PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
"Accelerate" is a great example of "increasing returns," the opposite of "diminishing returns." The episode's title references the super-speed capacity of the new threat of this mostly done-in-one story (though it gets a sequel in Season Three). But metaphorically, it's as if the writers of the program suddenly got tired of all the low-level messing around that dominated the latter half of Season 2, and sought to "accelerate" the deeper meanings of the SMALLVILLE mythos.
In its more routine moments, SMALLVILLE was like many soap operas, concerned only with the barriers its characters built up between one another, thus generating secrets that cause conflict. But in the show's better moments, the show was able to show the vulnerabilities that generated the barriers in the first place. The first episode, "Pilot," establishes the dark secret of Clark Kent's non-human status, and the universe seems to respond to his interest in Earth-human Lana Lang by leading her to wear a kryptonite necklace, as if to say, "hands off; you have no business with this Earth-girl, not least because your advent to this planet caused the death of her parents." The kryptonite touch-me-not goes away in due course, but Clark and Kent still can't seem to connect, though Clark's relentless penchant for "saving" her incites the jealousy of Chloe, the other Earth-girl in Clark's life. But not that much in that scenario speaks to Lana's own secrets.
"Accelerate" starts off with Lana showing a b&w horror movie in some part of her bistro, the Talon, to a bunch of similarly-aged patrons. This allows for yet another almost-romantic moment between Clark and Lana, which of course goes nowhere. Later, she's alone cleaning up the theater-area, when the film projector suddenly activates, and plays a home-movie showing two little girls at play. Lana instantly recognizes that one of the girls is herself as a child, while the other is her childhood friend Emily Dinsmore, who tragically perished roughly ten years ago. Even freakier, a little girl who looks just like ten-year-old Emily shows up and asks Lana to be her friend. Then she disappears.
While Lana is busy freaking out, Lex is busy making wedding plans, though Doctor Helen is mysteriously absent. But Lionel is still mooching around, and Lex wonders if his dear old dad has some other business in Smallville than his stated aims. At least one iron in Lionel's fire is to follow up on a project he's had going on with one of his former Luthorcorp employees, Pete Dinsmore (Neil Flynn of SCRUBS and THE MIDDLE fame).
Clark being Clark, he instantly has total faith in Lana's testimony of seeing a ghost, and he investigates the story of Emily's demise. It seems that the two little girls had a habit of playing near a perilous river (while singing that Golden Black Plague Oldie, "Ashes, ashes, we all fall down"), and Lana fell into the river. Emily selflessly followed her, and managed to encourage Lana to swim to safety, but lost her own life. Clark then suggests that if some apparition has been popping up, they should talk to Emily's father in the neighboring town of Granville. (Perhaps it's "grand" rather than "small" because Lionel's got such grand plans working sub rosa.)
Pete isn't especially welcoming to Clark or to Lana ("Look at you; all grown up"). He denies the existence of a ghost-girl, but a few scenes later, we see him in another location-- the run-down home where Pete lived formerly with his daughter and his never-seen-or-named wife. He confers with Little Emily, who doesn't understand why things have changed so much, and complains about being kept in some confinement. When Pete tries to capture Emily, she apparently impales him with the shaft of a rotary fan.
Someone finds Pete and gets him to the hospital. I'm not sure why Lex happens to be at this place of healing when Pete's admitted-- after all, Doctor Helen is still absent-- but he encounters his dad trying to visit the unconscious Luthorcorp employee. Lex wanders into Pete's room but unlike Lionel, Lex gets a visitation from Emily, who wouldn't let Lionel see her because "he's a bad man." Emily promptly disappears.
Clark sees Emily too, and for what may be the first time in all cinema, gets to view a speedster in "frozen time." Clark talks Lana into accompanying him as they break into Pete Dinsmore's Granville home. They don't find Emily, but they find her precursors in a secret lab, and realize that Emily is the age-accelerated clone of the dead child, whom Dinsmore fostered as a substitute for his loss. Clark also has a bad moment when he's fleetingly exposed to liquified "meteor rocks," which are presumably how Dinsmore was able to give the clone super-powers. Thus we finally get some payoff as to why Lionel has been amassing supplies of kryptonite in episodes like "Insurgence" and "Witness." Clark and Lana report their findings to the police, but Sheriff Adams attests that by the time her people made the scene, persons unknown (but certainly employed by Lionel) scrubbed the house clean of all its mad science. The sheriff uncharacteristically gives the teens a pass on breaking and entering. Many later episodes will depict further experiments in creating superhumans-- a calculated substitute for the old "freak of the week" formula-- so in this sense "Accelerate" is a pivotal story in the mythos.
Once Lana understands that Clone-Emily is not a spirit, she wants to reach out to the confused child-- though she doesn't know that this Emily has a murderous streak. She meets Emily at the river, and reveals that she Lana has suffered "survivor's guilt" for years because Emily died and Lana didn't. Emily then tries to correct that oversight by pushing Lana into the river. but her guardian angel is there to save her once more.
Before the final dramatic payoff, Lionel reveals that he has a more pressing reason for returning to Smallville than conferring with Dinsmore. He's managed to finagle control of the Kawatchie Caves out of Lex's hands and into his own, and so the threat to Clark's secret is placed in yet greater peril.
Lana confesses that she not only suffers survivors' guilt from Emily's death (to say nothing of having lost her parents later on), she feels utterly unworthy of being saved. Clark reassures her and the two have yet another heartfelt moment that still doesn't lead to a romantic clinch. Two more scenes wrap up the episode. Lionel tells Dinsmore that he'll no longer have access to the cloning-project, and then he tries to win over Emily, once more confined in some unknown location, by giving her a bunny rabbit. Emily has only one more appearance in the series, but she "accelerates" in age so as to lose all semblance to Lana's original playmate.
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