somewhere.
So if you don't want to get in trouble with
your girlfriend, I guess maybe you just need to go
find it. Lana gets confronted by Greg, and Greg is
(10:43):
cool now? And how do we know Greg is cool now?
Because he has powers we don't know that yet, but
what we do know is Greg has a black leather jacket,
and in the late nineties, early two thousands, I feel
like that is the sign for when you.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Know someone is cool.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
First of all, his face is cleared up, so being
stung by all those bugs, being given superpowers it is,
I mean, at clear, clear remedy for acne. But he's
he's got the black shirt, he's got the black leather jackets.
So this is this is how we know that he's cool. Now,
I do want to comment real quick that they've already
(11:17):
kind of made a change in some of the Letterman
jackets I talked last episode about in the Letterman jackets,
the S on the jacket looks very much like the
Superman symbol.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
It's got the almost like baseball plate.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Shape around it with the S in the first episode,
and already in this one the jacket Whitney is wearing,
it's just an S, like a straight up, you know,
kind of Letterman patch s on the jacket. There's no
shape around it at all. So they've kind of already
made that change. But that was a fun thing for
the first episode to have that in there. Lex shows
up at the farmer's market and he's had chatting up Clark,
and then we cut to a scene where Whitney is
(11:51):
driving down the road in his truck and bug boy
attacks and tries to kill Whitney. Clark runs out and
realizes that Whitney's truck is about to catch fire and
might explode. Clark grabs him and kind of hunkers down,
covers Whitney with his body, you know, blocks some of
the trapanel that flies out, And of course, again his
parents don't necessarily know that he's that invulnerable, so they're
(12:14):
panicking because they think Clark is blown up with him.
They go around and find that really Clark is mostly untouched.
I mean he's jackets a little singed. But Whitney's fine,
he's fine. He's just he's he's smoking and you know,
as any dad will tell you, like you shouldn't smoke,
it's not good for you. Different kind of smoking though,
and so he's fine. And the next scene we see
(12:37):
Clark is he's like looking at himself and he's like,
I have no marks on me at all, Like, how
do we even explain this? I think Mom's a little
freaked out. And then he talks to his dad about, hey,
by the way, last night I was I was floating,
So how do we deal with that? And Jonathan in
true John Schneider Jonathan fashion is like, yeah, Son, I
(12:59):
don't know, I got no clue, Like this is all
new for me too, but.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
We got to hide it from everybody.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
So that's kind of his constant message to Clark is
we got to hide this, like we can't let anybody
know about this. We get a scene where Lex is
this is where Lex is going to start interfering in
Clark's life. He does show up and shows up actually
at Lana's at the barn where she's keeping her horse,
and she makes a little comment about how, hey, you know,
(13:25):
I actually know you too. I've seen you somewhere before
and it was in a bit of a compromising situation.
So yes, I know exactly who Lex Luthor is. He's
trying to kind of bring I guess since Jonathan Kent
wouldn't let Clark keep the truck, Lex's deciding that he's
going to do the next best thing. If he can't
get Clark a truck, he'll he'll get him a girl.
And so he's trying to play matchmaker between Clark and
(13:47):
Lana here and trying to encourage her to maybe spend
a little bit more time with her good buddy Clark.
Greg's mom comes home and it is a complete mess,
and his bedroom looks like something out of a combination
of Aliens and Iraq noophobia. It's all very unpleasant, and
(14:08):
this is where missus Arkin not really going to be
here so much anymore, because he vomits what looks like
spiderwebs all over his mom, so kind of creepy. We
find out that Lex loves tabletop games, especially tabletop games
where he can re enact the Trojan Horse, and.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Clark is admiring that. As he's at Lex's house, they talk.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Lex is constantly going to be talking in every episode
he's in at this point about Alexander the Great and
how he's basically Alexander the Great, and again that he
and Clark their friendship will be the stuff of legends,
and you know how it's just there. No one will
be able to keep them apart. And so Lex actually
(14:47):
gives Clark the metal box that has Lana's necklace in
it that he found, and so Clark is gonna bring
this back at some point later, Greg tries to meet
up with Lana again at the school. She trying to
kind of, you know gently, you know, let him off
the hook, but he's he's being very stockery. We get
a scene where we kind of get to see the
(15:08):
effects of kryptonite on Clark. He opens up this metal
box kind of out in a field and he's just
kind of holding his hand close to it to see
what happens, and it starts to kind of age his
hand very quickly, and it starts to hurt, and and
so he's just I think he's just experimenting to try
to figure out, like, what is it that causes these
meteor rocks to kind of, you know, make me feel
(15:28):
this way, to make me feel sick and kind of queasy,
and it's just not good. Goes back to the bar
and Lana is there, finds his stalker Telescope, and you know,
she tells him that she found out that Whitney did
the whole Scarecrow thing and that's not cool, and and
that she found out through Lex Luthor, and Clark is
in the back of his mind he's like, yeah, okay,
(15:49):
I don't really want Lex interfering in this, Like I'm
not trying to step in between, you know, Lana and
her boyfriend who could possibly beat me up, even though
I'm in vulnerable.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
So Clark is feeling a little awkward about that.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
But and then we get some more scenes with There's
a really kind of creepy scene of Greg and he's
taking a shower and he's starting to shed his skin.
We get a scene in the barn of Clark and
his dad working and he kind of starts to hear
something and there's like somebody crawling around in the rafters
and it's really kind of creepy. He ends up Jonathan
(16:24):
ends up falling off of one of the top levels
of the barn and was about to land on some
sharp farm equipment. Clark runs over and grabs his father,
like runs super fast, grabs his father real quick, and
he's able to save him, and then Clark is basically
untouched by these They find some like green slime all
over the place where Greg has been scurrying around. Again
(16:46):
super gross. And then they have a little leybe take
some time to have a little father son chat and
go from there, and then then we have Clark and
Chloe are back at the wall of weird and she is.
They're kind of going through you know, what is what
is it's going on with these people? Like why do
(17:08):
we get all these weird people? And Chloe's got her
hypothesis like, well, maybe maybe he got attacked by his
bugs and maybe his bugs were you know, somehow infected
with radiation or I don't know, that's well, you know,
maybe that's how he got powers. So she's always kind
of doing these like off the wall theories of you know,
what's going on in this town and what's causing these
(17:30):
people to become the freaks that they are. We get
some pretty gross kind of body horror type stuff where
we see skin that was left behind by Greg in
one of these scenes, find out that he is also
stocking Lana much like clark is, but nobody wants to
talk about the Clark thing. They find missus Arkins's dead
body hanging from the spiderwebs in there, and they realize
(17:53):
that Greg is it's going to go after Lana, probably
try to kill Whitney in the process because he wants
him out of the way, And they realize that because
Greg is probably infected by these bugs, Greg may have
some similar attributes to the bugs, meaning the bugs have
a short lifespan. Greg may have a short live span.
What do bugs do when they have a short lifespan?
They need to mate, and so Greg needs to mate
(18:17):
and Lana is not going to want to mate, and
so this is all bad stuff. And sometimes when bugs
mate and they like bite their mate's head off, so
that's also bad. Who knows if that's going to happen,
but that's it's pretty bad. And so Clark realizes that
he thinks he knows what might be happening here. He
goes and he finds Lana in a treehouse and she
is covered by some of his spiderwebby stuff, very much
(18:40):
a kind of sleeping beauty kind of thing here, and
he confronts Greg in the treehouse and they have a
little bit of a tussle. Clark falls out of the treehouse.
They end up going to have a fight in kind
of an industrial area. There's some meteor rocks there, which
makes Clark weak, and Greg is able to throw him
around like a rag doll for a little bit while
(19:01):
they're doing this whole fight thing. Clark kind of finally
gets the upper hand and Greg gets smushed like a bug.
Hes this heavy equipment falls on him and when he
gets smushed, like all these just hundreds upon hundreds of
like little beetle type things just goes scurrying around all
over the place. Since Clark was busy doing all that stuff,
(19:22):
Whitney gets to swoop in and make it look like
he's the one that saved Lana and he pulls her
out of all the spiderwebby stuff and they are, you know,
they're back on again, and Clark is you know, he's
having a rough day. But Clark does bring the metal
box with the necklace leaves it on Lana's doorstep. Now,
if Clark was vindictive and not the kid with the
(19:43):
good moral compass that his parents have raised him to have,
he could have put the necklace in a flaming bag
and left it on the doorstep. But he's a nice guy,
so he just hangs it on the doorknob and then
you know, goes about his business. That is the end
of the second episode of Smallville of Metamorphous. So this
was another, like I said, another freak of the week episode,
(20:04):
kind of establishing the pattern that we're going to have
at the beginning of the season. And this it was
just always kind of fun to see, like, what are
some different ways we're going to get the meteor rocks.
Eventually we'll alert that is the media rocks that's mutating
all these people, and when they get exposed to it
in different ways, they get different types of powers. You know,
it's a clever enough way. It's kind of like when
(20:25):
you get to the Flash TV show and they explain
it through the particle accelerator explosion and dark matter and
that's what causes all the meta humans. You know, similar
kind of explanation. But that's kind of what we get
for you know, how we're going to get these different
quote unquote supervillains every week that Clark is going to
have to deal with, which is going to train him
(20:46):
in turn, how to become the superhero that he's going
to be someday. And as we go through the seasons,
the threats will get more and more sophisticated, and obviously
that helps Clark grow in it.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Well maybe glow.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
It's a glow up for Clark helps him grow into
the superman that he is going to be someday. These episodes,
especially kind of these early on episodes, you know, it
was just fun because they would pretty constantly drop little lines,
you know about you know, somebody would say something about
somebody being super or somebody would say something about flying,
or it was always, you know, there was always a
(21:19):
little kind of tongue in cheek, a little little wink
to the camera, you know, especially if you were a
Superman fan and you knew what these characters were destined for.
That was a pretty constant thing in these early seasons,
but very fun, you know, as a fan of of
Superman stuff, as a fan of the comic books and
the lore, it was always fun to watch these episodes
and just kind of play along with it, like you
(21:40):
knew it was going to be. You knew as a
CW show, so you knew kind of what the formula
was and what this was designed to be. But it
was just it was fun weekend and week out.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
It was fun.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
We haven't quite reached the point yet where I start
to get a little frustrated with kind of as we
get into you know, later in the season and in
later seasons, there's a lot of times where somebody you
end up going off on this train of thought for
half of a season or maybe even more, just because
somebody didn't say something to somebody like there's a big
(22:11):
there's a secret, not even maybe a big secret, somebody
just they don't communicate well. And then you go like
an entire twenty two episode, twenty four episode season where
they're upset with each other and if they had just
maybe talked for a moment, then things would have been resolved.
That's one of the things I'd loved about Superman and Lois.
They did that for maybe like an episode, maybe two
(22:31):
episodes at most, but then eventually somebody was like, hey,
you know what, I'm kind of upset about this, or hey,
we should really talk about that thing that happened, and
then they talk through it and everybody's good and we
move on to the next thing. So, I mean, that's
one of the things that while I love Smallville it
was one of my favorite shows, it is one of
my favorite iterations of Superman, there are some kind of
frustrating things that they were doing to try to build
(22:54):
tension and build up the drama in the show, and
that's kind of one of them. I think that's a
pretty typical, you know, CWWA be teenage show kind of
trope where that would that would happen, and that would
like cover an entire season of misunderstanding. So you know,
we haven't quite gotten into that yet, but but we
will pretty soon. So we're just having fun with the
(23:14):
standard basic freak of the week kind of a thing here,
building the relationships between Clark and Lana, building the relationships
between Clark and Lex and that really is going to
be I think one of the strengths of the show,
and which is why I love that the podcast that
they do together, they do together that it's Tom Welling
and Michael Rosenbaum, because I think their chemistry with each
other is what really, you know, made this show, especially
(23:36):
as they progressed into looking more like what their characters
would look like later in life. Just a lot of
fun to watch them do it. And and and such
good actors on this show too, Like there's not a
in all of the main cast, and oftentimes with the
supporting cast too, you know, not there's not too much
cheesy acting from the main cast from time to time
(23:58):
a little bit, but you know, pretty solid actors all around,
with everybody involved and always you know, one of the
stars of this show, I think was the relationship between
Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum and the relationship between Tom
Welling and John Schneider, that father son relationship they had,
and I think John Schneider just made probably one of
my favorite Jonathan Kent's in any version of Superman. If
(24:22):
I try to think about it now, is there a
Jonathan Kent that I enjoy better than John Schneider?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
And I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
I think he had several years to develop that character
and he did so well, so it might be. I
got to think about that one a little bit, but
John Schneider might be one of my favorite Jonathan Kent's
in all of the Superman history.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
All Right, that's gonna do it for this episode. Thank
you everybody so much. Again.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
As always, you can always reach out leave us a
review on your podcast service of choice, where we should
be available on all of them out there.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Would love to.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Hear from you if you have got any questions, if
you've got any comments, any thoughts about the episodes that
were covering by the show in general, all ten seasons
of Smallville. If you want to go back to something
we mentioned when we were doing Superman and Lowess or
anything Superman related, please feel free to leave that in.
If you're leaving a comment, somewhere, please feel free to
leave that in there, and would love to answer that
and kind of interact with that on the show because
(25:16):
I'm just I'm a huge Superman fan. Doesn't matter what
it is, I'm more Superman, more better, and so if
you are too, I would just you know, it would
be so much fun to just chat, just have a
little chat back and forth and just gush about all
the things that we really really enjoy about this character.
All Right, everybody, We'll see you back here next time
for episode three. This one is called hot Head, So
(25:39):
we'll be here back here next week for hot Head,
and in the meantime, up up in a way, we
will see you next week
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.