PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
"Witness" is another weak story that I tend to term a "bridge episode." Not that much happens in the main plot, but various subplots are either terminated or initiated on the side.
One old subplot stems from eight episodes back, when "Insurgence" boldly revealed that Lionel Luthor had, for reasons unknown, accrued a large stock of kryptonite, somehow molded into bricks. This means that Lionel also returns to Smallville from wherever he'd been after having his phony blindness revealed.
For some reason, Lionel was sending a shipment of kryptonite somewhere by truck. Clark witnesses the truck being waylaid by three teens wearing face-masks, so the virtuous high-schooler intervenes. To Clark's surprise, the teens all possess super-strength, and they knock the hero for a loop. What we have here is a twist on the somewhat-abandoned "freak of the week" pattern from the show's first season, except that in the earlier episodes, the freaks usually got accidentally irradiated. The leader of the teen thieves, one Eric Marsh, apparently learned about kryptonite's mutative properties through chemistry experiments, after which he and his cohorts began using kryptonite-fumes as steroids, so that they could become high-priced jocks. The sloppy script doesn't explain how Marsh could possibly have learned about Lionel's krypto-cache, and none of the thieves are given more than cursory motivation.
I think the writer's main goal was just to pit Clark against foes with similar powers, shortly after the revelations of his alien heritage and his speculations that other Kryptonians might have survived. Thus "Witness" is like SUPERMAN II writ small. After some complications, in which Clark worries that his foes may menace both his parents and Chloe, the hero defeats the baddies in a power-clash, and implicitly they lose their powers when deprived of their drug of choice. Do any of the defeated criminals rat on Clark as a super-powered anomaly? Nope, they're too busy disappearing from continuity, since Marsh and his cronies are never seen again.
However, the high-school heist artists weren't responsible either for having trashed Chloe's newspaper HQ or for menacing the Kents. Without looking ahead, I suspect these deeds will somehow be laid at Lionel's door. It's certainly no coincidence that the second thing he does after coming back to Smallville-- the first thing being to loosely accuse Lex of committing the heist-- is to approach Chloe Sullivan. He seems unusually interested in granting largesse to a student newspaper, and even knows that Chloe interned at the Daily Planet in Metropolis, a concern in which Lionel has some unspecified business interest.
Clark and Lana continue to be friendly but make no more romantic noises. Yet Chloe is annoyed by their growing closeness and she picks a quarrel with Clark. Since this plot-thread is not resolved by episode's end, I assume it gets some development down the road. The exact opposite obtains with regard to the ongoing subplot about Lana connecting with her birth-father Henry Small. It's clear some producer axed the subplot, since after some minor tumult regarding Small's current wife, both characters vanish from the show without further elaboration. However much kryptonite the thieves have in their possession when Clark defeats them, Clark with Pete's help gets hold of the deadly mineral and buries it. Lex is confined to a minor threat, in that he wants to know more about the hijacked cargo but is unsuccessful in learning anything. It would have been nice to get an update on how much Lex knows about the alien substance at this point. I have only the vaguest memory that the show finally does explain what's going on with Lionel's researches, but I'm trying not to check ahead.
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