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Toyman’s back, Clark’s got a new power, Ollie’s in Mexico, and Tess thinks she’s Lara Croft. Let the excitement begin.

During a hostage situation, Clark is caught in an explosion and suddenly gains the power to hear peoples’ thoughts, starting with Lois and eventually everybody. Jor-El explains that this is another one of his trials, and it will help Clark to know how humans think so that he can better use his Kryptonian intuition. Clark uses his new power to figure out from witnesses and other evidence that Toyman was behind the bombing in an attempt to get back at Oliver Queen for framing him for Lex Luthor’s murder. He also starts getting closer to Lois with the knowledge he gains from listening to her thoughts, which he is unable to “turn off.” 

Meanwhile, a Tomb-Raidered-out Tess finds Ollie in Mexico and demands that he come back and address his shareholders before the company goes belly-up just like its CEO seems to be doing. Eventually, the situation comes to a head at the Queen Industries shin-dig, where Toyman has planted a bomb. He says it is going to go off if Ollie doesn’t read a speech admitting to the murder of Lex. Clark finds the bomb hidden in an android duplicate of Toyman and stops it, but not before Ollie steps off of what he believes is the trigger mechanism once everyone else has cleared the room. Clark has a talk with Ollie about being suicidal, and Ollie seems to finally come to his senses. But Tess goes to the jailed Toyman and gives him Metallo’s heart to play with. 

The episode was only so-so as a whole. I still like the general direction the series is going in, and the writing seems to still be up a notch over seasons previous to that last one. I was kind of annoyed when I saw that Toyman was coming back since I’m not a big fan of the character, but the writers redeemed themselves at the end by showing that the technological genius is going to figure out how Metallo’s “heart” worked. Presumably, this will lead to an all-metal version of Metallo in the future. 

I was liking the storyline with Oliver going downhill, but it seems like it might already be over, unless the ending was a ruse. It would have been cool to see him grow a beard while he was down in the dumps, and then decide to keep it when he became Green Arrow again, like in the comics.

I hate it when they give Superman new powers in any version, and this Clark is no exception. It was kind of a cop-out to have Jor-El “plant the seed,” but I’m glad they made it only temporary. Chloe had the right idea suspecting Clark of using his powers to get Lois to like him better because…well, Clark was using his powers to get Lois to like him better. It’s not quite as creepy as it sounds considering he had no control over it, but I still thought he deserved to get called on it. There’s no doubt they’re headed straight for Lois & Clark territory, which is fine by me, considering that whole thing was a newer version of Moonlighting, which was a few years after the Sam and Diane relationship on Cheers, and can probably all be traced back to Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, one of the best movies ever.

I’d like to think that Clark used his X-ray vision on the android Toyman before melting its face (even though they didn’t show him doing it). I mean, if he had been wrong, that would have been pretty gruesome, and I’m sure Clark would have never forgiven himself.

Then he’d end up in the same place as Ollie, feeling sorry for himself and drinking himself to death with Kryptonite juice or something.

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