Lois waits at the farm for a woman from the VR Agency to answer the phone. Her call is on hold and you know how long that takes. When the call is finally answered, Lois threatens her, after she calls her huffy, "stop giving me the runaround bitch, or I will come for you." There's no record of Clark Kent (Tom Welling.) Clark returns and begins to pick up the pieces of the glass Lois dropped, but his finger bleeds and doesn't heal. The VRA took away their powers. Oliver (Justin Hartley), Dinah/Black Canary (Alaina Huffman) were all released, just like Lois was. The VRA were waiting for them at Carter Hall's (Michael Shanks) funeral. Which explains what that pyramid object was. Lois claims she went all Erin Brokovich on them. They couldn't really remove Clark's powers could they since he's not a 'meteorite freak' and doesn't have powers in that sense.
Clark has a flash of memory with Chloe (Allison Mack) injecting him and the cover being closed over him, he thinks he was experimented on. Oliver returns and needs a drink before recalling Chloe too, throws his phone down which has her photo and shrinks into a corner. Clark goes to Watchtower and finds Dinah, they need to find who did this. They can't recall anything after Carter's funeral. That's all he was relegated to, a memory from his funeral. Dinah thinks Chloe is their only chance of getting their powers back, again if the VRA don't know what their powers are, then how could they take them. Especially since the only power Ollie has is to shoot arrows with precision. Think it was more a case of mind over matter. Oliver finds himself in a straitjacket.
Clark finds him and tells him they'll fight this. Oliver wonders how as they have no weapons. They are in his head making him believe Chloe is behind this. Clark doesn't want to give up on Chloe just yet, but deep down he probably has. Oliver says she tortured them. Cue Chloe as she walks through the wall. She wouldn't torture them. She also explains they were all caught after Carter's funeral (er how many times will that be mentioned?!) and hooked to a virtual reality world, driven by their subconscious. She's "Chloe in the sky with diamonds." A take on Lucy in the sky with diamonds, the John Lennon song, apparently written when he was high on LSD. Chloe created an avatar of herself to get to them. Their body flatlined when she tried to get them out so she had to plug them back in. Oliver must believe everything he sees isn't real. He can manipulate it and his straitjacket vanishes.
She's programmed a portal to get them out. She shoots at VRA security men, if they find her and who she's contacted they'll be killed. Oliver asks where the rabbit hole is (the portal) and calls her Alice (as in Wonderland.) Oliver trusts her with his life, which is the same as Clark last season, when Oliver and Chloe didn't trust him and were stockpiling large amounts of Kryptonite, just incase. Now Clark doesn't trust Chloe. The others see footage of Oliver and Chloe breaking out and Dinah thinks Chloe could have contacted them but doesn't want to. Which is a little silly cos Chloe will contact all of them soon enough and they won't believe her aside from Lois, who believes in Chloe. Lois and Dinah argue over Chloe, whilst she texts Clark to meet her on the roof. Which was a good way for him to get away from the cat fight.
Oliver tries to explain what Chloe told him. Clark doesn't have any abilities here. They blocked his neural pathways to see if they can remove their powers in the virtual world. If they succeed they will do it for real. Which doesn't make that much sense when you think about it, again Oliver's powers may extend from his mind, i.e. he shoots arrows etc cos he thinks of it, but Dinah has her 'screeching' powers and again that's not really an extension of her mind, it's what she can physically do. They're just being led to believe they don't have powers. Chloe can get Clark out if he believes everything he's seeing is fake. They have to jump to get back int the real world. But instead Clark prefers to waste time on questions. He wants to trust her but...Chloe and Oliver jump.
Oliver is released in reality and they kiss. Flagg (Tim Whittall) holds a gun on him, "keep your shirt on Queen." Oliver says he'll take care of the ladies. Flagg tells them all the VRA are trained killers. Chloe needs to get five more out, but we don't see the others, as they're not really there. Chloe goes back for Dinah and tells her she's "caught in a virtual world." Dinah believes Chloe is a traitor. They fight and Avatar Action woman Chloe goes into full-on fight mode. Watch out for Chloe's boots in the chick fight scene, they're flatter. Dinah comes into reality and apologizes to Chloe. She has 17 minutes to get Clark out from the "Pixar postcard." They need him to fight the others, but they appeared to do just fine without him.
Chloe tells him Clark lost trust in her, cos, finishes Oliver, she left them. Clark needs a pep talk from Lois, a lot of that lately. He should trust Lois if he doesn't trust Chloe. Chloe and Clark have been through plenty of battles together so this should just be another day to them. Clark doesn't know her anymore and still goes on about Chloe not telling him why she left. Lois says she's always been there for Clark, he's known Chloe the longest: the Torch, the Summers at the lake, Watchtower. Lois: "...the hardest thing ever is is to trust someone enough to let them have their secrets." Meaning Clark not telling anyone his secret. Clark's heart is saying the opposite and his heart is usually right. Oliver and Chloe jumped cos it's a real portal, he has to believe for himself.
Chloe sits at the computer but she didn't hear or see Trotter (Lori Ann Triolo) sneak up in the reflection and is knocked out. They use Chloe's avatar in an attempt to trick Clark and Lois, but didn't reckon on Lois knowing her cousin! At least I got my question answered about Trotter being on the trot/loose (bad joke) last episode. Chloe asks if Clark is really going to let Lois jump. Lois tells her she's not real and whacks her. Flagg and Oliver take down the VRA. Deadshot (Bradley Stryker) saves Chloe as does Oliver. Dinah, as the Canary screeches at Trotter. Plenty of Chloe's avatars appear whilst Clark still contemplates jumping. Chloe knows he will never jump, he's the most reluctant to accept his abnormality. If he takes a leap and won't defy the rules of this world and it'll kill him. Lois once again has to talk him round.
Clarkie this is getting to be a bit of a habit with you, since when can he no longer think and decide for himself. He was doing that a long time before he met Lois. He needs to trust himself like when he told her his secret. "Close your eyes and ears and take the leap of faith...I believe in you." We get a teaser of what Clark will really eventually do and fly. Well Lois got to the portal easily she didn't have to jump.
Chloe looks at their old photo with Pete and one with Clark and Lois as Homecoming King and Queen. He tells her it wasn't the same without her. It was good she wasn't here when Trotter took them or she couldn't get them out. Chloe tells him the helmet warned her. When she found out Flagg wanted ro kill the General ( episode Abandoned) she gave him a choice of reporting to her or reporting him to the government. "Every Frankenstein has a heart," referring to the Suicide Squad. Chloe had her suspicions about Clark back then, but still carried on. "Their lies are there to protect you." It's not trust if you have to explain themselves. Clark fears it's hard to do that. She'll never give up.
Trotter and her men are sent to a "virtual venom" world of their own. Lois asks Chloe to be her maid of honour. Oliver gives her flowers. It's a long time she got those. Oliver stopped looking for her when she went away cos it's what she wanted. That he trusted her means a lot to Chloe. She wanted to call but the helmet warned her to stay away. She didn't trust herself to leave if he was near her. Clark looks at Carter's book and finds a photo of him inside, so we don't forget what he looks like, ha. He's been thinking a lot about him. Lois thinks he'd be proud of Clark. Clark shut his eyes and ears to the outside world to figure out what's true. Lois got him to believe and fly...in cyberspace. Clark: Who knows one day we may get to fly in the real world." She believes he can do the impossible.
Lois doesn't recall being zapped after she saw the object or even that she saw the object in the last episode, or perhaps someone forget to write that in. A bit of an anti-climactic episode . Thought it could have been done much better maybe that's just me and my high expectations, and found an alternative way to bring Chloe back. Clark not trusting Chloe when she's the only one he's ever trusted. So her "betrayal" as he believed it was would hurt him more than the others. She left without telling him anything and so didn't trust him, though she was protecting him. Oh come on the entire scenario Clark found himself in had to be fake, from what we've seen of the VRA, the government, Trotter, would never release the vigilantes after they were caught. What was happening to them in the real world of virtual reality is what would happen anyway, Chloe told them as much. It was naive, particularly of Clark to believe they were suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress.
Apparently Chloe had more than five other vigilantes left to release, unless she had gotten to the remainder who attended Carter's funeral (now I'm saying it!) first and released them, but they would have stuck around to help, had they been in the episode actually, save for the budget required to get the actors back. At the funeral were meant to be Zatanna, AC, Impulse, Stargirl, The Flash, as well as Clark and Lois and Lois wasn't released yet either, so she should have said six; as far as we know only Oliver and Dinah were released by her. Some mention that Cyborg was also there, oh who knows, we couldn't really see them anyway. Others disputed whether it was Zatanna or Mera, but Mera isn't the type to wear fishnets. (Oh unintended pun there!)
Chloe referencing plenty of films you'd think it was an episode of NCIS, ha. The Wizard of Oz (1939), Oliver mentions Alice in Wonderland, book and movie, as well as referring to Narnia, from The Chronicles of Narnia. The closest one to this episode Chloe mentioned was The Truman Show; where a man growing up in a town, which wasn't real, had his life aired as a reality show to viewers.
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