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, “Aqua” gave us one of Season Five’s more confident hours — a breezy, well-constructed episode that introduced Arthur Curry with charm and economy, continued the Clark-Lex deterioration with quiet precision, and gave James Marsters a showcase scene that made good on the promise of his casting. It was, by most reasonable measures, a good time.

“Thirst” is not a good time.

That’s not an outsider’s opinion being smuggled in under cover of critical analysis. The showrunners themselves — Alfred Gough and Miles Millar — said in the DVD commentary for this episode that it was perhaps the worst they ever made, citing irrational thinking and a budget so low it forced corners that probably shouldn’t have been cut. When the people who made the thing are that candid about its failure, it feels dishonest to pretend otherwise. And when Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling revisited it on the TalkVille podcast in 2024 and suggested it might actually be worse than “Ageless” — their previous consensus pick for the show’s low point — that’s a data point worth taking seriously.

So let’s talk about what went wrong. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about the fact that this episode went wrong in one of the most fascinatingly specific ways possible — because “Thirst” isn’t just a bad episode of Smallville. It’s a bad episode of Smallville that is drowning, almost certainly on purpose, in the iconography of a much better show.

The Buffy Problem (Which Is Also the Buffy Opportunity)

Here is a partial list of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer references embedded in “Thirst”:

The villain is named Buffy Sanders. The episode’s writer, Steven S. DeKnight, also wrote and produced for both Buffy and Angel. The special guest star, James Marsters, is best known for playing vampire Spike across six seasons of Buffy and one of Angel. At one point in the episode, Pauline Kahn tells Chloe that the Daily Planet doesn’t print stories about “slaying Buffy the Vampire.” And Fine — Marsters, the guy who spent years as a vampire on television — delivers the line “There’s no such thing as vampires” with what I can only describe as weaponized irony.

This is not a show that stumbled into Buffy territory accidentally. This is a show that ran directly at the comparison, arms wide open, and then tripped over its own feet on the way in.

The problem is that leaning this hard into Buffy associations only works if the episode can survive the comparison, and “Thirst” cannot survive the comparison. Buffy the Vampire Slayer used monsters as metaphors — the vampire sorority could have been something, a commentary on exclusivity, on the way institutions drain people, on the cost of belonging. Instead, the Tri-Psi girls are just vampires. There’s no second layer. The meteor rock origin story is introduced and discarded without generating any thematic weight. The horror is neither funny enough to be camp nor scary enough to be horror. It exists in an uncomfortable middle space where nothing it attempts quite lands.

And then there’s the character named Buffy Sanders. On one level, naming your villain Buffy in an episode this loaded with Buffy DNA is a gag — a wink at the audience, a bit of self-aware humor. On another level, it invites a direct comparison between this character and Buffy Summers, and Buffy Summers wins that comparison so comprehensively it isn’t close. Buffy Sanders is a cardboard antagonist with a vampire gimmick and approximately one personality trait: menace without texture. Buffy Summers is one of the most fully realized protagonists in television history. Naming your lesser creation after the greater one is either very confident or very unwise, and “Thirst” doesn’t have the goods to make it the former.

DeKnight is a talented writer — his work on both Buffy and the later Daredevil series on Netflix demonstrates that clearly enough. But whatever constraints produced this episode (and the budget conversation suggests the constraints were significant) resulted in something that feels less like an homage and more like a Halloween costume of a better show.

What Chloe Might Have Made Up

Here’s the most interesting thing about “Thirst,” and it arrives courtesy of the TalkVille podcast rather than the episode itself: there’s a legitimate argument that none of the vampire plot actually happened.

Chloe narrates the entire episode. That’s an unusual structural choice for Smallville, and the episode doesn’t fully commit to the implications — there are multiple scenes Chloe narrates that she couldn’t possibly have witnessed, including the conversation between Fine and Lex at the mansion and Fine’s murder of the security guard at the warehouse. The episode never offers an explanation for how Chloe knows what she knows. It just keeps narrating.

Rosenbaum and Welling, on the podcast, floated the theory that the vampire story is something Chloe invented — that the entire episode is Chloe Sullivan writing fiction and presenting it as journalism, which would explain both the narrative omniscience and some of the episode’s more glaring logical holes. The Tri-Psi sorority is supposedly expelled from Metropolis University, yet Lana — a Tri-Psi member — remains enrolled without consequence. The sorority’s activities apparently generated police involvement and a CDC report, which seems like the kind of thing the Daily Planet might have already heard about before a college intern filed her first story. When Pauline Kahn pushes back and calls it tabloid nonsense, Chloe’s defensive insistence that “I didn’t make this up” reads, in this light, like exactly what someone who made it up would say.

I want to be careful not to overclaim here — this is a fan theory born on a podcast, not authorial intent, and Gough and Millar’s commentary suggests the episode’s problems were more about budget and bad decisions than deliberate unreliable narration. But the theory is more interesting than anything the episode does with its own premise, and the fact that it holds together at all says something about the structural looseness of “Thirst.” A tighter episode wouldn’t leave this much room for revisionist interpretation.

What Chloe definitely did get out of the experience, real or imagined, is a job at the Daily Planet. We’ll come back to that.

Fine Gets His Hands Dirty

If “Thirst” has a genuine success, it’s in what it does with Professor Fine in the episode’s margins.

The Fine-as-Brainiac storyline has been building patiently since his introduction in “Arrival” and his first full appearance in “Aqua,” and “Thirst” delivers the moment that shifts him from quietly menacing to openly dangerous. When Lex sends a guard to follow Fine to Warehouse 15, Fine extends a metal spike from his hand — the T-1000 visual reference is intentional and effective — and kills the man without hesitation or expression. It’s a brief scene, efficiently staged, and it does exactly what it needs to do: it confirms that the charming academic is not playing a long game of intellectual chess. He is a machine, he is lethal, and the patience he displays in his scenes with Clark is a predator’s patience rather than a scholar’s.

Marsters continues to be the best reason to pay attention to Season Five’s villain architecture. His scene at the hospital — showing up to check on Chloe, steering Clark toward Project 1138, operating with the smooth confidence of someone who has already anticipated every response — is a quieter version of the manipulation we saw in “Aqua,” but no less precise. Fine is consistently the most watchable presence in any room he enters, which is exactly the quality Brainiac needs. A villain this dangerous who was also boring would be a problem. Marsters ensures he is never boring.

The Lex-Fine dynamic is also worth noting. Fine goes to the mansion and offers Lex information proactively — a file on himself, knowledge of LuthorCorp’s university funding scheme — rather than waiting to be cornered. It’s a chess move designed to establish trust while maintaining leverage, and Rosenbaum plays Lex’s response with the careful skepticism of someone who recognizes manipulation but can’t quite resist the information being offered. These two are well matched, which makes the eventual collision something to look forward to.

Chloe Sullivan, Daily Planet Correspondent

The Chloe storyline in “Thirst” is the episode’s other genuine accomplishment, which is notable given how thoroughly it’s overshadowed by the vampire nonsense happening around it.

Chloe interviewing for an internship at the Daily Planet has been a long time coming. Her entire arc on the show has been building toward journalism as vocation rather than hobby, and the scene where she faces down Pauline Kahn — who tells her, with practiced contempt, that Lionel Luthor’s arm-twisting is the only reason she’s in the room — is one of Allison Mack’s better scenes of the season. Chloe doesn’t fold. She doesn’t apologize. She says she doesn’t want special treatment and is willing to earn her place, and she means it, and you believe her, because Mack has spent four seasons making Chloe Sullivan’s intelligence and determination feel like real qualities rather than character notes.

Pauline Kahn is played by Carrie Fisher, which is both a delight and a mild distraction. Fisher brings exactly the right energy to the character — imperious, precise, the kind of editor who uses condescension as a diagnostic tool — and the casting feels intentional in ways that extend beyond star power. The name Pauline Kahn is almost certainly derived from Paul Levitz and Jeannette Kahn, two high-ranking DC Comics executives, which is the kind of inside-baseball reference that rewards attentive viewers. The additional layer that Project 1138 is named for George Lucas’s first film, THX 1138, and that Carrie Fisher played Princess Leia in Lucas’s Star Wars — that’s either coincidence or extremely deliberate easter egg placement, and given this show’s track record with this kind of thing, coincidence feels unlikely.

Chloe ends the episode having earned her byline, starting in the basement, using the “up, up and away” tagline in a closing narration that’s doing a lot of heavy lifting to remind us this is still a Superman story. It’s a moment that lands despite the surrounding chaos, which is a tribute to how well the show has set Chloe up and how well Mack delivers it.

Lana Lang, Vampire

Kristin Kreuk has spoken candidly about her frustration with this episode — she found the objectification of her character exhausting and fought to change the script, without success. She refused to film certain scenes she found uncomfortable. That context matters when watching her performance here, because the most generous reading of what’s onscreen is that the writing failed her, and the less generous reading is that some of what doesn’t work traces directly back to the conditions under which it was made.

Vampire Lana has the right ingredients on paper. Lana has spent four seasons being positioned as Clark’s primary romantic entanglement, often to the detriment of her own agency, and a storyline that literalizes the way that dynamic drains her could be genuinely interesting. “Thirst” doesn’t pursue that reading. Instead it uses the vampire premise mostly to put Lana in various states of aggression and submission, which is the pattern Kreuk was objecting to in the first place. The heat vision scene — Lana absorbing Clark’s blood and briefly acquiring his powers — is a visual that should be striking, and functionally it is, but the episode doesn’t know what to do with it thematically beyond moving the plot forward.

The post-resolution conversation between Clark and Lana — walking across campus after the antidote has worked, him asking carefully how much she remembers — is actually one of the episode’s quieter successes. Lana saying she remembers biting him, that she felt his love and his strength, and that she misses being with him lands with more weight than the surrounding episode deserves. It’s a small, well-played scene that gestures toward the genuine emotional complexity of the Clark-Lana dynamic without resolving any of it. Which is, in fairness, what this show does with that dynamic in most episodes.

So Does “Thirst” Work?

No. Not really.

It’s not unwatchable — there are enough moving pieces (Fine, Chloe, the occasional decent line reading) that it never completely stalls. But the central premise is underdeveloped, the horror doesn’t work, the comedy doesn’t land, and the Buffy associations it courts so aggressively only serve to remind you of a show that did this kind of thing with significantly more skill and intention. The showrunners were right. The podcast crew was right. This one belongs in the lower tier of the Smallville catalog, and the honest move is to say so while noting the handful of things that work despite everything.

The Buffy meta-commentary is the most interesting lens through which to watch “Thirst” precisely because it makes the failure legible. This is a show that knew what it was adjacent to, reached for it, and couldn’t quite close the distance. That’s a more specific kind of failure than just a bad episode. It’s a missed opportunity that was aware it was missing.

Fine is still great, though. Fine is always great.

What do you remember about “Thirst”? Did the Buffy connections land as fun for you, or did they just underscore the gap? And what did you make of the unreliable narrator theory — is Chloe making all of this up? Let me know in the comments below!