Smallville 5.5: "Thirst"

Written by Stephen S. DeKnight
Directed by Paul Shapiro

In which Lana gets into college on a late admission, but when she encounters a housing shortage, she joins the wrong sorority, while Chloe tries to get a job at the Daily Planet…


I had the feeling that this episode would be less than satisfying, given the promos, but I had been hoping for a more affecting episode. Let me put it this way. Mix hot young women, vampirism, and outfits made of vinyl or leather, and it’s hard not to get something I’m going to enjoy. I’m a typical male in this respect, and proud of it. Which makes it all the more telling that this episode just about dashed every hope I had of an entertaining hour.

A lot of people criticize Kristen for her acting skills (or, from their point of view, lack thereof), but I really don’t think that was the problem here. I think it was the approach to the story. The whole concept is a very bad example of a holiday-themed episode, but instead of taking a direction that might have been more memorably sexual in nature, like “Spell” before it, there’s a campy tone that makes it all fall apart.

The writers clearly wanted it both ways. They wanted the sexually charged nature of an out-of-control sorority with a taste for blood, and they wanted Lana to be a part of it. They even had Chloe in an intriguing outfit for once, though they did hold back a bit, since she was still conservative compared to the rest of the crowd. Yet for all the corsets and shiny, shiny material, the camera angles were more suggestive than revealing.

But even that would have been acceptable had the tone of the episode given the audience something more to appreciate. The campy approach to the story left little meat to the tale, and in fact, it detracted from one of the main goals of the episode: explaining how Chloe managed to get a job at the Daily Planet.

The beginning of the episode made it clear that Kahn thought Chloe was a joke, a brat handed a job because of all the wrong reasons. Kahn herself was too campy by far, but the set-up was clear. Chloe needed to show that she could come up with something impressive enough to get an entry-level shot at the Planet.

This is what bugged me the most. This is supposed to be a story that gets Chloe her break, however tiny? More importantly, this is the kind of story that Chloe thinks will get her that break? All right, if one assumes that this episode is entirely from her point of view, perhaps the tone of the episode is intentional, but I find it hard to swallow that Chloe would ever find this substantial enough to constitute her one shot.

Consider that the only good thing about this episode was the role played by Professor Fine. I was surprised to find that the episode gained immediate gravitas once Marsters hit the screen. So why couldn’t this episode have been split into two aspects: Clark dealing with the Lana problem, with a healthy dose of dark sexuality, and Chloe going to Fine for a story related to Lex, which just happened to interconnect to Clark’s side of the tale? It’s a very minor difference, but it would have connected Fine and Chloe, which might have planted some powerful seeds for future development.

Instead, this episode was like every shot with Lana in that leather corset and tight, tight pants. It painted one hell of a picture, and every so often, there was a brief glimpse of how hot she could be. But most of the time, it was little more than a tease, promising something substantial and delivering little more than a blur.

Writing: 0/2
Acting: 1/2
Direction: 1/2
Style: 1/4

Final Rating: 3/10