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!

After the prom-night spectacle of “Spirit,” Smallville does something genuinely interesting with “Blank” — it strips Clark Kent down to nothing and asks what remains. Not just physically, not just in terms of powers and abilities, but fundamentally: if Clark Kent woke up tomorrow with no memory of who he is, no knowledge of where he came from, no awareness of the secret he’s spent his life protecting — what kind of person would he be? The answer is someone worth knowing. “Blank” works better than its premise has any right to, largely because it trusts its characters enough to let them breathe.

A Clean Slate, A Familiar Problem

The setup is simple enough. Kevin Grady, a teenager with the ability to erase people’s memories with a flash of green light, accidentally wipes Clark’s mind completely — not just the last few minutes, but everything. Every memory Clark has ever made, gone in an instant. It’s a neat trick for a metahuman, and Kevin sells it well as a frightened kid who’s been through something awful and is running from the consequences. But the real engine of “Blank” isn’t Kevin or his ability. It’s what happens to Clark once the slate is truly clean.

Because here’s the thing — Clark Kent without his memories is still Clark Kent. He still has all of his powers, which makes for some entertaining moments of accidental superstrengthing and heat-visioning a lamp into flames the second he lays eyes on Lana Lang. But beyond the physical comedy of a guy who can’t figure out why he just ripped a door off its hinges, there’s something more compelling at work. Amnesia Clark is honest in a way that regular Clark rarely gets to be. He has no reason to lie, no ingrained habit of deflection, no carefully maintained facade of normalcy to protect. When he wonders out loud why he doesn’t just tell everyone what he can do, it’s not a rhetorical question — he genuinely can’t figure out why he would choose a life of constant deception. It’s one of the sharpest observations the show has ever made about the cost of Clark’s secret, delivered by a version of himself who’s seeing it clearly for the first time.

Chloe’s Finest Hour

If “Blank” has a single emotional center — and it does — it’s Chloe Sullivan. Allison Mack carries the weight of this episode almost entirely on her shoulders, and she makes it look effortless. Chloe is the only person who knows Clark’s secret (Jonathan and Martha happen to be out of town), which means she’s the only person equipped to handle the crisis when it hits. The episode is smart enough to let us see both the strength and the strain of that position.

Watch how Chloe operates throughout this episode. She’s running at full speed from the moment she realizes what’s happened — tracking down Kevin’s identity, keeping Clark away from situations where he might accidentally reveal himself, coaching him through his own powers with a patience that speaks volumes about how seriously she takes the trust he placed in her. She’s essentially doing Clark’s job for him, protecting his secret when he can’t protect it himself. And she does it without hesitation, without complaint, and without anyone else even fully understanding what she’s doing or why.

There’s a quiet moment early on that captures the complexity of her position perfectly: amnesia Clark observes that he and Chloe must have been incredibly close for him to have trusted her with something this enormous. Chloe hesitates, then reluctantly admits that Clark didn’t actually tell her willingly. It’s a small sting — Mack plays it as someone who’s made peace with the circumstances but hasn’t entirely stopped feeling the weight of them. Clark’s response, though, is what elevates it: even without any memories, even without a single data point about who Chloe Sullivan is, he tells her that he knows she wouldn’t betray him. It’s instinctive. It’s character. And it quietly confirms what the audience has suspected all season — that whatever version of Clark Kent exists, Chloe is someone he can trust.

The episode’s final beat belongs to Chloe as well, and it’s the kind of understated punch that elevates good television into something genuinely memorable. Clark goes to thank her for looking after him, and asks — with real vulnerability — whether he did anything unusual while his memory was gone. He’s nervous. He’s worried he exposed himself. He pleads with her to be completely honest. And Chloe, after a beat, tells him that the only thing he did differently was trust her. She doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t make it a big moment. She just leaves him sitting with that information. It’s one of the best closing beats the show has produced: it validates Chloe’s role in Clark’s life in a way that feels earned, and it gently challenges Clark to consider what that trust should mean going forward. After four seasons of watching Clark keep Chloe at arm’s length on this subject, having the amnesia storyline force him to confront what her loyalty actually means is quietly devastating.

Lex Luthor Sees an Opportunity

You have to hand it to Michael Rosenbaum — “Blank” gives him one of the season’s best showcases for what he does best. When Lex learns that Clark has amnesia, his reaction isn’t concern for his friend. It’s calculation. And Rosenbaum plays it with such smooth, practiced ease that you almost don’t catch it happening until it’s already happened. The scene where he gets Clark alone and steers the conversation toward the Kawatche Caves is a masterclass in making villainy look like charm. He’s not threatening. He’s not aggressive. He’s friendly, even warm — “We kinda dropped the formalities the day I ran you off a bridge” is delivered with exactly the right mix of self-deprecation and confidence to make it sound like a joke between old friends rather than the ominous callback it actually is. He guides Clark toward the caves with the gentle inevitability of someone who’s planned this move in advance, and for a moment, you genuinely think it might work. The only thing that stops Clark from handing Lex exactly what he wants is Chloe’s whispered warning — which Clark, even without his memories, is apparently still supernaturally perceptive enough to hear from across the room.

What makes Lex’s appearance particularly effective is how it bookends with the closing scene. After Clark’s memory is restored, Lex pays a visit to the Kent farm, claims he just wanted to share his own amnesia experience from Summerholt, and plays the whole encounter off as casual concern. It’s smooth enough that Clark might have bought it if he weren’t already suspicious. But as Lex leaves, it’s revealed he’s quietly taken one of Clark’s cave map drawings from the loft. He didn’t get what he wanted through conversation, so he took what he could through theft. It’s one of the most distinctly Lex things the show has ever given us — the quiet, unhurried pivot from Plan A to Plan B that reminds you exactly who you’re dealing with.

Lois, Amnesia, and the Endless Reset Button

“Blank” gives us a callback that’s easy to miss if you’re not paying close attention, and a pattern that’s harder to ignore the more you think about it. When Lois first encounters amnesia Clark, her response is immediate and deadpan: “Again? Well, at least you’ve got your clothes on this time.” It’s a funny line, and Erica Durance delivers it perfectly. But it’s also a direct reference back to “Crusade,” the Season 4 premiere, when Lois stumbled across Clark in a cornfield with no memory and no clothes, operating under the Kal-El personality. So this isn’t the first time Lois has encountered a memory-wiped Clark Kent. It’s the second. For a character positioned as someone with genuine instinct and investigative drive, the fact that she’s had two separate encounters like this and hasn’t connected the dots starts to feel less like narrative coincidence and more like the show protecting its secret at the expense of Lois’s intelligence.

The pattern gets worse when you add the other thread running through this episode. “Blank” also marks the second time Lois has learned and subsequently forgotten Clark’s secret — the first was in “Spell,” when she was possessed by the witch Brianna Withridge. Now she watches Clark casually demonstrate his powers throughout the episode before Kevin conveniently wipes everyone’s memory at the end. Lois learns Clark’s secret. Lois forgets Clark’s secret. Repeat.

This is a storytelling choice that makes sense from a practical standpoint — the show needs to keep Clark’s secret secret, and the reset button is the easiest way to do that when a main character gets too close to the truth. But it’s a choice that accumulates cost over time. Every time Lois learns and forgets, it cheapens both the revelation and the forgetting. It turns one of the show’s biggest potential dramatic stakes into a recurring inconvenience. We know Lois is going to learn Clark’s secret eventually — that’s where her arc is heading. But the show keeps letting her touch that truth and then erasing it, which makes the eventual real revelation feel less like a climax and more like the show finally deciding to stop hitting the reset button.

Jason’s Colors Are Showing

Jason’s subplot in “Blank” is brief, but it’s pointed. When Lana tells him she’s not going to college — not enrolling at CKU with him, possibly not going at all — Jason’s response is to grab her arm hard enough to leave marks and scream at her about everything he’s done to protect her. It’s an ugly moment, played without any of the charm or wounded-lover softness that Jason usually deploys when things don’t go his way. Jensen Ackles commits to it fully, and the contrast with the Jason we’ve seen for most of the season is jarring in exactly the way it should be.

At this point in the season, though, it’s hard to read this as a warning sign so much as a confirmation. Jason’s antagonist turn has been telegraphed for weeks, and his work with his mother to secure the Stones of Power has made his allegiances clear enough that this scene feels less like a shocking revelation of his true nature and more like the show finally letting the mask drop completely. The audience has already seen where Jason is headed. This is just the moment he stops pretending otherwise.

Kevin Grady and the Ethics of Forgetting

Jonathan Bennett makes a solid impression as Kevin Grady, mostly because the show gives him something more interesting to do than simply be a threat. Kevin isn’t malicious — he’s scared, grieving, and manipulated by his own father. The revelation that Dr. Grady sent Kevin to Summerholt not to treat his abilities but to erase the memory of Kevin accidentally killing his brother is genuinely dark, and Kevin’s confrontation with the truth — that his father actually pulled the trigger — lands with real emotional weight.

There’s a thematic parallel with Clark running through the subplot, too: both characters are dealing with what happens when memory is taken from you and what it means to get it back. The key difference is in the aftermath. Clark gets his memory restored and returns to being someone who lies to everyone he loves. Kevin gets his memory back and finally gets to grieve honestly. It’s an effective parallel, and it gives Kevin’s story a resonance that elevates it beyond the typical monster-of-the-week formula.

Why “Blank” Works

One detail worth pausing on before we get to the big picture: the fact that Kevin’s ability — which normally erases only the last few minutes of a person’s memory — managed to wipe Clark’s entire life is quietly significant. It suggests that a Kryptonian brain stores a lifetime of memory in a volume so compact that Kevin’s power treated it as a single unit and erased it all at once. It’s the kind of worldbuilding detail Smallville doesn’t always bother to explore, but when it does, it’s a useful reminder that Clark Kent isn’t just a guy with superpowers — he’s an alien, and his brain works in ways that are fundamentally different from everyone around him.

“Blank” is, at its core, an identity episode. It asks what Clark Kent is without his memories, and the answer is both reassuring and a little sad. Reassuring because the fundamental goodness of the person Clark is — the instinct to help, the inability to look away from someone in trouble, the deep well of trust he extends to the people around him — survives the erasure of everything else. Clark doesn’t need to remember saving people to want to save people. He doesn’t need to remember trusting Chloe to trust her again on instinct. The hero exists beneath the memories.

But it’s also a little sad, because the amnesia version of Clark is freer. He doesn’t carry the weight of the lies, the accumulated guilt of keeping secrets from the people he loves, the constant calculation of how to protect his identity at the expense of everything else. And when his memory comes back, all of that weight returns with it. Clark gets his life back, but he also gets his cage back. “Blank” is one of the few episodes this season that makes you genuinely feel that cost, and it does so by showing us what life looks like without it — even if only for twenty-four hours.

It’s not a perfect episode. The Summerholt plot has some pacing issues, Kevin’s resolution comes a bit quickly, and the convenient memory-wipe at the end does exactly the kind of narrative damage to Lois’s arc we discussed above. But “Blank” is one of Season 4’s stronger standalone hours, and it earns that status by doing something the show doesn’t do often enough — letting its characters exist in a space where the secret doesn’t control everything, and showing us what that looks like. For an episode built around the absence of memory, it’s one that’s worth remembering.

What are your thoughts on “Blank”? Do you think the amnesia premise gives the show a genuine opportunity to explore Clark’s identity, or does it ultimately just reset the status quo? Does Chloe’s role in this episode solidify her as the emotional core of the series for you? And are you as frustrated as I am by the Lois reset button, or do you think the show is handling her arc in a way that still works? Share your memories and theories in the comments below!