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, “Thirst” earned its reputation as one of Smallville‘s more troubled hours — a vampire sorority premise that couldn’t survive the Buffy comparisons it was actively courting, held together mostly by James Marsters doing excellent work in the margins and Chloe Sullivan finally landing at the Daily Planet. The showrunners themselves called it one of their worst. The TalkVille crew suggested it might actually be worse than “Ageless.” It was not a good time.

“Exposed” is a different kind of episode entirely. It is not a good time either, exactly, but it’s also not a disaster — it’s something more frustrating and more interesting than that. It’s an episode that has genuine things going for it, makes some legitimately fun choices, and then undercuts itself at nearly every turn with a villain who barely registers and a central plot device that the episode isn’t quite sure how to handle. It’s middling, but it’s a specific, occasionally entertaining kind of middling, which puts it in a different tier than last week’s mess. Different flavor, same general altitude.

Let’s talk about what it gets right, what it gets wrong, and the elephant in the room that is wearing very little clothing.

Two Good Ol’ Boys Walk Into a Scene

Before we get to Lois on a pole — and we will get there — it’s worth spending a moment on the casting choice that is quietly the most interesting thing about this episode.

Senator Jack Jennings is played by Tom Wopat.

If that name doesn’t immediately register alongside John Schneider’s, here is the relevant background: Tom Wopat and John Schneider spent six seasons playing Luke and Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard, which ran on CBS from 1979 to 1985 and was, for a significant stretch of that run, one of the most-watched shows on American television. These two men, as characters, were cousins who drove recklessly through the dirt roads of Hazzard County in a Dodge Charger and got into trouble on a weekly basis.

In “Exposed,” Jonathan Kent’s oldest friend rolls up to the Kent farm in a Dodge Charger. Lex, confronting Jonathan, drops a reference to “Good Ol’ Boys.” The episode is absolutely aware of what it’s doing.

This kind of meta-casting doesn’t always work — sometimes it’s more clever in concept than in execution, a wink that lands awkwardly in practice. Here it works, for a few reasons. Wopat and Schneider have genuine warmth together, the kind of easy, lived-in chemistry that you can’t manufacture with two actors who’ve just met. Their scenes feel like old friends, which is exactly what the episode needs them to feel like. When Jonathan is blindsided by the revelation of Jennings’ affair, you buy the hurt because the friendship reads as real. And when Jennings ultimately decides to withdraw from the race rather than drag everyone through the mud, the scene has weight precisely because Wopat has built enough goodwill that you don’t want him to be the villain — even when the evidence is pointing in that direction.

It’s also worth noting that the casting serves the episode’s political subplot in ways that go beyond nostalgia. Jennings is introduced as the kind of old-guard, handshake-politics figure that Jonathan respects and understands. Lex, by contrast, represents a new and colder model of political operation — one that runs phone logs rather than favors, that lets the press find the scandal rather than getting his own hands dirty. The Dukes of Hazzard undercurrent shades Jennings as a man from an older, simpler era of doing things, and it makes the gap between him and Lex feel like more than just ideology.

The episode doesn’t fully capitalize on this — it rarely has the room, given everything else it’s trying to do — but it’s there, and it’s good.

Lex Luthor, Running for Senate

The political dimension of Season Five has been building quietly, and “Exposed” is the episode where it steps fully into the light.

Lex is running for State Senate against Jennings. That’s not a throwaway detail — it’s the beginning of a transformation the show has been pointing at since the pilot, the moment when Lex’s ambitions stop being about business and start being about power in a more direct and visible form. And the way the episode handles Lex in this context is one of its genuine successes.

Lex in this episode is not the villain, exactly. He’s doing things Jonathan finds uncomfortable — running phone logs, watching Jennings’ campaign for exploitable weaknesses — but he’s not manufacturing the scandal. He checks out the photograph and reports what he finds. He alerts Jonathan rather than the press. When Clark shows up at the mansion to accuse him of planting evidence, Lex denies it credibly, gives Clark a VIP pass to the Windgate, and doesn’t make a production of doing so. He’s being politically ruthless, but he’s being honest about it in a way that the good guys, with their shock and their righteous outrage, aren’t quite ready to acknowledge.

Rosenbaum is playing this with a precision that the episode’s broader plot doesn’t deserve. Lex is in full calculation mode — every scene, every line is part of a longer game — and yet he’s also demonstrably more useful to Clark in this episode than Jonathan or Jennings or anyone pretending at moral clarity. That’s the uncomfortable place the show is putting Lex in right now, and Rosenbaum inhabits it without letting the character tip into either villainy or sympathy. It’s a tightrope performance in what is, functionally, a fairly lightweight episode.

Jonathan’s arc here carries an additional layer of significance that the episode plants almost as an afterthought, in the final scenes. After the dust has settled and Jennings has announced his withdrawal, the Senator turns to Jonathan and suggests he’s the one who should be running. It’s a brief moment and the show doesn’t linger on it — but those of us who know where this season is going understand that the seed being planted here will matter. A lot. The show is building toward something with Jonathan, and this is one of the early bricks in that foundation.

Lois Lane, Exotic Dancer, Reluctant Hero

Here’s where we have to be both honest and fair, because “Exposed” doesn’t make it easy to be both at the same time.

The central plot of this episode is that Lois Lane goes undercover as a stripper to investigate a murder at an upscale gentleman’s club, gets kidnapped by a human trafficker with diplomatic immunity, and has to be rescued from a rooftop helipad. Along the way, Clark shows up in a suit and tie, orders a Coke “straight up, on the rocks,” and watches the whole thing with the expression of a man who has wandered into someone else’s nightmare and cannot find the exit.

On paper, this is exactly the kind of absurdist premise that Smallville can pull off when it’s firing on all cylinders — the kind of thing that works because the show is in on the joke and everyone involved is committing fully. And to her credit, Erica Durance commits. The awkward dance routine, the laser-focused discomfort when she spots Clark in the audience, the lap-dance-as-cover-for-espionage scene that is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds — Durance plays all of it with the energy of someone who has decided that if she’s going to do this, she’s going to do it all the way.

The problem, and it’s worth acknowledging, is that Durance herself has talked about this episode with some reservations. On the TalkVille podcast in 2024, she mentioned being nervous about the pole dancing scene — it was her first time doing anything like it on stage, and she was raised in a conservative environment. More significantly, she noted that the original conception of Lois’s dance was intended to be comedic, but the producers stripped out the comedy before it aired, leaving behind something that inadvertently became more objectifying than it was supposed to be. That’s a meaningful distinction. The difference between “Lois Lane is bad at dancing and it’s funny” and “Lois Lane is dancing for your viewing enjoyment” is the difference between the show being in on the joke and the show being the joke — and without the comedic framing, the scene lands closer to the latter.

Durance is clear that she was okay with it at the time, and she’s not trying to rewrite history. But the context shifts how you watch the sequence. The instinct to read Lois’s undercover stint as pure fun is understandable, and it’s not entirely wrong — there are genuinely funny moments in the episode, and the Clark-Lois dynamic in the club is exactly the kind of awkward, combustible chemistry that makes their relationship worth following. It’s just that the episode could have been funnier and less uncomfortable if it had trusted its own premise a little more.

What the episode does do well, within these limits, is use the scenario to advance the Clark-Lois dynamic in meaningful ways. The lap dance scene — Lois straddling Clark’s chair and whispering questions while he tries to maintain a dignified expression — is genuinely good. The closing exchange, where Lois threatens to expose his Elmer Fudd nightlight if he tells anyone about the lap dance, lands as a warm beat in a relationship that’s still figuring out its register. These two are not yet what they will become, but “Exposed” does the work of building the architecture of their dynamic: the bickering, the mutual reluctant respect, the gradual recognition that they function better as a team than either of them wants to admit.

The Part That Doesn’t Work

Mr. Lyon is not a memorable villain.

He doesn’t need to be, exactly — “Exposed” is not a villain-driven episode, and the human trafficking operation is more of a plot mechanism than a genuine antagonist showcase. But there’s a specific way in which Lyon fails that’s worth naming: the episode builds toward his capture with some legitimate momentum, Clark yanking a helicopter off a rooftop is a solid action beat, and then Maggie Sawyer shows up and informs everyone that Lyon walks free because his father has diplomatic immunity.

This is presented as commentary on the criminal justice system — an acknowledgment that the real world has frustrating limitations that super-hearing and helicopter-catching can’t always overcome. Lois punches him anyway, which is both cathartic and accurate to her character. And the episode does resolve the loose end by confirming, in its final scene, that Interpol arrested Lyon upon his return to Europe thanks to an anonymous tip.

But the diplomatic immunity beat still lands as a cop-out rather than a meaningful observation. It’s the episode gesturing at moral complexity without doing the work of earning it. “The system is broken sometimes” is a fine theme; it just needs more than a throwaway scene to register as anything other than a convenient way to get Lyon out of the frame before the closing credits. Smallville has done more interesting things with its antagonists even in lesser episodes than this. Lyon barely rises to the level of obstacle, let alone threat.

The episode’s other notable absence is the bulk of its main cast. Lana, Martha, and Lionel all go unseen — Lana, notably, for the first time in the show’s run. This is less a criticism than an observation: “Exposed” operates as a smaller, more self-contained story, and the trimmed cast reflects that. It doesn’t hurt the episode to lose Lana or Lionel for a week. It does mean the episode has fewer resources to draw on when it needs to be something more than a fun procedural lark.

The Byline and the Barn

Two small things worth noting before we close.

Chloe ends the episode having broken her first real story at the Daily Planet. It’s a quiet payoff — the byline appears in the final scene, page 73, bottom of the page, exactly where you’d expect a first byline to land — and it works in the context of what “Thirst” set up. Chloe earned her internship under difficult circumstances and in a chaotic episode; she earns her first story in an episode that’s much less chaotic, doing the actual work of journalism alongside Clark. Allison Mack plays the moment with the right amount of pride without overselling it. It’s a small victory handled with appropriate smallness, which is exactly right.

And then there’s Jonathan and Clark in the barn, processing Jennings’ departure. It’s a brief scene and it doesn’t do anything flashy, but John Schneider is reliably good at these quiet moments — the conversations between father and son that don’t announce themselves as important but that accumulate meaning over the course of a season. Jennings has withdrawn from the race. Lex Luthor is still running. The suggestion that Jonathan might be the right person to step into the breach has been made and not yet answered.

We know what’s coming, even if Jonathan doesn’t. The barn scenes hit differently when you’re watching with that knowledge.

So Does “Exposed” Work?

Partially. Unevenly. With caveats.

It’s not the show at anything close to its best, but it’s also a more functional hour than “Thirst” in most of the ways that matter. The Clark-Lois chemistry carries real weight. The Lex political subplot is handled with more care than the episode probably deserves. Tom Wopat and John Schneider bring something genuinely warm to material that easily could have been throwaway. And the episode has a sense of humor about itself, even when the execution doesn’t fully back up the instinct.

The villain is forgettable, the diplomatic immunity resolution is a cop-out, and the central conceit would have worked better with the comedic framing it was apparently designed to have. But there are enough pieces working that “Exposed” earns a passing grade on effort if not on execution.

Different flavor of middling than last week. Not the worst place to land.

What do you remember about “Exposed”? Did the Lois undercover plot land as fun, or did it leave you a little cold? And how do you feel about the Lex Senate storyline building in the background — is it something you were tracking at the time, or did it register more on rewatch? Let me know in the comments below!