It's A Small, Small...ville?

I know the show would never be taken for Shakespeare, but I really hate reading the TWoP recaplets of Smallville this season and feeling, every time, as though I've dodged a bullet by not turning on my TV.

I had the advantage (if that's the word) of watching the first five seasons of this show in about three months' time, which tends to give one a definite perspective on how Smallville has declined in quality. This season, they've introduced an Illuminati-esque secret society. Here's my conspiracy theory:

A few years ago, a number of writers, network executives and producers decided to test the idea that all you really need for a show is ideas, not development. To get people hooked at first, of course, they made it about something recognizable: Superman. They wrote a few decent episodes to give it a nice fan base, and when they had enough test subjects in place, the experiment began:

--Endless embryonic attempts to develop Lana's character. As a word-nerd myself, I was always going to identify more strongly with Chloe, but I can think of many, many times they started to tell us something interesting about Lana and...just stopped. Take her sudden martial arts skills in season 2: laughable that after one session with Lex she can defeat an assailant, but they could have kept that up. They could have shown her taking a more active role (when not possessed) in that whole witch thing back in season 4. They could have, for the love of god, spent more than 5 minutes indicating what she wants to do with her life, since she hardly touches a pencil onscreen before deciding to major in art in college.

--Constantly going around on the whole man vs. (S)superman thing with Clark. We get it; he's afraid of becoming a Kryptonian overlord on earth. But I'm pretty sure that would have made season 1 Clark more determined to use his powers in his own way, while current Clark is just hanging around on the farm till trouble knocks on his door (Wait, what am I saying? NO ONE on this show knocks on doors!).

--Lex not really being evil. Onscreen, we see him being incompetent occasionally, or misguided (he was making those supersoldiers because he was afraid of an alien invasion, a fear not really all that unfounded since, you know, he saw aliens invade). But until recently, very little true evil has come out of Lex. The show has managed the interesting feat of making BAD THINGS LEX EFFING LUTHOR DOES seem vaguely out of character. Yeesh.

I could go on; many people do, more eloquently, on various forums. But the fact that I feel a little guilty about not watching is proof enough that the vast conspiracy has worked; that you can feed people a string of neat ideas in place of a plot and still keep them tuning in.