Behind Luka, we see a familiar, trench-coated heavy. Luka rolls his eyes in his head a bit to let us know he's thinking about something. He turns and, oh no! It's BeatDead Dad! Luka takes off running as Lana looks on after him. He ends up in the back alley of The Talon. Suspense music. BeatDead Dad gives chase. As he does, a big trash truck is pulling up.

Inside. Clark is looking for Luka. Lana, instead of actually helping, comes up and tells Clark that Luka ran out the back and looked scared. Clark goes to look for him.

Luka is hiding in a trash bin where BeatDead Dad is looking. Clark comes out calling and BeatDead Dad makes a slip away so as not to be noticed. But now Luka has bigger problems -- the trash truck is picking up his hiding bin! You can probably guess the rest. Trash pickup! Scared kid! Trash compactor! Fear! A re-enactment of the trash compactor scene in Star Wars minus a few aliens and droids. Clark does his X-ray vision and sees a boy skeleton in the trash truck. He zips over, pulls some hydraulic hoses to stop the mechanism and zips to the back. As Luka cowers, the steel is torn open, showing Clark's face haloed by a ridiculous yellow light. It's Jesus! Holy Mackerel! "You're safe now," Clark says, as huge, triumphant music plays, thus fulfilling the foreshadowing of the earlier comic book panel.

Commercials. Did you know Carrot Top can only be on the beach at night because otherwise he'll burst into flames from the sunlight?

Kent Farm at night. You know the nighttime is the right time for Lex to show up and pay Clark a visit in the barn. Clark is doing something with some mini-weights at a florescently lit worktable. "Clark! Where's your young sidekick?" Lex asks as he moseys in. Clark says the kid is sleeping. Lex mentions, while holding what looks like the same coffee cup from that afternoon, that Luka thinks Clark is his older brother. Jealous? Clark mopes about the kid leaving the next day and then asks for some commiseration from Lex on what it's like to be an only child, and actually uses the word "sibling." Close-up on Lex. "I had one," Lex says smoothly. The Hell? This is the first we've heard of this. Shocker! Lex explains that when he was eleven, his mother got pregnant and that it was a total surprise. Huh. I thought she died when Lex was even younger than that. Lex says that his dad was happier than he'd ever seen him and the day "Julian" was born, Lex felt like he was part of a real family. That is until Lex's mom woke up the day of the child's baptism and found he'd stopped breathing in his crib. Lex says his mother was never the same (did she commit suicide?) and that his father became more distant, since Julian was his chance to have a son he could truly love. Clark says he's sorry. "It's in the past, Clark," says Lex, unconvincingly. "We would have ended up hating each other anyway. My father would have seen to that." Lex says he didn't come over to hash out his sad past: he came over for some good lovin'. And to tell Clark that Papa Luthor offered him a job in Metropolis. Clark looks pleased, then perplexed. He asks if Lex told Luka about that. Nope. As he puts his tools away (no foreplay fun, apparently), Clark tells Lex that the offer is what he's wanted. Only Lex says it's what he used to want. In those lonely days before Clark. Lex says he's a different person in Metropolis and around his father. He's got a day to decide. Clark, wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt with a red shirt under it so he gets the red-collar effect, says that if anyone can choose who he wants to be, it's Lex.