The episode jumps forward twelve years to when Clark (Tom Welling) is trying to find his identity. He is unable to handle being told of his alien origins and runs away from home. Although he is attracted to Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk), he cannot get close to her without falling over in pain because she wears a necklace made of meteor rock (kryptonite), which is a radioactive fragment of Clark's destroyed homeworld. This was a concept Gough and Millar devised to establish a reason for Clark's clumsiness. In other media, it is usually portrayed as an act he puts on to deceive people of his true identity. But Clark and Lana do share an intimate moment at a cemetery, where Lana is visiting the grave of her parents. In such scenes, Gough and Millar created a theme of loneliness through the life stories of Clark and Lana. Lana's boyfriend, Whitney Fordman (Eric Johnson), becomes jealous of Clark and Lana's friendship and ties Clark to a scarecrow pole, using Lana's necklace, indirectly, to subdue Clark. This image of Clark, in just his underwear and a red "S" painted on his chest, stretches back to Gough and Millar's foundation for the series, which was about taking Clark down to the basic elements of the Superman character.