'Smallville': The truth is out there, but nobody cares

"Smallville" has its Villain of the Week pay homage to David Duchovny's greatest contribution to television. I want to believe, but it's increasingly difficult to do so.

Faora and her sister Vala really do appreciate Clark's efforts in landing them fake passports. It even lead to Vala getting a bookstore job (and subsequent opportunity to drool over Clark)... if only a masked man hadn't gassed her to sleep and then held hostage in a life-size Ziploc bag. Clark finds Zod poking around the store the next day, and has to hear the Major blah blah that Kal-El is killing the Kandorians softly. All Zod can do is blah blah, what with the limited powers and no imminent red sun to save him. Vala's doing her best to talk her captor down, but when you're dealing with Fox Mulder-in-Gregory House's body, any alien will certainly be eliminated. That's a shame, too, as Vala probably had hot alien parents.

Poor Lois. She's starting to think with her heart instead of her steady journalistic brain. She tries to take one night off for a dinner date with Clark, and she ends up being kidnapped by the masked man, who we now know as Dr. Bernard Chisholm, ME. He promptly chains Lois up, then forces her to review page after page of detailed data proving that "aliens are living among us." When that doesn't work, he reveals his slowly-freezing Vala AND his horribly disfigured head from when he died and was resurrected. Meanwhile, Clark and Faora head over to the hospital, where they grill a lowly doctor about stolen bodies and engineers performing tests to induce powers. As it turns out, Faora was trying to get the powers with the Towers OR Zod. Chisholm was onto the scheme and tried to rid the world of the aliens single-handedly. Of course, he was sucked into the body snatching plan and came out the other side a different man.

With all of this going down, Zod does what any rational man would do to save a fellow Kandorian: go undercover as a Daily Planet reporter. He eventually finds all the letters Chisholm wrote to the paper and tracks down the evil lab, only to be shot as he tries to save both Lois and Vala. Lucky for him, the one guy he thinks he can't trust whooshes in to save both and get a clearly dejected Chisholm to kill himself. How is Zod saved from certain death? Clark plunges a sliver of Kryptonite into his hand, causing a single blood drop to fall into Zod's open wound, thus returning the Major back to full health. Good for him.

The B-story finds Tess revealing to Oliver that someone is embezzling heavily from the company. Chloe's not afraid to admit it's herself when confronted with this accusation. But for why? She's been stockpiling hundreds, if not thousands, of Kryptonite-laced weapons in a centrally located cargo container. Of course, she also calls it "borrowing" the money... a sort of insurance plan to the entire planet. Unbeknownst to her, Oliver figures the weapons aren't safe in their current location and moves them right before Tess busts them both. Miss Mercer is even more upset that she's being left out of the loop, but them's the breaks.

In the end, Zod tells Clark that he had him pegged all wrong. This, of course, is to lull Kal-El into a false sense of security... as it seems the blood drop transfusion did more than heal Zod: it gave him the power to (at least) fly like Clark. With a newly reinvigorated Zod on the loose, you'll now have to wait until April 2nd for the end of the season.