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 premieres carry a different kind of pressure than finales. Where a finale’s job is to pay things off, a premiere has to do something harder: it has to convince you that what just exploded is worth rebuilding. After the chaos of “Commencement” — meteor showers, Jason Teague’s unhinged farewell, Clark finally throwing that crystal into the Arctic — “Arrival” has a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to be delicate about it. For the most part, it rises to the occasion. It’s overstuffed in some of the same ways Season 4 was overstuffed, but it moves with a propulsive energy that makes you forgive the rough edges. Mostly. We’ll get to the parts that are harder to forgive.

The Fortress of Solitude: Clark Finally Gets His Room

Let’s start with the moment the show has been building toward since the Pilot: Clark throws the Crystal of Knowledge into the snow, and the Fortress of Solitude rises from the Arctic. It’s a genuinely beautiful sequence, and the production clearly understood what it needed to look like. The visual echoes of the Christopher Reeve films are intentional and earned — both versions feature a Fortress born from a thrown crystal in the frozen north, both use localized blizzards as a defense mechanism, and both give Jor-El’s voice a warm, resonant authority that makes it feel like a homecoming rather than a command. Terence Stamp’s voiceover work here is quietly excellent. When Jor-El tells Clark “Welcome home, my son,” it lands not as a cliché but as the culmination of four years of resistance, delay, and painful growing up.

What makes the Fortress work as a story beat — beyond the spectacle — is that it’s also the site of the episode’s first real complication. Chloe was accidentally transported to the Arctic along with Clark, and she follows him into the Fortress just in time for a localized blizzard to nearly kill her. It’s a setup that requires Clark to make an immediate choice: complete his training or save his friend. Jor-El is unambiguous. Clark breaks the deal anyway. It’s a beat we’ve seen variations of before, and we’ll see variations of it again — Clark’s inability to prioritize his Kryptonian destiny over the people in front of him is practically a character trait at this point. But it works here because it feels earned rather than reflexive. Clark isn’t defying Jor-El out of stubbornness. He’s defying him because letting Chloe die while he stands ten feet away is not something Clark Kent is capable of doing. That distinction matters.

Chloe Sullivan Deserves Better Than Four Years of Waiting

Speaking of Chloe — the hospital scene where she reveals she’s known about Clark’s powers is one of the best scenes the show has produced in a while, and Allison Mack makes every second of it count. Shivering, nearly hypothermic, and still somehow funnier than most people are when they’re at full capacity, Chloe delivers the line “I know you can run faster than a speeding bullet, Clark” with exactly the right mix of exasperation and affection. She’s been sitting on this secret since she watched him catch a car like a beach ball in “Pariah,” waiting patiently for Clark to trust her enough to tell her himself. He never did. And her response to that isn’t anger — it’s just quiet, characteristic Chloe grace.

There’s something genuinely moving about the moment Clark tells her he’s from another planet and Chloe’s reaction isn’t horror or disbelief but a stumbling, searching attempt to recalibrate her understanding of her best friend. The exchange — “So you’re saying you were born this way?” / “I wasn’t born anywhere near this galaxy” / “Okay… so that would make you like an…” / “Yeah.” — is written with a lightness that defuses what could have been overwrought while still honoring the weight of the moment. And then Chloe, being Chloe, calls him a superhero while he’s still processing it. It’s the right note. Allison Mack has been the show’s secret weapon across four seasons, and this scene is her reward for all of it.

The Disciples of Zod: Kryptonian Tourists with Convenient Skills

Aethyr and Nam-Ek arrive in Smallville aboard the Black Ship looking for Kal-El, and they are immediately formidable in the way that Kryptonian villains are always formidable — heat vision, super strength, super speed, the works. The action sequences are genuinely well-staged, and there’s something satisfying about seeing Lana, of all people, try to lure them into a kryptonite vault as a trap. It doesn’t quite work, but it’s the kind of clever-desperate move that the show rewards.

That said, the Disciples of Zod come loaded with a question the episode doesn’t really want to answer: why do they speak English? These are Kryptonian prisoners, recently emerged from a spaceship that has presumably been traveling the cosmos. They blast police cars, locate Lex’s caves, and engage in fully fluent conversation with characters in Smallville without any apparent adjustment period. Similarly, their complete mastery of Kryptonian abilities — heat vision, telekinesis, the works — seems to be immediately and effortlessly available to them under Earth’s yellow sun, while Clark spent multiple seasons slowly discovering what he was capable of. These aren’t grievous storytelling sins, exactly, but they’re the kind of convenient handwaves that remind you the show’s mythology was always more interested in dramatic momentum than internal consistency. You half expect Aethyr to mention that she also went to Smallville High and knows where the good coffee is.

What the Disciples do accomplish is giving Clark a genuine physical fight for the first time in a while — one that tests him rather than just showcasing him. The climactic confrontation at the Luthor Mansion has real stakes, and the resolution, with Clark turning Aethyr’s own Phantom Zone vortex against them, is clever enough to feel earned rather than pulled out of thin air. The Phantom Zone itself is a compelling piece of Superman mythology the show has been circling for a while, and seeing it used here as an offensive weapon rather than just a concept is a nice touch.

Clark Loses His Powers (Again): The Smallville Tradition Continues

Here’s where things get frustrating. The episode ends with Clark making the conscious choice to stay with Lana instead of returning to the Fortress to complete his training as promised, and Jor-El — being a father of his word — strips Clark of his powers at sunset. Clark wakes up human. He tells his parents he’s fine with it. He’ll enjoy being a normal person for a while. Martha and Jonathan exchange the look of two people who have watched this show long enough to know exactly how this is going to go.

This is the sixth time Clark has lost his powers. Six. And it’s the first time it’s happened in a season premiere, which suggests the show understood it needed to try something different with the formula while still leaning on the formula. The problem isn’t that Clark losing his powers is inherently uninteresting — there’s real dramatic potential in exploring what Clark Kent is without the abilities that define him. The problem is that we’ve been here enough times that the dramatic potential has been substantially depleted. The show has cried wolf on Clark’s vulnerability so often that it’s hard to feel the stakes anymore. When Clark smiles and tells his parents he’s looking forward to being human, the response it produces isn’t “oh, interesting character journey ahead” — it’s “okay, how many episodes before Jor-El gives them back?”

What makes it especially frustrating in the context of “Arrival” is that the episode spent its first forty-five minutes building genuine forward momentum. Clark created the Fortress. He got his powers acknowledged by his best friend. He fought actual Kryptonian warriors and won. Everything was pointing toward a Clark who was finally, as “Commencement” promised, ready to become Superman. And then the reset button gets pressed. Classic Smallville. You can set your watch by it.

Lionel, Lois, and Lex: Everyone Else Having a Perfectly Normal Tuesday

The supporting cast gets some good material in the chaos. Lionel’s catatonic state — still carrying whatever Kryptonian knowledge the Crystal of Water downloaded into his brain at the end of last season — continues to be one of the more intriguing threads the show has going. The image of him carving Kryptonian symbols into the hardwood floor of the Luthor mansion while Lana watches in quiet alarm is genuinely unsettling, and John Glover plays the vacancy with a precision that makes it clear this is not a reset for Lionel but an evolution. He whispers to Lana that green kryptonite is the Kryptonians’ only weakness, which is both helpful and concerning depending on whose side you think Lionel is ultimately on. The show has been keeping that ambiguous for four years, and it’s still working.

Lois, meanwhile, gets some of the episode’s best action beats — confronting the Disciples of Zod at the hospital because of course she does, getting thrown across the room, and still somehow keeping Jonathan Kent alive through sheer force of stubborn competence. Erica Durance is settling into the role in a way that feels more assured than at any point in Season 4, and there’s a real warmth to her scenes with the Kents that suggests the show is figuring out what Lois is for beyond comic relief. Lex, too, is operating at a high level of suspicious efficiency — storing the Black Ship in Warehouse 15, telling Lana she “owes him,” and arriving at a Canadian hospital specifically to find out what Chloe knows. He’s bad at being subtle, but he’s very good at being thorough.

A Little Black Ooze Walks Into a Warehouse…

The episode’s final image is Lex checking on the progress of his investigation into the Black Ship, just in time for a black ooze to drip from the hull and slowly take human form. If you’ve never seen Smallville before and you watched this moment cold, you might wonder what sinister alien intelligence has just been unleashed on the world. If you grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, your immediate reaction was probably something closer to: “Is that… Spike?”

It is, in fact, James Marsters, who brings his considerable screen presence to the role of Brainiac — here operating under the alias Milton Fine — and whose casting is one of the more inspired decisions Season 5 makes. Marsters has exactly the right energy for a character who is fundamentally defined by a cold, preternatural intelligence wearing a warm, charming exterior. He gets no dialogue in this episode, just a slow, ominous materialization from alien ooze into a man in his birthday suit, but it’s a strong entrance. The fact that he and Leonard Roberts (Nam-Ek) both appeared in Buffy gives this episode a slightly unplanned reunion quality that is very fun to sit with. The Buffyverse and the DC universe apparently share a casting agent.

Clark and Lana: Back Together, With Asterisks

And then there’s the reunion. Clark visits Lana in the hospital. She’s reading about Jason and Genevieve Teague’s deaths in the meteor shower — an ending for both characters that is handled via newspaper headline, which is either admirably efficient or slightly dismissive depending on your investment in the Teague mythology. Clark asks if she meant it when she said she loved him. She says yes. They decide to give the relationship another try.

Here’s where it gets complicated. The Clark and Lana barn scene in “Commencement” was genuinely moving — quiet, intimate, earned. This reunion doesn’t have the same quality because the emotional work it would require has largely been deferred. Lana and Clark getting back together at the end of the Season 5 premiere should feel like an arrival (the episode is literally called that), but it’s hard to fully invest in it when the circumstances are murky. Lana spent the finale navigating a hostage situation, a helicopter crash, and an alien encounter. Clark just lost his powers as a direct consequence of choosing her over his destiny. Both of them are making this decision in the immediate aftermath of genuine trauma, without any of the space or clarity that would give it real emotional weight.

Tom Welling and Kristin Kreuk are good enough actors to make the moment feel tender, and they do. But there’s a nagging feeling that the show is putting them back together because it doesn’t quite know what to do with them apart, rather than because the story has genuinely led here. Whether that feeling bears out over the course of Season 5 remains to be seen. For now, it’s a moment with real warmth and genuine uncertainty in equal measure — which is, honestly, probably a fair summary of the Clark-Lana relationship in general.

Does Season 5 Get Off to the Right Start?

“Arrival” is a strong season premiere that does most of what it needs to do — it resolves the cliff-hangers from “Commencement,” introduces compelling new threats, delivers one of the best Clark-Chloe scenes the show has ever done, and gives us the Fortress of Solitude in a way that feels appropriately mythic. The stumbles are real — the Disciples of Zod and their convenient English fluency, the power loss reset that lands like a familiar thud rather than a genuine dramatic choice — but the episode has enough forward momentum to carry you past them.

What “Arrival” does most effectively is establish that Season 5 is going to be interested in different questions than Season 4 was. Where Season 4 was largely about Clark resisting his destiny, Season 5 seems poised to explore what happens when Clark has embraced his destiny but lost the tools to fulfill it. That’s a more interesting dramatic premise, and if the show commits to it — really commits, rather than walking it back after a few episodes — there’s real potential here. Smallville has always been better at promise than follow-through, but the promises it makes in “Arrival” are good ones. The road ahead is uncertain. The Fortress is built. Clark Kent is, for the moment, entirely human. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

What are your thoughts on “Arrival”? Does the Chloe reveal land as well as it should, or did the show wait too long to get here? Are you on board with Clark losing his powers again, or is this the one that finally broke you? And what did you think of the black ooze formerly known as Spike? Share your memories and theories in the comments below!