Smallville

How did the two evil Ians get Chloe and Lana to the dam from the school? Would no one have noticed two of the same person dragging two kicking and screaming girls from the high school?

Trivia: Lex Luthor's licence plate is "LEX XIV."

Trivia: First time we see that Clark has his own cell phone, which will become an important plot point in many future episodes.

Near the start of the episode, Clark and Pete are walking down a hall when someone bumps into them. Just before that, you can see Clark's mouth moving but nothing coming out.

We see Smallville's local super-sized water-project dam here. Several natives of Kansas have posted occasionally and said they've never seen one in all their time there. No doubt Vancouver has several, however... :)

Clark just walks into Chloe's house. No knock, no invitation. He's not ever this rude otherwise.

Why do Pete and Clark try to "trap" Ian into revealing himself in two places at the same time? They already believe there's two of him, and...well, it's Smallville. They know weird stuff happens - do they really need to confirm for themselves there are two Ians? Seems like they would be trying to prove two Ians to Chloe and Lana, or to the authorities. Have the girls nearby, take time-stamped pictures, have the police nearby, something.

About the title, the word "dichotic" implies the number two and rhymes with "psychotic". 'Dichotic' (Webster's Ninth ed.) refers only to the discrepancy in how each of a person's ears perceives different aspects of sound. One who is dichotomous such as Ian is not "dichotic." If you break it down in Greek it makes a little more sense, but that seems really, really obscure. (although folks keep sending us URLs saying what "dichotomous" means for some reason...)

When Ian locks himself in the storage room to duplicate anyone could have seen him because the door had a window.

When Clark was setting the trap to find out if there were two Ians, how did he get the number of Ian's pager?

When Pete called Clark on his cell, it happened way too fast. Clark answered the phone too quickly. The phone didn't have time to ring. Right after Pete dialed the number the phone got answered too quickly.

So what happened to Frankle's body? It probably wasn't destroyed in the fire. So is the surviving Ian doing time for the crime? I hear that over on CSI they can do amazing things with forensic science and DNA sampling and all. And wouldn't there have been a ton of hoopla? The people of Smallville seem to take murders pretty casually.

So is Ian a krypto-mutant or what? It's like they're not even trying to explain the presence of super-human types these days. It would have been nice, since we're not told if there's any limitation on Ian's powers or anything. Could he have created a dozen of himself? A hundred?

Ian tries to kill Lana and Chloe, both of which didn't know his secret - maybe they were on their way to figuring it out, but for the most part they thought that he was just cheating on them. But he doesn't try at all to kill Pete and Clark, who do know his secret, and he knows that they do because Clark accused him of trying to kill them! In fact, he's polite to Pete when he asks him if he knows where Lana is! That doesn't make any sense. (editor's note - Clark did think it was a trap for him, and Ian did try to kill Pete and Clark initially at the shop lab and possibly witness Clark display superspeed. Still, this makes Ian's politeness to Pete at The Talon later even more puzzling. Maybe he's of two minds...? :) )

Lucky break, no one besides Clark notices that Ian had double-booked classes. Even the people looking at his application don't bother to call the school to straighten out the mixup, which would've raised a lot of awkward questions for Ian, especially with the new tough principal.

So what happens to the Ian at the dam that Clark throws? And..what happens to the third Ian? There were two at the beginning. Then later we see Ian grow another clone. So what happened to the second one from the beginning? For that matter, if Ian already had a second version of himself running around doing his studies and such, why did he need to clone again at all? None of this is explained on-screen. There is a deleted scene on the DVD that shows Ian at the bottom of the dam dying and the third one shows up there and also dies at the same time saying "We were born as one... and that's how we'll die."

Ian looks as astonished at the egregious violations of the laws of physics as we in the audience are. Clark falls past Chloe - objects fall at the same speed barring things like skydiving techniques, propulsion, and wind resistance that don't apply here to the relatively short distance involved. And Clark simply catches Chloe falling at accelerated speeds without trying to cushion her or anything - basically she'd end up with a lot of broken bones at the very least. (some folks thought this was an unconscious manifestion of Clark's flying ability like in "Vortex," but would Clark really count on it manifesting so that he abandons Lana and hopes he can catch Chloe in time? It doesn't appear to work that way later in "Insurgence." Others noted, "Well, it's a superdoing show - it doesn't have to be realistic." but that seems to contradict what the writers try to bring to show reality-wise)

Ian says Chloe told him Clark dumped her a day after the spring formal. In that episode they kinda-sorta agreed to just be friends and Chloe pushed for it quite a bit. Is Ian exaggerating things or is Chloe lying, misremembering, or just putting some personal bias on what she's saying? This isn't made clear here but Clark acts as if it's a fact.