Smallville Season 9, Episode 8 “Idol”

I’ve already bitched about Smallville as a whole and sung the praises of this season in particular in an Outside the Longbox just about a week ago. Tonight, however, I have to rave about what I believe may be one of the best episodes of the series.
Idol introduced us to Smallville’s rendition of Zan and Jayna, the Wonder Twins. First off, avoiding the weirdness of the names, the duo spends the entire episode referring to each other as Zee and Jay (not Z-Jay) and secondly, at no time do they call themselves the Wonder Twins. In fact, they merely proclaim “powers activate” each time the need arises. Gleek makes a fantastic cameo, as well, and the Hall of Justice even gets some love. All in all, the twins were handled very well, but the real gold star here is that they were barely the center of attention. In fact, their screen time was fairly limited. Nothing against them, but… this isn’t the Zan and Jayna Power Hour.
No, the bulk of this episode focused on Lois and Clark - their burgeoning romance, Lois’s suspicions regarding Clark’s true nature, and so forth. All handled marvelously well, I might add. But best of all, to me, was the scene of Lois interrupting the District Attorney’s press conference to act as an advocate for “the Blur” (for those not in the know, this is what we’re calling him instead of Superman). This scene in particular was fantastically written and went a long way towards establishing the “proper” character of Lois Lane over some of the missteps the series initially took with Durance’s portrayal.
The other strong point of the episode, I felt, was the very believable approach to putting the genie back in the bottle in regards to the Blur’s true identity. There was no flying around the Earth backwards or magic amnesia kiss, just a damn good explanation proving A could not possibly equal B, even though we all know that they’re totally equivalent values. Wait, what was I talking about’? Oh yeah…