 | This brilliant re-imagining of Clark Kent's (Welling) teenage years growing up on his "adoptive" parents' farm in the town of Smallville remains immensely popular with Superman fans and has elicited a number of positive comments from various Objectivist commentators.
Forget any corny "Superboy" antics - Clark has no costumes or secret identities, and his superpowers have not yet fully developed. He attends high school like others of his age, faces the usual troubles of those in their late teens, and has to deal with the additional complications caused by his developing abilities, his extraterrestrial origins and the necessity of keeping certain aspects of his life a secret from even his closest friends - which early in the first season come to include one Lex Luthor(!) (Rosenbaum), who's persistently troublesome behaviour causes his father Lionel (John Glover) to send him to Smallville to run Luthercorp's local operations in the hope of engendering a sense of responsibility. In an intriguing twist, Lex's lifelong baldness is shown to have been caused by his infant self's exposure to radiation from a meteor shower which hit Smallville some years previously (bringing with it the infant Clark's spaceship and a huge amount of kryptonite, which substance is still to be found in the area surrounding the town and causes the teenage Clark just as much trouble as it will in future cause Superman).
Interwoven with "stand alone" single episode stories are several complex storylines, notably Clark's quest to uncover his origins (at times against the wishes of his parents) and choose his own values and destiny; Lex's increasingly volatile relationship with his father (the latter quickly turning out to be just as big a criminal as the future Lex will be) and the effects of this on Lex and those around him; and the effects all the various goings on have on Clark and Lex's relationships with others such as Lana Lang (Kreuk) Chloe Sullivan (Alison Mack), and Pete Ross (Sam Jones III). John Schneider and Annete O'Toole complete the regular line-up as Clark's human "parents" Jonathan and Martha.
The show paints a picture very different from the idyllic upbringing implied by other renderings of the Superman mythos. Clark and Lex are both deeply troubled young men (as are a number of the other characters), Clark's limited powers rarely if ever prove to be the whole solution to whatever situation he and the other characters face, calling for regular displays of rationality and courage, and all of the central characters screw up at one time or another and must choose to accept responsibility and seek to rectify matters or, on occasion evade it (in true Objectivist fashion, the latter course is always shown in a disapproving light).
Definitely worthwhile viewing, and I would suggest worth checking out even for those who are not generally science fiction or superhero fans.
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