And we made it back! Can you believe it? The Pope didn't make it past hiatus, but we sure did, beeyatches! Woooo!

(Massive lightning strike.) Ow. Sorry, Papa Juan Pablo II.

We open the first new episode in a while at LuthorCorp headquarters. At least that's what the askew, yet still phallic monolith outside says. Inside, Lex Luthor, goddamned sexy man about town (at least he was before Season Four), is staring at a very large green jewel held by some steel machinery. I'd make a comparison between Lex and steel machinery, but that would be redundant. Lex asks a Dr. Sinclair if he's sure he's fixed the problem. Lex's hand squeaks against some glass as he walks away from the jewel. The glass is happy. "Absolutely, Mr. Luthor," says Sinclair. You take the pill an hour before sex and make sure you don't let the farmboy go home for 36 hours. Sinclair blah blahs about test results and thermal variance. Hey, thermal variance this, egghead. We want Lex! And we want him now! Now Sinclair's talking about separation impurity. Is that like when Brad got busy with Angelina? Lex throws up his hands in annoyance. "Six months of this and all you had to do was turn up the heat?" he asks. You should have just had Lex enter the room! Sinclair, argumentative since he found out as a child that his name was "Sinclair," sputters that this shit ain't exactly easy, dickweed, and that meteor rocks are hard to deal with. They're the in-laws of the geological world. (Except mine. My in-laws rock.) Sinclair says he had trouble figuring out the right temperature. Lex says that if this thing, whatever it is, works, he'll leave a permanent mark on the world. Not like when he tried to piss on the world's snow to spell out his name. This one will stick, dammit! Sinclair notes that it won't hurt Lex's bank account either. Mind your own beeswax, Sinclair. The ironically sin-less Sinclair hands Lex a pair of safety goggles by Ray Ban. These goggles are sweet. All scientists should look this cool. Sinclair initiates a "thermal sequence." The voice of a woman who sounds like she had to skip class at junior college to record her lines informs us that, yes, things are about to get thermal up in here. A blue laser shoots at the large green rock. Sinclair ups the temperature to 70 percent. "Come on, come on," Lex chants. Is there a midget below frame that we're not seeing? Lex is very intent here. Sinclair opens up some sample tray with, what, like jalapeño poppers and Bagel Bites? They're getting irradiated and turning into weird black spores. The temperature climbs to 90 percent and Sinclair seems pretty pleased with himself. Pride goeth, bitch. Pride goeth. Buffy the Voice-over Slayer says that there's some irregularity in the radiated seeds. Well, of course there is. Sinclair boldly pumps things up to 95 percent. You crazy Sinclair, you! Sinclair cranks to 98. He says the power objective has been attained. It's just a number, really. It could have gone to 111 if he'd wanted it to.