somebody save me. i don't care how you do it.

i realize most of you are on the periphery of my 'smallville' binge, a dramatic three week adventure that has taken me from the cratered cornfields of smalltown kansas to the mean streets of bigtown kansas.  i've consumed two seasons of highly stylized schlock, and survived not only to tell the tale but to be horribly crippled by withdrawal symptoms. 
 
see, the beauty of 'smallville' is not that sci-fi is cool for teenagers, or that the cast is peopled by attractive human beings.  these things increase the show's appeal for me as a nerd-ridden adult, true.  but the genius is in the design.  the characters in 'smallville,' intrepid teenagers the lot of them, solve mysteries, fall in love, break each others hearts, drink a good deal of coffee, stay up late at night, write newspapers, etc.  they all live these idealized adult lives, without sacrificing any of the awkward teenage glamour.  the boxcar children come of age.  they are half us now, half us then.
 
i understand that the inclination to draw parallels to 'buffy' is strong.  but 'buffy' balked, systematically eliminating the adult characters one by one, effacing the 'teenage-ness' from the main characters and leaving us with a sad passion play about the pitfalls of being unique.  those adults, no matter how complicit with adolescent adventuring, establish the frame of reference, the limits of the universe.  clark can run faster than the speed of sound, but he can't flagrantly defy his father.  these stories are too fantastic and have too much potential to become global in scope if narrative cages aren't built around them.  remember the severe limitations imposed on the early 'x-files' story lines, when the writers refused to even wink at the audience when alien after alien turned out to be a fake.  when the show broke the fetters of the small screen for the over-produced gloss of the big one, so too did it gallop free of the very restraints that made it interesting and real.  'buffy's' appeal was never as great as 'the x-files'', but it too erected a literal monument to the absurd and took everyone over the edge with it.
 
when it comes right down to it, science fiction is only limited by the human elements at the core of the narrative.  we can go as far as our human heroes take us.  i'm not saying 'smallville' is crowded with good characters; rather, it's crowded with the right characters, whirling in a gravitational ballet that is more space opera than soap opera.  i'm lucky enough to be watching this show for the right reasons.