Contrasting wonderfully with the previous low-key “school bully” episode of Superboy comes The Alien Solution, the ninth episode and the first to fully acknowledge the existence of aliens other than Superboy.  Starring John Haymes Newton as Clark Kent / Superboy, Stacy Haiduk as Lana Lang, and Jim Calvert as T.J.White, The Alien Solution signals the first “step up” from the High School premise of the series.

In space, an alien entity is spying on Earth in general and Superboy in particular. (A no-prize for telling me where the “Lana falling out of the sky” scenes come from!)

Seeing Superboy rescue Lana from a falling helicopter, the alien activates, animates, and integrates a frozen figure –

– an alien warrior, who vows to challenge, fight, and beat Superboy.

On Earth, Clark and Lana are hanging out at the arcade before their next class. Outside, a carelessly thrown ball heads towards Lana.

Clark catches it, leading to an awkward moment between friends.

Clark heads off to finish an assignment while Lana fetches her books for her next class. Out in space, a transporter beam stretches out from a distant asteroid spacecraft.

The alien warrior lands, and takes Lana captive. Unfortunately, other students just think it’s a prank.

Clark chills out, then receives a phonecall from T.J. to explain why Jim Calvert isn’t in this week’s episode.

The other students realise that it isn’t a prank but, when they try to help, they get zapped. Lana asks what the strange creature wants. He wants Superboy, and he’s observed that Superboy always comes with Lana is in danger.

Clark notices a disturbance as students run passed his window. One of them tells him about the strange creature and Lana.

Superboy races to Lana’s side and the alien tells him that he’s beaten the best that many worlds have to offer, and now he’s here to challenge the best that Earth has. Superboy is his greatest challenge.

The alien fires his weapon, and Superboy is catapulted into a power transformer.

Seeing the carnage, Lana attacks the alien who just tosses her aside.

Superboy extracts himself from the high velocity, but then he sees Lana’s prone body.

Seeking revenge, Superboy leaps back into the fight.

This fight isn’t as easy to win as all those human thieves and rigged basketball games.

Superboy manages to break the alien’s weapon… and then defeats him.

Medics arrive but find no pulse from either the alien or Lana. The mortified Superboy cradles Lana, but then his superhearing picks up a faint heartbeat.

While directing the medics, Superboy fails to notice the alien entity leave the warrior and hide inside Lana.

At the hospital, Clark is told that, whatever the warrior was, he was dead long before the fight with Superboy.

Clark pours out his heart to the unconscious Lana, until she awakes suddenly with a strange voice.

The alien voice threatens to kill Lana if Superboy doesn’t agree to meet the challenge according to the alien’s rules.

Clark agrees, and he follows the alien entity out into space.

They head towards the awaiting asteroid spaceship. The entity explains that it inhabits the dead body of the best fighter from a world before using that warrior to fight the best warrior of the next world. Each time, the body it takes is better than the last. Now it wants to fight and defeat Superboy and have the ultimate body with which to conquer others.

Superboy says that he doesn’t fight to kill, but the entity forces his hand by animating and inhabiting each of the three remaining warriors. Before the process is complete, Superboy uses his heat vision to destroy the three bodies.

Enraged, the entity heads back to Earth to kill that which Superboy loves – Lana! Superboy follows at super-speed…

…he overtakes the alien entity and gets to Lana ahead of it.

The entity attempts to inhabit Lana again, but Superboy uses his superbreath to suck the entity out of the air.

He secures the entity in a compressed air bottle, before resuming his identity as Clark Kent.

Lana wakes up and asks what happened to the warrior. Clark tells her all he can but is a little embarrassed when she tells him that she had a dream about Clark being Superboy.

Later, at the Science Department, Clark finds a more permanent home for the alien entity.

The Alien Solution is the first episode of Superboy to break away from the “80s formula” style of episodes.  Without any build up, explanation, or pretext, we’re suddenly facing an alien entity and we see four different alien species.  No one questions this, least of all Superboy.  There’s no spending several Smallville-like weeks having Clark figuring out flying in space.  He just does it, as though he’s always done it.

In the most important respect, this instantly lifts the series high above many other television superhero TV series by setting the bar for potential future stories much higher.  On a lesser aspect, though, it is hard to quantify a series that has Superboy spending time refereeing a basketball game to thwart a school bully (Lex) one minute, and then he’s up in space battling alien beings the next.  The two episodes couldn’t be further apart.

Okay, so there’s not much of a story here and the actual plot is straight out of “The Dummies Guide to Cliches”, but that isn’t the point.  The point is that this series is no longer the “twee” near-camp guy-in-suit 80s-trapped superhero series.  Superboy has taken the first step on the long road that will take it to television superhero excellence.

A couple of points of note in this episode.  The first is that Lana gets to kiss both Superboy and Clark, and Clark pours out his heart to the unconscious Lana in the hospital.  This develops the characters a little while giving us some background to Lana & Clark’s friendship back in Smallville (something that comes back in the next episode).  The second is that the “alien in the bottle” is a Chekhov’s gun.  It won’t remain frozen forever (it’s a pretty poor conceit that the alien entity could be trapped in a bottle anyway, but best not to question that one).