MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*
Like "Extinction," "Slumber" is mostly a fill-in episode, though it leads into a new Lex arc. Said arc involves not only an attempt to rob Lex of his sanity but takes the conflict between Lex and Lionel to a new level.
But this is a Clark-centric episode, with only minimal details about his relationship with his parents (whose farm gets bailed out thanks to Lex's beneficence) or with his gal-pals. He dreams that he's enjoying a skinny-dipping encounter with Lana at a local lake, and he goes with the dream, even though the action is out of character for Lana. He sees a strange girl who calls herself Sarah Conroy, though she has a habit of disappearing, and when he encounters her again, she's being pursued by a weird caped figure, the Traveler. Yet the most tumultuous incident in the dream takes place when Clark visits Lex at the latter's mansion. After some minor badinage, Lex shows Clark a sword reputed to be able to cut anything, and then suddenly swings it at Clark. But it's a fakeout, because Lex has learned Clark's true nature and wants to see the sword shatter on Clark's arm as the acid test of his theory. The topic of how Lex might feel about knowing Clark failed to confide in him hasn't been raised for some time, but this fantasia shows that Clark feels intensely guilty over the sin of omission.
Clark finally wakes from the dream and learns from the Kents that he's been sleeping a day and a half. Clark later finds out that he has a new neighbor in the Bolger family, but the only one living in the house is Nicholas, uncle of Sarah, while Sarah is at a hospital, lying in a coma since the car accident that took her parents' lives. Nicholas has been drugging Sarah to keep her in the coma so that he could keep control of her inheritance-- and he would've got away with it too, if some stray meteor-rocks hadn't endowed Sarah with telepathic abilities. On some level she's aware of what her uncle's doing and has cast him as the menacing figure of the Traveler. Then she messes with Clark's dreams on some instinctive level in order to attract his attention. The fantasias aren't anything symbolically deep, but there's some visceral suspense in that Clark has no powers in Sarah's dreams, and that only she can actually end the dreams so that Clark can save her from her enemy. So "Slumber" rates as a solid if unremarkable tale.
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