The scorched-Earth area where Zod laid his intergalactic symbol-turd. The soil is smoking. Lex lies in the middle, in his suit, twitching. He awakens and stands up. He breathes rapidly. "Lex?" says Papa Luthor, who just showed up. Papa asks Lex whether he feels all right. Lex says that everything feels different. Papa asks what happened, but Lex doesn't seem sure. Lex says that Papa tried to warn him about SoFine, but he didn't listen. Papa Luthor observes that Lex never has listened and that he has always wanted what was just out of his grasp. Papa says this time Lex overreached himself. Lex asks Papa whether he is there to lecture or to help. Papa says that it's too late for either: "You made a deal with the devil. He always comes to collect." With interest! Lex looks away. Papa comes and puts his hands on Lex's shoulder, but Lex brushes him aside -- and sends Papa Luthor flying like a damn rocket, right into his towncar. Papa Luthor careens right toward us, as we look from inside the car. He smashes face- and hands-first into the windshield, cracking it. His head bleeds. Papa Luthor looks pretty damn dead to me. Lex, surprised, looks down at his own hands. Cut to Papa Luthor's frozen face, stuck to the windshield. Yegads! Papa Luthor's face slides down and he rolls over. He breathes in pain. No fucking way. I don't want him to die either, but come on. That's just ridiculous. Papa, his face bloodied, looks at Lex. Lex runs very, very fast, super-zipping to his father. He asks Papa whether he is all right, and Papa mutters, "What have they...done to you...Lex? What have they turned you into?" Lex looks around and can't come up with a decent answer. So he zips away. Papa Luthor blinks. But he's alive, at least.

Lair of Lex. Lana is rifling through photos of the spaceship. We hear a whoosh. Lex is suddenly standing there. Lana goes to hug him. She says that she thought she'd never see him again. Lex tells her that he's been given a gift. Lex lets go of Lana and walks to his desk. He opens a box atop it and pulls out a fancy silver gun. Lana watches him, afraid. Lex puts the barrel of the gun against his right palm and shoots. Lana gasps in horror. If they really wanted to throw us for a loop, Warner Bros. could have insisted the gun used in this scene be the Toon Gun from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. That would have made for an awesome scene. The gun smokes. Lex stares at his hand. Lex holds it in a fist. Lana steps forward, almost crying. She opens Lex's hand. There's a flattened bullet and a ring of gunpowder around it. "There's not a scratch on it," she whimpers. Lex says that Lana needs to know the truth about him. He has a thing for fish. Tartar sauce turns him on. Lana backs away. "They've turned you into one of them," she says, frightened. "I have their abilities. But it's still me," Lex explains. He tells Lana that he'd never lie to her. Oh, well that's cool, then. Be an alien. Lana steps forward again. He asks how he could keep something like this from the person he loves most. Lana, almost crying again, just watches him with adoration. Then she moves her eyes around to think. She tells Lex that she overheard Clark and Chloe talking about trying to kill him. Lex looks away in disgust. "That's fear, Lana," he tells her. He thinks Papa Luthor has infected Clark with afeardness. "Clark can't stand the fact that I'm different now," Lex says. He says that there's a place he needs to go. Red Lobster. He starts to walk, and Lana tries to go with him, but Lex stops her. Lex puts his hands on both sides of her face, and tells her he'll always love her. Lana says that it sounds like they'll never see each other again. Oh, action movie cliché. Lex says that that's her choice. He asks her to meet him at the top of LuthorCorp plaza that night. Then he zips out of the room, leaving Lana's hair to whoosh with the wind. Wanna give us a time for that? Should she just wait a few hours? What part of the roof? Hello? Aw, crap. Lana shivers because of oncoming commercials.