Lesbian kisses between straight characters generally don’t occur on television until sweeps periods, but Smallville jumped the gun this week when Lana Lang and a female villain-of-the-week shared a deadly kiss. Although this episode, titled "Facade," was by no means as outdated and exploitative as Smallville's previous lesbian exploitation attempt (a second-season episode titled “Visage” which featured a psycho-killer lesbian), it’s difficult to say that “Facade” represents progress.

“Facade,” the third episode of the fourth season of the WB’s popular teen drama, was written by Holly Harold, one of Smallville’s few female writers, and centers on the evils of plastic surgery. It opens with a flashback scene set during Clark Kent's (Tom Welling) freshman year at Smallville High, as he witnesses the football team making fun of a girl with pronounced acne. Bursting into tears, the girl runs away from their taunting shouts of “Scabby Abby,” and the episode fast-forwards three years to the present time. Abigail Pine (played by Brianna Lynn Brown) is about to undergo plastic surgery, and her mother, a brittle blonde with an obsession for perfect features, is the doctor in charge. As a glowing green shell with needles poking out of it descends onto Abigail, who is strapped down to an operating table, her mother insists, “Everyone will love you when they see the real you, the one that’s been inside you all along.”

When the new-and-improved Abigail returns to school, she’s no longer “Scabby Abby”; instead she looks like a cookie-cutter blonde beauty queen. She immediately catches the eye of football player Brett, who lures her into the boys’ locker room shower with some Teutonic grunting and much fondling of her surgically sculpted chin. But when they kiss, Abigail passes something onto Brett that makes him go crazy. He hallucinates that his face is melting off and runs madly into the parking lot, straight into a car driven by the young Lois Lane (Erica Durance).

Meanwhile, the perfectly perky Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) has returned to Smallville from her trip to Paris, where she met the handsome football star Jason Teague (Jensen Ackles). Jason can’t bear to be parted from Lana, so he has moved to Smallville and taken a job as the high school’s assistant football coach. This means they can be together—but only in secret (teachers obviously can’t date students). On her way back from a secret assignation with the assistant coach, Lana sees Abigail and Brett getting close in the hallway, and after she finds out that Brett has been hospitalized, she asks Abigail about his mysterious behavior.

Freaked out that Lana will somehow link Brett’s accident to her evil smooching, Abigail tells her mother, who orders her to take Lana down before she has a chance to destroy her operation. Abigail finds Lana back in the high school drama room, where she is sitting blindfolded, surrounded by costumes and glittering lights, waiting for a birthday present that Jason is about to bring to her. Abigail kisses Lana on the lips, and Lana briefly responds before she realizes that it’s not Jason. When she pulls off her blindfold and sees Abigail, both girls look disgusted and shocked. Abigail apologizes, but it’s too late—Lana begins to go crazy, and when she looks in the mirror she sees her face rotting off.

It turns out that Abigail’s plastic surgery increased her serotonin to unsafe levels, and whenever she kisses anyone, she transmits that serotonin to them. This causes them to hallucinate that their faces are melting off. At the end of the episode, after Lois and Clark have saved the day, a quick wrap-up scene explains that Abigail’s mom has been locked into a psych ward, and Abigail is fine and will be returning to school next week.

In comparison to the crazy lesbian stalker in Season Two's “Visage," “Facade” is a model of good behavior: Abigail doesn’t have an obsession, lesbian or otherwise, with Lana; it’s her evil mother who bullies her into doing the bad deed. And “Facade” is clearly a less exploitative episode than “Visage,” if only because at the end of the episode it doesn’t appear as though Abigail’s classmates are condemning her for kissing Lana (in fact it’s not clear that anyone knows they kissed at all).

But there is no avoiding the fact that both Abigail and Lana look disgusted by their kiss. Abigail might have been having feelings of remorse about driving her friend crazy, and Lana’s reaction might have been one of shock (especially since she was expecting her boyfriend), but viewers get to see two young actresses looking freaked out by the fact that they just kissed another girl.

Lana’s psychotic hallucinations about her face melting off fall in line with the overall story, which is a morality tale about the dangers of wanting to fit in too badly (via plastic surgery, our society’s fairy godmother). But the fact that her hallucinations come immediately after her kiss with Abigail also suggests that her rotting features are a punishment for kissing a girl—especially because Lana appears to lean into the kiss before she realizes she isn’t kissing Jason.

The problem with the kissing goes beyond the metaphorical damnation of lesbianism, however. The WB’s advertising for “Facade” prominently featured the kiss between Abigail and Lana, titillating viewers with the tagline “A town’s obsession with beauty has seductive side-effects.” This clearly exploits lesbianism for ratings, and while everybody does it (although usually during sweeps months), that doesn’t make it acceptable.

Given the negative consequences of the kiss and disgusted reactions of the two girls, this scene doesn’t exactly build up any sense of gay pride—far from it. That would still be okay, if there were ever any actual lesbian characters on the show to offer alternate (read: more positive) portrayals. But while sinister lesbian activity is acceptable fare for Smallville, lesbian affection borne of any kinder, gentler motives—like, say, genuine attraction between women—is apparently off-limits.

At the same time, “Facade” demonstrated that, despite a sometimes saccharine, family-values feel (it is, after all, about Superman), Smallville has several great female characters, particularly the ass-kicking Lois Lane (who ends up saving Clark in this episode) and her spirited cousin, Chloe (Allison Mack). Let’s hope that in the future, Smallville’s producers focus on these girls, rather than dredging up tired old lesbian clichés that only underline homophobic stereotypes.