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!

Season finales are a promise. They’re the show telling you that everything you’ve invested in over the past twenty-two episodes is about to pay off—that the threads will converge, the stakes will peak, and you’ll be left desperate for September to arrive. “Commencement” keeps some of those promises and breaks others. It’s a finale that swings big enough to be genuinely exciting in stretches, then stumbles over its own ambitions in ways that are hard to ignore. That’s not a condemnation. Smallville has always been a show that reaches further than its grasp, and “Commencement” is a fairly representative example of what that looks like when it’s both working and not. There’s real spectacle here. There’s genuine emotion. And there’s also a surprising amount of plot logic that falls apart if you look at it too carefully. Welcome to the Season 4 finale.

The Meteor Shower: Spectacle Earned and Unearned

Let’s start with the big set piece, because it’s the thing “Commencement” will always be remembered for: a second meteor shower raining down on Smallville while our characters scramble in every direction trying to survive. After spending much of Season 4 chasing Kryptonian stones through ancient caves and Parisian cathedrals, the finale delivers a legitimate apocalyptic moment, and on a television budget, it’s genuinely impressive. Buildings crumble. The Kent farmhouse takes a direct hit. Lana’s helicopter goes down in flames. The show earns its visual chaos here, and you can feel the budget that was banked during bottle episodes like last week’s “Forever” being cashed in all at once.

What makes the meteor shower work emotionally—not just visually—is the sense of helplessness it creates. Clark is arguably the most powerful person on Earth, and he spends much of the finale running from place to place, unable to stop what’s already in motion. Jor-El is unambiguous about this: Clark brought this upon himself by failing to collect the Stones of Power, and now human blood has stained one of the elements, awakening something dark from the depths of space. There’s real weight to the idea that Clark’s procrastination and resistance to his destiny have tangible, catastrophic consequences. For a show that sometimes lets its hero off the hook too easily, this is a meaningful moment of accountability.

The sequence where Clark shields a young boy named Henry from the falling debris is the kind of beat the show does well when it commits to it—no grand speech, no dramatic pause, just Clark using his body as armor for someone who can’t protect themselves. It’s a small Superman moment in a season that has often kept Clark at a careful distance from his destiny, and it lands. Less successful is the geography of the chaos, which becomes increasingly hard to follow as the episode juggles half a dozen storylines across multiple locations. Who is where? How much time has passed? Why does the meteor shower seem to last approximately forty-five minutes when real atmospheric entry takes seconds? Smallville was never a show that worried much about hard science, but the timeline of the finale requires a certain generosity from the viewer that occasionally feels like a stretch.

Jason Teague: The End of a Long Goodbye

Jason Teague survived his fall off a cliff last week—because of course he did—and he arrives at the Kent farm bloodied, unhinged, and waving a shotgun at Jonathan and Martha. It’s a fittingly chaotic exit for a character who spent most of Season 4 being chaotic in ways that rarely served the story. Jensen Ackles is a talented actor who clearly committed to the role, and he brings a manic, cornered energy to these final scenes that is genuinely unsettling. But the honest assessment of Jason as a character is that he was never quite the antagonist the show needed him to be.

The problem with Jason was always structural. He was introduced as a love interest, revealed as a schemer, and ultimately reduced to a pawn in his mother’s game—a pattern that left him without a coherent identity. By the time he’s holding the Kents at gunpoint demanding to know where Clark is, there’s something almost pitiful about his desperation. He’s been manipulated, lied to, thrown off a cliff, and nearly killed multiple times, and his response is to keep pushing deeper into a conspiracy that was never really his to own in the first place. His death—caught inside the Kent house when a meteor strikes—is abrupt and, honestly, the right call. He had run his course. The season had extracted everything it could from the character, and a prolonged farewell would have given him more weight than the narrative had earned. Sometimes the most honest thing a show can do is let a character go cleanly.

What his exit does accomplish, in a sideways kind of way, is close the book on the Teague family storyline with a certain grim efficiency. Genevieve is dead at Isobel’s hands. Jason is dead under a pile of Smallville rubble. The stones have been collected and united. Whatever elaborate mythology Season 4 was building toward with the Thoreaux bloodline and the Kryptonian elements is now, for better or worse, resolved. The fact that it resolves by mostly blowing everything up—literally—is on-brand for a show that has always preferred visceral momentum to careful plotting.

The Clark and Lana Barn Goodbye

If there’s a moment in “Commencement” that genuinely earns its emotional weight, it’s the quiet scene in the barn between Clark and Lana before he leaves to unite the stones. They’ve had countless conversations in this barn over four seasons—arguments, confessions, declarations, breakups—and this one carries the particular sadness of a goodbye that might be permanent. Lana gives Clark the Crystal of Air, tells him she believes it belongs to him, and they say they love each other with the unspoken understanding that Smallville might not exist by the time they see each other again.

Tom Welling and Kristin Kreuk are at their best in these low-key, intimate scenes, and this is no exception. There’s a stillness to the moment that the rest of the episode—with its military convoys and falling rocks and shotgun-wielding coaches—doesn’t really allow. Clark isn’t being heroic here. He’s scared, and he’s saying goodbye to the girl he loves, and the scene is honest about what that feels like. Whether or not you’ve been fully invested in Clark and Lana’s relationship across Season 4 (and reasonable viewers could argue either way), this moment earns its sentiment because it isn’t asking for anything more than what it is: two people who care about each other, standing in a barn, not knowing if it’s the last time.

The immediate aftermath is less graceful. Lana’s subplot in the finale—navigating Lex’s pressure to hand over the stone, ultimately boarding a helicopter that gets shot down—is busy in a way that undercuts the barn scene’s intimacy. She goes from a genuinely moving farewell to a tense negotiation with Lex to a crash landing near a mysterious spaceship in the span of about fifteen minutes, and the tonal whiplash is significant. The crash and the spaceship discovery are intriguing as a Season 5 setup, but they come at the cost of letting the emotional resonance of the barn scene breathe.

Lois Lane and the Art of the Long Setup

Erica Durance’s first season as Lois Lane has been an odd one. She arrived as comic relief, gradually became something more interesting, and has spent most of Season 4 existing in the margins of plots that don’t really have room for her yet. “Commencement” is where the show starts quietly laying the groundwork for who Lois is going to be, and it does so mostly through throwaway lines that reward anyone paying close attention.

The exchange where Clark jokes that Lois talks enough that there’ll be no dead air on her hypothetical radio show, followed by Lois dismissing journalism because she’d probably end up sitting across from the most bumbling reporter on the masthead, is the kind of winking foreshadowing that the show has always done with its Superman mythology. The joke only lands if you know who Lois Lane is going to become and who that bumbling reporter is going to turn out to be. It’s a small moment, but it’s doing real work—planting seeds for a dynamic that won’t fully bloom for another few seasons while still giving Durance something fun to play in the present.

Lois watching Smallville burn from a hillside, in tears, unable to do anything to stop the destruction—it’s a genuinely affecting image, and it speaks to something true about the character. Lois has always been defined by her inability to be passive in the face of catastrophe, and here she is, forced to watch. Durance plays it without melodrama, which is exactly right. The show doesn’t always know what to do with Lois in Season 4, but in its best moments it understands that she’s not just a comedic presence. She’s someone who cares, fiercely, even when caring doesn’t make a difference.

Lionel Luthor, Kryptonian Vessel

The moment where the Crystal of Water emits a ray of energy that strikes Lionel and sends Kryptonian symbols running through his brain is one of the finale’s most intriguing beats, and it’s made more so by the fact that John Glover plays it with the absolute minimum of reaction. One moment Lionel is doing Lionel things—threatening Lex, maneuvering for leverage, being magnificently ruthless—and the next he’s catatonic on the floor of the Luthor Mansion with alien writing scrolling across his eyes. It’s a startling image.

What makes this beat land is the context built up over Season 4. Lionel has been positioning himself as Clark’s unlikely protector in increasingly explicit ways, and the idea that the Kryptonian stones would choose him as a conduit—that the universe, or Jor-El, or whatever force is at work here would find Lionel Luthor a suitable vessel for Kryptonian knowledge—carries a certain dark poetry. Lionel has always been a man defined by his hunger for power and his willingness to acquire it through any means necessary. The notion that he might now carry something genuinely extraordinary inside him, something that aligns him even more closely with Clark’s destiny, is a compelling setup for Season 5. John Glover has earned every ounce of this storyline over four years of magnificent villainy, and the show seems to be acknowledging that by giving him something genuinely strange and new to play.

Chloe and Clark: The Arctic Ending

The finale ends not with Clark standing triumphant, but with Clark and Chloe standing bewildered in the middle of the Arctic, having just accidentally traveled together when Clark combined the stones and threw the Crystal of Knowledge into the frozen landscape. It’s a choice that speaks well of the show’s instincts: rather than ending on a heroic note, “Commencement” ends on a question mark. Clark has done what Jor-El asked. The Fortress of Solitude is presumably being created somewhere off-screen.

Allison Mack has been the show’s secret weapon across all four seasons, and the Clark-Chloe dynamic is at its best when the show trusts it the way this scene does. She finds Clark in the caves. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t panic. She looks at Clark with the particular expression she’s perfected over four years—the one that says I don’t understand any of this but I trust you anyway—and then she vanishes in a blinding flash. It’s the right note to end on. Not triumph, not catastrophe, but a beginning: Clark has finally embraced his destiny, even if he still doesn’t fully understand what that means, and his oldest friend is standing next to him as it unfolds.

The journey to get there is messier than it should be. The finale is genuinely overstuffed—there are too many moving parts, and the editing sometimes struggles to maintain momentum when it needs to cut away from the scenes that are actually working to check in on subplots that aren’t. But the Arctic moment works precisely because it doesn’t try to resolve everything. It embraces the incompleteness of this particular chapter and points toward what comes next. Smallville is no longer a show about high school. Clark Kent has graduated in every sense of the word.

Does Season 4 Stick the Landing?

“Commencement” is a mixed finale for a mixed season, and the two things are not unrelated. Season 4 has been Smallville at its most ambitious and most scattered—a year that introduced Lois Lane and the Isobel mythology and the Kryptonian stones and Jason Teague and managed to make all of those things feel both overstuffed and underexplored at various points. The finale inherits all of that complexity and does its best to synthesize it into something satisfying. It partially succeeds. The spectacle is real. The character moments that land, land well. The emotional core—Clark finally choosing his destiny, saying goodbye to high school and to a version of himself that no longer fits—comes through clearly enough to matter.

But there’s a reason “Commencement” doesn’t quite reach the heights of the best Smallville finales. It’s trying to close too many doors and open too many new ones at the same time, and some things get left in the doorway. Jason’s death is efficient but not earned. The Isobel storyline resolves with a whimper—Lana stabs Genevieve, the mark disappears from her back, and that’s essentially that for a mythology the show spent an entire season building. And the question of what exactly Lionel now carries inside him is compelling precisely because the episode doesn’t explain it, which is a fine choice for a season opener but a slightly frustrating one for a closer.

Still, Clark throwing that crystal into the Arctic with Chloe watching from behind him—that image sticks. After four years in Smallville, Clark Kent is finally, genuinely, irrevocably on his way to becoming Superman. The show has been building to this moment since the Pilot, and “Commencement” delivers it with enough conviction to make it feel like the arrival it’s supposed to be. The road ahead is uncertain—for Clark, for the show, for all of us who’ll be back next fall. But the road behind has been worth traveling.

What are your thoughts on “Commencement”? Does the meteor shower deliver the spectacle Season 4 deserved? How do you feel about Jason’s final moments—fitting exit or wasted opportunity? And does the Arctic ending earn its emotional weight, or does the messiness of everything leading up to it get in the way? Share your memories and theories in the comments below!