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!

Last week, “Hidden” left Clark standing in the wreckage of a choice — powered back up, haunted by what the restoration cost, carrying a secret he couldn’t share with the people closest to him. It was a heavy episode dressed up in the clothes of a reset, and it did its best work in the quiet moments after the action stopped. The grief was real, even if the machinery producing it was a little visible.

“Aqua” is not interested in any of that.

Well — that’s not entirely true. “Aqua” has its own serious business to conduct, and it conducts it well. But it also has a guy who can breathe underwater, a flirtation that generates more heat than most of Smallville‘s actual romances, and a college professor who is secretly one of the most dangerous artificial intelligences in the DC universe but delivers that threat with the cheerful menace of someone who has done this before. The episode’s surface is genuinely fun. What’s underneath it is worth paying attention to.

Let’s talk about both.

The One Where Aquaman Shows Up

“Aqua” is, in the bluntest possible terms, an origin-adjacent episode for Arthur Curry — the young man who will become Aquaman. It’s also, and this is worth saying clearly, a genuinely good episode for the character. Alan Ritchson’s AC is confident without being smug, charming without being calculated, and committed to a cause (the health of Crater Lake’s marine ecosystem) in a way that doesn’t feel like a lecture. He rescues Lois from drowning in the teaser, earns himself an immediate invite into her orbit, and proceeds to spend the next forty-five minutes being the most effortlessly likable guest character the show has produced in a while.

Part of what works is that the show doesn’t oversell him. There’s a version of this episode where the arrival of a future Justice League member is treated like a major event, where the music swells and Clark looks appropriately awed and the whole thing carries the weight of destiny. “Aqua” is not that episode. AC shows up, does impressive things, explains approximately nothing about himself, and fits into the ensemble with the comfortable ease of someone who has always belonged there. The reveal of his abilities is handled with more restraint than the show usually manages — his first appearance has him outswimming Clark, which is immediately funny and establishes a dynamic the episode leans into throughout.

The fight between Clark and AC at the LuthorCorp facility is another highlight. It’s brief, it’s creative, and it treats both characters as genuinely capable rather than letting Clark coast on his power set. The hydrokinesis — AC generating water blisters and weaponizing them — is a nice touch, and the choreography has enough personality to distinguish it from the standard superhero scuffle. When the fight ends not in defeat but in conversation, you believe the mutual respect that follows.

As for the DC Comics connections: they’re everywhere, and they’re worn lightly enough to function as rewards for attentive viewers rather than obligations. AC attends the University of Miami, competes on its swim team, and wears orange and green — the colors Aquaman has worn in the comics for decades. His father, Tom Curry, is mentioned, nodding to Aquaman’s lighthouse-keeper origin. Clark and Arthur’s teenage encounter echoes a Superboy comic from 1971. AC calls Clark “Superboy” and “Boy Scout,” the latter of which becomes Clark’s codename when the Justice League assembles in Season Six. And Lois’s line about AC’s “orange and green thing” — “Looks like Flipper threw up” — manages to mock the color scheme while making it oddly endearing. Even the title earns its keep: “Aqua” is from the Latin for water, aquamarine is a light blue-green, and the episode has fun threading the color symbolism throughout, from Lois’s blue bikini to Lex’s self-described “white knight” branding.

The trivia footnote that the episode’s high ratings nearly produced a standalone Aquaman series — which was eventually created, cast with Justin Hartley, and ultimately not picked up by The CW, leading instead to Hartley joining Smallville as Oliver Queen — is one of those alternate-universe TV history moments worth sitting with. Somewhere in a parallel timeline, there’s an Aquaman show. In this one, we got Green Arrow instead. It’s hard to argue with the outcome.

One more thing about Alan Ritchson, since he has become considerably more famous in the years since this episode aired: watching him here, knowing what he eventually becomes in Reacher, is a genuinely interesting experience. The physical presence is obviously there, but what’s interesting is that the warmth is there too — the same quality that makes his version of Jack Reacher surprisingly human despite all the violence. AC is a gentler character than Reacher by a significant margin, but Ritchson’s instinct toward likability is already fully formed. The note that this episode also marked his first time working with Kristin Kreuk, who later co-starred with him in Reacher‘s first season, is the kind of long arc connection that makes you appreciate how small the television world actually is.

The One Where Brainiac Goes to College

While AC is busy being charming at Crater Lake, the episode’s second major thread is introducing the season’s actual villain — and doing it with a patience and precision that pays off for the rest of Season Five.

Professor Milton Fine makes his first full appearance in human form here. He lectures at Central Kansas University on how history is shaped by whoever controls the narrative, uses Lex Luthor as a case study in the construction of a false persona, and recruits Clark as a research assistant before the class is half over. He is, in case you’ve forgotten since “Arrival,” Brainiac — the Kryptonian artificial intelligence disguised as a flesh-and-blood academic, running a long game whose full dimensions the show will take its time revealing.

James Marsters is exactly right for this role, and the episode has the good sense to know it. If you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and if you’re reading this blog, the odds are reasonable that you did — you know Marsters as Spike, the platinum-blond vampire who spent seven seasons evolving from scene-stealing villain to reluctant hero while remaining, at every stage of that journey, the most watchable person in any room he occupied. Brainiac is a different register: cerebral where Spike was instinctual, controlled where Spike was chaotic, threatening in the way that someone very intelligent and completely without conscience is threatening rather than the way a vampire with a leather coat is threatening. And yet the quality that made Marsters compelling on Buffy — the sense that he’s always thinking three moves ahead, that the charm is real but the danger underneath it is realer — translates directly. Fine’s opening lecture is a small masterpiece of misdirection. He seems to be making an argument about historiography. He’s actually recruiting.

The line readings are worth noting. When Fine tells Clark “I’ll never lie to you, Mr. Kent — after all, I’m an educator. Truth is my life’s work,” the irony is so thick you could stand on it, and Marsters delivers it with the exact straight face that makes it funnier and more ominous simultaneously. When Clark pushes back on the Lex-Hitler comparison and Fine responds with “An honest opinion. I like that!” — there’s a flicker of genuine appreciation in there, the way a chess player appreciates an opponent who doesn’t fold immediately. He’s evaluating Clark, filing away information, building the dossier he’ll need. It’s excellent villain work because it doesn’t announce itself as villain work.

The Groucho Marx quote — “There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes he must be crooked” — is the episode’s best joke, and the exchange it produces (“I would think a college professor would be quoting Karl Marx, not Groucho.” / “German philosophy’s easy. Comedy’s hard.”) is the kind of writing this show is capable of when it remembers that wit and menace are not mutually exclusive.

Clark and Lex, One More Step Apart

The third thread running through “Aqua,” and arguably the most important in terms of the season’s long arc, is the continuing deterioration of Clark and Lex’s friendship. It’s been fracturing for years at this point, but this episode gives it a specific new break: Clark watches Lex lie directly to his face about the Leviathan project, and this time Clark can’t construct a charitable interpretation that makes the lie forgivable.

The scene where Clark and AC confront Lex at the mansion is efficiently staged, and Michael Rosenbaum does what he always does — makes the deception feel like something Lex has genuinely convinced himself is reasonable rather than something he knows is wrong. Lex isn’t lying here in the way a caught child lies. He’s lying with the smooth conviction of someone who has decided that the full truth is a complexity the other party isn’t equipped to handle. Clark has been giving Lex the benefit of the doubt for four-plus seasons, and the benefit of the doubt has been enabling exactly this. When the Leviathan project goes up in sabotage and Clark visits Lex afterward, there’s a new quality in the conversation — something that sounds less like disappointment and more like acknowledgment. Clark is done performing optimism about what Lex is becoming.

And into that void steps Professor Fine, offering Clark a job built on the premise that Lex is corrupt and documenting that corruption is righteous work. Clark accepts. It’s a moment that should carry a warning label. Fine is right about Lex — that’s what makes the manipulation so elegant. The truth he’s offering is real. The purposes he’s serving with it are not.

Lois and AC: The Fling That Almost Was

The Lois and AC romance is probably the most nakedly enjoyable thing in the episode, and it deserves acknowledgment on its own terms before any caveats arrive.

Erica Durance and Alan Ritchson have genuine chemistry — the kind that makes banter feel like flirtation rather than exposition delivery. Their scenes at Crater Lake and the Talon work because both performers are clearly having fun, and the episode is smart enough not to oversell it. This is a fling, not a love story. Lois knows it’s a fling. AC probably knows it’s a fling. The audience definitely knows it’s a fling, because this is Smallville and Lois is going to end up with Clark Kent when the show is ready to get there.

That awareness is also where the limitations live. The episode gives Lois real emotional investment in AC — her sadness at his departure in the final scene is genuinely felt, and her comment to Clark afterward about how he was “different from the other guys” is the kind of reflection the show doesn’t always let Lois have. But it’s still a single-episode romance, and the emotional weight it can carry is correspondingly compressed. Lois doesn’t get much to do here beyond react to AC, which is a waste of what Durance is capable of. The flirtation is charming. It just doesn’t run very deep.

Clark’s jealousy in the Talon scene — watching AC impress Lois and Lana with his ecological speech, getting increasingly prickly about it — is a nice touch that the episode plays mostly for gentle comedy. But it’s also the first small crumb of the Clark-Lois dynamic that the show is building toward, and it lands a little differently knowing where they end up. When Clark consoles Lois at the end and tells her she’s going to meet someone even more special, the dramatic irony is loud enough to hear from space.

So Does “Aqua” Work?

Yes, largely. It’s not a profound episode — it doesn’t try to be — but it does several things well simultaneously, which is harder than it sounds. It introduces two major DC characters with care and economy. It advances the Clark-Lex deterioration without belaboring it. It gives James Marsters a showcase scene that makes good on the promise of his casting. And it does all of this while being legitimately entertaining, which is not a thing this show can always say.

The seams show in the usual places. Gabriel Duncan’s absence from five seasons of established continuity is a symptom of a show-wide pattern rather than an isolated complaint, but “Aqua” doesn’t have a Gabriel Duncan problem. Its guest characters are doing real work. The villain’s plan is coherent. The action sequences are more creative than average.

More than anything, “Aqua” works because it understands what kind of episode it is: a breather with teeth. The surface is bright and the water is warm and there’s a guy down there who can outswim Clark Kent. But underneath it, Professor Fine is already planning something, Lex is already one step further down a road he won’t come back from, and Clark is already making the kind of alliance he should probably think twice about. The fun is real. So is what it’s concealing.

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What are your memories of “Aqua”? Does Alan Ritchson’s AC hold up as one of the show’s better guest heroes? And what was your reaction to James Marsters showing up as Fine/Brainiac — were you excited, or did the Spike associations take some getting used to? Share your thoughts in the comments below!