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Nicodemus

Clark and Lana in "Nicodemus"

First aired March 19, 2002

Official Description - Detailed Description - Notes

Detailed Description:

By Nadine

Freak of the Week: The Nicodemus is a flower that lived over a hundred years ago, and killed a whole settlement in the area. It delivers a yellow dust which causes the recipient behave with unrepressed feelings for a couple of hours, then faint and go into a coma, and finally die. Dr. Steven Hamilton (Joe Morton), who has been hired by Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) to discover the effects of meteor, was able to revive this flower with the power of the rocks. The first victim is James Beals (Bill Mondy), an employee of LuthorCorp who stole the flower, obviously got infected and with unrepressed feelings demands to speak to Lionel Luthor (John Glover) to tell him his exact feelings. On the road, James gets involved in a crash with Jonathan Kent (John Schneider), who saves him, but not before getting affected by the flower as well. Jonathan strange behavior can be seem by passionately kissing Martha (Annette O'Toole) all day, lashing out unfairly at Lex and driving into town with a shotgun. Clark Kent (Tom Welling) manages to stop him, just before Jonathan faints and gets taken to hospital.
Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) and Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) decide to go to the scene of the car crash, where Chloe takes photos, and Lana finds the dead plant, which suddenly comes alive again for just long enough to infect Lana. Lana goes on a hormone rampage, looking sexy in dark leather clothes, breaks up with Whitney Fordman (Eric Johnson), comes on to Clark in one of the steamiest scenes we may see in a while. She strips down to her sexy red underwear by the pool, impresses Clark with a back flip and kisses him passionately. She pushes Clark into the pool and leaves him wondering what happened as Principal Kwan (Hiro Kanagawa) finds him there, alone. Lana also comes onto Lex at the Talon, before driving off in his Porsche. When Clark catches up with her, she is half way up a windmill, at which point she faints and goes to hospital.
Chloe discovers that the night she took photos, Dr. Hamilton was at the scene. When she visits him, she notices "the Nicodemus Diary", a book Lex had bought to Dr. Hamilton to question him about the history of the flower. She also notices all the flowers in the lab and a piece of meteor rock. She informs Clark that Lex is behind this, since he is funding Dr. Hamilton's research and that he is the one who checked the book out. When Clark confronts Lex, he denies it.
Finally, the last victim is Pete Ross (Sam Jones III), who comes onto Chloe, steals her car keys and storms into the Lex mansion accusing Lex of all this and showing his true hatred for the man. This was just at the time that Dr. Hamilton had found an old book that contained a Native American cure for the flower. Clark saves the day, as usual, and all the victims (exept Beals who had already died) are saved in time, with no memory of their strange behavior.

Character Development: Most of the characters behaviors were warped by Nicodemus flower this episode, however, a few interesting key points. When Lex first visits the Kents to apologize for Beals' behavior, and while Jonathan-under-the-influence is mouthing off at him, we see that Lex is truly hurt and has genuine feelings. He also begins to feel guilty at a later stage, when both Jonathan and Lana are in the hospital and Clark is beginning to despair. While he does inform Dr. Hamilton that putting people in hospital was not part of the plan and that he wants to fix this, he still later lies to Clark when confronted about his association with Dr. Hamilton.
During the final confrontation, Lex manages to get Dr. Hamilton and the cure out safely before Clark arrives to save the day. When Pete, still with the gun, accuses Lex of conspiring with Dr. Hamilton, Clark asks Lex if it is true, and Lex simply replies "What do you think?". Pete will never be able to confirm it, since he won't remember, and by the next day, Lex had destroyed the lab, and Chloe just found an empty barn. Lex, however, simply moved the facility and the good doctor elsewhere. And Clark being the genuine friend that he is will not want to believe it.
During a pre-infection walk through the school hallways, Pete admits that he hates Lex. When questioned by Clark, Pete says that it is because the Luthors took his father's factory. This seems unlikely to Clark, and Chloe confirms that it is more likely that Pete is jealous of the new-found friendship between Lex and Clark.
While Clark and Martha are sitting at Jonathan's bedside in the hospital, Martha tells Clark about the first time she met Jonathan. He was sitting by the fountain at Metropolis University. She found him so cute, that she went up to him and asked him for his notes. He didn't know that she was the class' note taker, to this day, he still doesn't know. He just handed his notes to her without even asking her name. She asked him how he was so sure she would return them, and he said "I prefer to believe in people". She found him so cute and all she could think was "I hope he marries me".
When Lana has recovered, she apologizes to all concerned, and asks Clark if she did anything shocking, to which he shyly responds "no".

Notes:

Clark's line, "With all my powers, I couldn't save him" over a comatose Pa Kent echoes the exact same line a teenaged Clark says in the Superman movie when Pa Kent dies there.

Somewhat coincidentally (or not), in the original Superman comics Pa Kent dies from a "Fever Plague" that nobody has had in 100 years and that Clark/Superman finds out about by reading a diary.

Hiro Kanagawa gets an beginning-of-episode credit, despite the fact he makes only a brief appearance and has little or no dialogue.

When Lana gets infected by the flower, she sees the flower, gets nailed by it, sneezes, then Chloe walks up. When asked if she found anything, Lana says "No" because she sees the hula doll. Doesn't a flower that sprays you qualify? Does the plant cause amnesia as well?

Metropolis isn't supposed to be as far away as is implied here - in an interview, Al Gough admits that the designers got it wrong in this episode, and made the Metropolis shot from the windmill larger than it was supposed to be. Officially, the producers consider Metropolis to be a three hours' drive away.

Near the end of the episode where Clark and Lana are sitting on the windmill and Lana is saying things like "I spent the whole day apologizing to the Talon staff...." you can see the moving shadow of the windmill obscuring her face. Yet when the scene zooms out, the windmill isn't moving.

When Lana and Jonathon get sprayed by the flower, it takes a while to take affect on their personalities. But, when Pete gets sprayed by the flower when him and Chloe are investigating Dr. Hamilton's "office", it takes affect on his personality immediately. How does that happen?

Season Two - Season Three - Season Four - Season Five - Season Six - Season Seven - Season Eight

Season One: Pilot - Metamorphosis - Hothead - X-Ray - Cool - Hourglass - Craving - Jitters - Rogue - Shimmer - Hug - Leech - Kinetic - Zero - Stray - Reaper - Drone - Crush - Obscura - Tempest

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Updated 1/5/09

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