Welcome back to Rewatching Smallville, my weekly dive into the iconic series that explores Clark Kent’s journey before becoming Superman. Whether you’re a long-time fan or new to the show, you’re invited to join in each Tuesday as I revisit episodes and share my thoughts and observations. Be sure to share your own memories and theories in the comments below!

There’s something deliciously absurd about a show called Smallville deciding to tackle time travel via a teen crisis hotline. It’s peak early-2000s television logic: “What if we took our most grounded concept—kids helping other kids through tough times—and made it literally save the future?” And yet, somehow, “Crisis” manages to be both completely ridiculous and genuinely compelling, which is probably the most Smallville thing imaginable.

Looking back at this episode twenty years later, it’s fascinating how “Crisis” captures Smallville at a pivotal moment in its evolution. Season 3 had already established itself as the show’s tonal pivot point—darker, more serialized, less concerned with freak-of-the-week hijinks and more invested in the mythology that would eventually consume the series. “Crisis” feels like the writers testing just how far they could push that envelope before snapping back to earth.

The Phone Call That Started It All

The episode opens with one of television’s most effective cold opens: Clark Kent, earnest farm boy turned volunteer counselor, picking up what he thinks is a routine crisis hotline call, only to hear his girlfriend apparently being murdered in the future. It’s a brilliant setup that immediately establishes stakes while playing with our expectations. We know Clark can leap tall buildings and outrun speeding bullets, but what’s he supposed to do with information from tomorrow?

The time travel mechanics here are wonderfully sloppy in the best Smallville tradition. A downed power line hits a puddle with meteor rocks, creating some kind of temporal feedback loop that allows Lana’s future distress call to reach Clark in the past. It’s not Doctor Who-level timey-wimey complexity, nor does it pretend to be. The writers wisely treat the time travel as an emotional catalyst rather than a scientific puzzle, which keeps the focus where Smallville always worked best: on character relationships and moral dilemmas.

What makes this work is how the show uses the sci-fi concept to explore very human anxieties. Clark’s desperation to save Lana taps into universal fears about losing the people we love, while the ticking clock element adds genuine urgency to what could have been just another “Adam Knight is dangerous” episode. The fact that Clark has to work within the constraints of the timeline—he can’t just tell everyone what’s going to happen—creates natural dramatic tension.

Adam Knight’s Swan Song

Speaking of Adam Knight, “Crisis” serves as Ian Somerhalder’s final bow in what had become one of Season 3’s most polarizing storylines. The Adam arc never quite worked the way it was supposed to, largely because the character felt like a plot device with abs rather than a fully realized person. But credit where it’s due: Somerhalder brings genuine desperation to his final performance, and the episode’s structure finally gives Adam clear, understandable motivation.

The revelation that Adam only has twelve hours to live without his next injection transforms him from mysterious love interest to genuinely dangerous antagonist. There’s something almost tragic about his final scenes—he’s not evil so much as he’s a dying man making increasingly desperate choices. When he collapses at the end, having realized Clark’s secret, it feels like the conclusion of a character who was always more interesting in theory than in execution.

The Adam storyline also highlights one of Season 3’s recurring themes: the corruption of innocence. Like Lex’s gradual moral descent, Adam represents what happens when desperation overrides ethics. His final warning to Clark about Lionel—”it will only be a matter of time before he discovers your secret”—feels like a dying man’s attempt at redemption, passing the torch of knowledge to someone who might actually be able to use it responsibly.

The Luthor Family Business

While Clark races to prevent Lana’s future murder, the episode’s other major storyline deals with present-day corporate intrigue as Lex finds himself framed for the Metron Labs murders. This is Smallville at its most soap opera-esque, complete with surveillance footage, planted evidence, and Lionel pulling strings from behind the scenes like some kind of bald puppet master.

What elevates this material is how it deepens the Lex-Lionel relationship. Michael Rosenbaum and John Glover have always had incredible chemistry, but “Crisis” gives them scenes that crackle with mutual manipulation and barely contained contempt. Lex’s decision to flip on his father in exchange for FBI immunity feels like a natural evolution of their relationship, while Lionel’s casual willingness to sacrifice his own son demonstrates just how far he’ll go to protect his interests.

The revelation of Lionel’s liver disease adds another layer to their dynamic. That final scene of Lionel contemplating suicide while holding a gun to his mouth is genuinely shocking, even on rewatch. It’s a moment that recontextualizes everything we’ve seen from him this season—his increasingly desperate schemes, his willingness to take bigger risks, his need to secure his legacy before time runs out.

Destiny vs. Free Will (Again)

“Crisis” marks the third time Smallville explicitly dealt with Clark’s ability to change destiny, following “Hourglass” and “Hereafter.” What’s interesting is how the show keeps returning to this theme, as if the writers are working through their own anxieties about predetermined fate versus personal agency.

The episode suggests that Clark’s intervention doesn’t actually change the future so much as fulfill it—the phone call from the future only happens because Clark is there to receive it, creating a stable time loop. It’s a clever bit of circular logic that lets the show have its cake and eat it too: Clark gets to be the hero who saves the day, but the universe maintains its cosmic balance.

But there’s something deeper at work here too. Clark’s ability to “cheat fate” reflects the show’s core optimism about choice and moral responsibility. Even when the universe seems to be conspiring against him, Clark finds a way to do the right thing. It’s a fundamentally hopeful worldview that would become increasingly important as the series grew darker in later seasons.

The 2004 Time Capsule

Watching “Crisis” in 2024, it’s impossible not to notice how perfectly it captures early-2000s television sensibilities. The episode aired during the golden age of serialized sci-fi, just months before Lost would premiere and change everything about how television handled high-concept storytelling. Shows like Buffy and Angel had already proven that genre television could tackle serious themes, while the Battlestar Galactica reboot was still months away from showing just how sophisticated sci-fi TV could become.

Smallville occupied an interesting middle ground in this landscape. It was more serialized than traditional network television but less mythology-heavy than shows like The X-Files. “Crisis” reflects this approach—it uses sci-fi concepts to drive character development rather than getting lost in the mechanics of time travel. The episode is more interested in how Clark feels about potentially losing Lana than in explaining the physics of temporal paradoxes.

The production values also feel distinctly of their time. The storm sequences have that slightly artificial quality common to early-2000s television, while the cell phone technology already feels charmingly dated. There’s something endearing about watching characters struggle with the limitations of 2004-era mobile phones, especially when those limitations are crucial to the plot.

What Worked, What Didn’t

Twenty years later, “Crisis” remains a fascinatingly uneven episode. The central time travel concept is genuinely clever, and the episode builds to a satisfying climax that pays off both the Adam Knight storyline and the ongoing Luthor family drama. The performances are generally strong, particularly from Somerhalder and Glover, and the episode successfully balances multiple plotlines without feeling overstuffed.

But the episode also suffers from some of Season 3’s recurring problems. The pacing feels rushed at times, particularly in the final act where multiple storylines have to be resolved quickly. Some of the dialogue is clunky, and the episode occasionally slides into melodrama in ways that feel more silly than dramatic.

The biggest issue is probably the same one that plagued the entire Adam Knight arc: the character never felt fully integrated into the show’s world. His relationship with Lana always seemed more plot-driven than organic, and his connection to the larger mythology felt forced. “Crisis” does its best to give Adam a satisfying conclusion, but it can’t entirely overcome the foundational problems with the character.

Looking Back with Fondness

Despite its flaws, “Crisis” represents Smallville at its most ambitious. It’s an episode that isn’t afraid to swing for the fences, even if it doesn’t always connect. The time travel concept could have been a disaster in less capable hands, but the writers ground it in emotional reality and use it to explore themes that would become central to the series.

More importantly, “Crisis” captures something essential about what made Smallville special during its early years: the willingness to take big risks in service of character development. The show was never afraid to look ridiculous if it meant finding new ways to explore Clark’s journey from teenager to hero.

Watching it now, “Crisis” feels like a time capsule from a more optimistic era of television, when shows could be earnest and melodramatic without irony, when high school relationships felt like matters of life and death, and when a young man’s journey to heroism could support a ten-season television series.

It’s not perfect television, but it’s perfectly Smallville—ambitious, heartfelt, occasionally silly, and always committed to the idea that even the strangest circumstances can reveal fundamental truths about who we are and who we choose to become. In the end, maybe that’s all we can ask from a show about a teenager who happens to be an alien: that it takes its characters seriously, even when everything else is completely bonkers.

And really, isn’t that what makes the best nostalgic television? Not perfection, but the kind of sincere storytelling that reminds us why we fell in love with these characters in the first place, flaws and all.