MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
"Perry" is essentially a 2000s take on the standard comics-trope in which some investigator, often Lois Lane, tries to learn Superman's secrets or nature. The only novelty here is that most comics-stories didn't place the elderly editor of the Daily Planet in the position of the investigator.
This version of Perry White has built up some journalistic credits for previous investigations, but now he's hit the skids and is working for a sensationalistic rag that specializes in occult happenings. To his (almost) good fortune, Clark Kent's powers are on the fritz due to a solar flare, and Perry witnesses some suspicious phenomena that get his journalist's nose twitching. He originally came to Smallville seeking to get an interview with Lana thanks to its being the 14th anniversary of the famed meteor shower, but Lana doesn't cooperate since that event caused her parents' deaths. Perry tries to get dirt on Clark from various regulars-- Lana, Chloe, the Kents, and even Lex Luthor-- but he had a previous encounter with Lex and the younger Luthor does not regard Perry with any friendly intent. Perry also investigated some aspect of Lionel Luthor's career but was forced to back down on that investigation. So Perry's looking for a big break, and he thinks Clark is it. In the end, Perry resorts to a test of Clark's powers that's straight out of the old "Lois Lane jumps off a building to test Superman" book.
This is a mediocre episode, notable mainly for foregrounding Clark's eventual journalism career and for building on the subplot of Lex's psychiatric evaluation.
Not much better is "Relic." A number of TV shows, such as MOONLIGHTING, had established the routine in which regular characters of the show would "flash back," imagining themselves incarnating other people in other times. In "Relic," though, the mechanism is not a simple flight of the imagination. Rather, Clark Kent starts flashing back to 1961, apparently re-experiencing events that happened to his father Jor-El when he came to Earth and "passed" as an Earth-human. Clark isn't privy to his father's thoughts, so the episode never reveals exactly what Jor-El was doing on Earth. Toward the end, two motives are suggested: (1) that Jor-El came to Earth as some sort of "rite of passage," and (2) that he was scouting out possible adoptive parents for Little Kal-El, possibly because the Kryptonian scientist possessed advance knowledge of Krypton's future destruction. I'm not sure if the writer knew which reason would fit in best with the series' future developments, and so maybe they were just tossing shit at the wall to see what stuck.
While Jor-El, under the name "Joe," passes through Smallville, he saves a young woman from a mugger. The young woman is Louise McCallum, great aunt of the current-day Lana Lang, while her assailant is none other than the father of Lionel Luthor, name of Lachlan. Later Lachlan murders Louisa and Louise's husband Dex is falsely accused of, and imprisoned for, Louise's murder. Jor-El is also loosely connected to the murder because he had some romantic moments with Louise, so Clark gets to re-live a parallel version of his relationship with Lana, given that Kristin Kreuk also plays Lana. (In contrast, the barely present Lachlan Luthor is not played by either of the Luthor actors.)
"Relic" is poorly paced and does little to advance the running narrative of Kryptonian visits to Earth, as recorded in the Kawache Caves. I didn't research what if any relevance this episode has to that narrative in the long haul, but I suspect this was just a toss-off tale that no one bothered to reference again.
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