Episode 4.18: Spirit

When Dawn Stiles, the leader of some stereotypical bimbo girls that feel like they walked straight off the set of Mean Girls, crashes her car and ends up in a coma, she begins to walk the earth in spirit form, with the unique ability to hop into people's bodies. She sets about using this ability to live the ultimate life experience of going to prom and becoming prom queen. But once she realizes that nobody really likes her she decides to take revenge by attempting to blow up the school with everyone inside. Meanwhile, the body of Bridgett Crosby is found in Lex's garden and, while Jason Teague does everything he can to appear shocked by this, even calling the sheriff, it turns out he is the man responsible, having now apparently decided to give his allegiance to his mother. This allegiance is only strengthened when he sees Lana on the dance floor with Clark.

I feel like Jason's decision to follow his mother and go to the dark side is really mishandled, to the point that I'm questioning whether he was ever truly on Lana's side. But it makes absolutely no sense for him to have been in on it with his mother since the beginning given some of the exchanges we've seen between the two of them in private. What I can gather is that Lana broke up with him after she saw him roughing up Lionel. But that was never made 100 percent clear so we can only assume that's the case. From there he must have decided to heed his mother's warning about Lana being the person who will most likely try to wipe out his family and so started to work with Genievieve. This is one of those cases where a couple of extra scenes were needed to fill in the blanks because, either way, it doesn't quite add up. Even if Jason did suddenly decide to support his mother, would he really go so far as to make himself complicit in murder?

Speaking of which, getting rid of Margot Kidder's character with an off-screen death seems somewhat shameful given the actress' connection to the Superman legacy.

The body hop story also seems pretty flimsy given the stuff that is happening with Lex and Jason. It definitely could have been trimmed down a bit to accommodate more attention to Jason's turn.

The intro, for example, is meant to be one of those intros that builds intrigue because it's Chloe doing something totally out of character. These kind of intros, where the rest of the episode shows you everything leading up to that moment, only really works if the episode keeps you guessing how we end up there. But the moment Dawn jumps into Martha's body we know EXACTLY how we are getting there. The intro should have been Dawn crashing and becoming Martha instead of wasting screen time showing us the same scene twice.

Martha is the standout in this episode of course. Or at least Annette O'Toole is, to be more precise, as she begins acting like an immature high school girl with the most shallow of life goals. Seeing her dance in the kitchen and get all jealous over anyone who comes near Clark is quite hilarious thanks to her well judged performance and comedy timing.

There is a moment in the episode where we see Jason looking on as Lana dances with Clark. This scene would have played much better if we had seen Lana breaking up with Jason earlier on in the episode as it would have heightened Jason's sense of jealousy and made his switch to his mother a lot more plausible.

So, the body hop stuff, while flimsy, is fairly entertaining, and the revelations with Jason, while being a good avenue to take the character down, feels rather underdeveloped.

6/10