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, “Solitude” delivered on the promise of “Splinter” and then some — James Marsters finally unmasked as full Brainiac, Martha Kent in genuine peril, Chloe Sullivan saving the day with a Fortress teleport she definitely did not plan in advance. It was a tight, purposeful hour that used Clark’s emotional vulnerabilities as a weapon and made the case that Season Five knows exactly what kind of show it wants to be.

“Lexmas” is the follow-up, and it is a very different kind of episode.

Where “Solitude” operated on the level of mythology and momentum — Zod at the door, Brainiac’s patience finally cashing out — “Lexmas” pumps the brakes, steps away from the season’s central conflict almost entirely, and asks a quieter, more melancholy question: What if Lex Luthor had simply chosen differently? It’s a Christmas episode. It’s an It’s a Wonderful Life riff. It’s an extended meditation on the soul of a man who still — right up until the final scene — could have gone either way.

And it works. Not as a continuation of the season’s narrative drive, but as something more like a pause button pressed at exactly the right moment. A eulogy for the Lex Luthor who could have been.

The Setup: One Bad Night in an Alley

Before the dream sequences begin, “Lexmas” gives us a very brief, very efficient portrait of where Lex is at this point in the season. He’s hired a fixer named Griff to dig up — or manufacture — dirt on Jonathan Kent, who is running against Lex for State Senate. Lex hasn’t pulled the trigger yet. He gives himself 24 hours. And then a mugger shoots him in an alley and leaves him for dead, which is Smallville‘s version of a universe tapping you on the shoulder and saying, maybe reconsider.

It’s a functional setup. The alley scene is quick and a little pulpy, which is appropriate because it’s not really the point — it’s just the mechanism that gets Lex into a hospital bed and, from there, into the dream. The episode knows this. It doesn’t linger. It gets Lex horizontal and unconscious and then moves immediately to the thing it actually came here to do.

The Ghost of Lillian Luthor

Here is where the episode earns its emotional credibility, and it does so through a character who technically isn’t alive: Lillian Luthor, Lex’s deceased mother, materialized in his coma dream as something between a guardian angel and a Greek chorus.

Alisen Down plays Lillian with an aching, quiet grief that the role requires. She isn’t here to deliver speeches. She isn’t here to condemn or validate. She’s a mother watching her son stand at a crossroads and understanding, with the resigned clarity that only the dead seem to have in these stories, that she can show him the road but she cannot make him take it. The warmth in her scenes with Rosenbaum is real. So is the sorrow. There’s a specific kind of pain in the way she looks at Lex throughout the dream sequence — the look of someone who knows how this ends and cannot change it.

The decision to use Lillian as the episode’s guide rather than, say, a straightforward omniscient narrator or a classic Smallville meteor freak of the week, is the best creative choice the episode makes. Lex’s relationship with his father is the dominant psychological fact of his life on this show. His relationship with his mother is its shadow — equally important, far less examined, and in some ways more devastating precisely because of how little she gets to appear. Lillian’s love for Lex is uncomplicated in a way that nothing else in his life ever has been. Bringing her back here, in this context, is the show’s way of saying: he was loved. It was real. He had something to hold onto, if he’d been willing.

The structure she provides — this is what your life could look like, you can have this, but you must choose it — is the episode’s engine, and it’s a structure borrowed from stories far older than this one. It’s Dickens. It’s Capra. It’s myth. “Lexmas” knows exactly what genre it’s working in, and rather than apologizing for it or trying to subvert it, the episode commits fully. That commitment is why it works.

Michael Rosenbaum Carries the World

Let’s be direct about something: “Lexmas” is Michael Rosenbaum’s finest hour on this show, and this is a show on which he has been consistently excellent for five seasons.

What Rosenbaum has to do in this episode is technically and emotionally demanding in ways that are easy to underestimate. He’s playing Lex in three distinct registers simultaneously. There’s the waking Lex — calculating, politically ambitious, on the verge of crossing a line he’s been approaching for years. There’s the dream Lex — genuinely, vulnerably happy in a way we almost never see, a man who has been stripped of his father’s money and expectations and discovered, to his own apparent surprise, that he can live with that. And then there’s Lex in the dream’s final act — watching his wife die, begging his father for help, receiving nothing, and having to process the full weight of a loss that Lionel’s cruelty made preventable.

Each version is recognizably the same person. None of them tips into caricature. And the transitions between them — as Lex moves in and out of consciousness throughout the episode — are handled with a fluidity that keeps the emotional throughline clear even when the episode is jumping between timelines and registers.

The dream Lex is the most affecting. Rosenbaum plays happiness with an almost cautious quality, like a man who suspects it can’t last, who keeps touching the edges of this life to make sure it’s real. He’s charmed by his son. He’s tender with Lana. He marvels at being liked — genuinely liked, not deferred to — by Jonathan Kent. There’s a lightness to him that we almost never see in the waking version of this character, and Rosenbaum earns every moment of it. When that lightness collapses — when Lana starts hemorrhaging after the baby arrives and Lex runs to Lionel and Lionel looks at his own son and says, essentially, not my problem — the crash lands with genuine force because Rosenbaum has spent the episode making us believe in what Lex almost had.

That final scene in the alley, when a recovered Lex tells Griff to find it or fake it and do whatever it takes — the episode’s true ending — hits harder than it might have precisely because of everything that preceded it. We watched a man be shown a better life. We watched him decide it wasn’t enough.

The Road Not Taken, and the Man Who Couldn’t Take It

“Lexmas” is operating in the tradition of It’s a Wonderful Life and the more recent The Family Man, both of which use the same basic structure: give a man a glimpse of the life he forfeited by his choices, see if the glimpse changes him. What makes “Lexmas” more tragic than either of those stories is that Lex’s alternate life isn’t exactly an idyllic fantasy. He’s poor — relatively speaking, by Luthor standards, which is to say merely comfortable. He’s estranged from his father. He loses his wife in childbirth. The dream life Lillian is showing him as the good option involves genuine loss and hardship.

And Lex still can’t choose it.

That’s the detail that distinguishes this episode from a simple It’s a Wonderful Life retread, and it’s worth sitting with. George Bailey’s vision was of a world worse without him. Lex’s vision is of a world in which he is genuinely loved, genuinely respected, genuinely good — and it’s not enough. Not because the life is bad, but because Lex can’t get past the loss at the end of it. He watched Lana die. He watched Lionel refuse to help. And his conclusion is not Lionel is the problem but rather this is what love costs, and power is the only thing that can protect against that cost.

He is not wrong about what he sees. He is catastrophically wrong about what it means.

Lillian’s grief in that final moment — her reflection in the window, crying as Lex tells Griff to destroy Jonathan Kent — is the episode’s most devastating image. She showed him everything. He understood none of it. And the version of Lex who could have been Senator Kent’s most admired friend, who could have raised Alexander and Lily in a house without a throne room, simply ceases to be possible. He was always right there. And now he’s gone.

This is the show finally, fully, and irreversibly committing to Lex as a villain — not because he’s evil in some cartoonish, cackling sense, but because he has made a choice in full view of the alternative, and the choice is to be his father’s son after all. It’s a Greek tragedy dressed up in Christmas lights, and it works because the show has spent five seasons making us believe in both the darkness Lex is choosing and the man he could have been.

The Other Half of the Episode: Clark, Chloe, and a Man in a Red Suit

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that “Lexmas” does have a Clark subplot, because Smallville is constitutionally incapable of allowing Lex to have an episode entirely to himself. Clark and Chloe spend the episode delivering toys for Tots for Tots in Metropolis because Chloe’s Teamsters went on strike — which is a sentence that exists in this television series — and Clark uses his super speed to cover thousands of deliveries in a single evening.

The subplot is warm, light, and cheerfully uncomplicated. It’s the eggnog to Lex’s scotch. There’s a man in a Santa Claus costume Clark talks off a ledge, who later appears at the Daily Planet to help Chloe with the remaining gifts and then vanishes with them into thin air, and the episode lets Chloe suggest that maybe, possibly, that was actually Santa. Clark and Lana share their first real Christmas together in the final scene. It snows.

None of this is the point of the episode, and it doesn’t need to be. It functions as breath — light air between the heavier passages of Lex’s tragedy. The contrast is deliberate and effective. While Clark is zip-delivering bicycles and talking a sad drunk off a building and earning a magical assist from what might literally be Santa Claus, Lex is receiving a supernatural vision of everything he could be and choosing to discard it. The Christmas spirit is alive and well on the Kent side of this story. On the Luthor side, it never really had a chance.

So Does “Lexmas” Work?

Yes — differently than the episodes surrounding it, but genuinely and on its own terms.

“Lexmas” is a detour from the season’s mythology, and it knows it. It’s not trying to advance the Brainiac plot or develop Clark’s powers or resolve anything that was left hanging in “Solitude.” What it’s trying to do is give Lex Luthor his proper moment of damnation — a scene where the audience sees him look directly at who he could be and choose, consciously and with full information, to become someone else instead. That’s not a small thing to accomplish. That’s the character’s defining act, and the show handles it with more grace and more genuine sadness than it probably had to.

Rosenbaum is exceptional. Down provides the emotional anchor the episode needs. The It’s a Wonderful Life framework is borrowed without apology, and the show earns that borrowing by making Lex’s version of the story genuinely darker and more tragic than its source material.

The Lex Luthor we’ve been watching for five seasons — ambitious, dangerous, forever hovering on the edge — made his choice in an alley on Christmas Eve. Lillian’s reflection wept in the window. And the show that has been keeping Lex’s soul theoretically in play since the pilot quietly, finally, closed that particular door.

Happy holidays, Lex.

What do you remember about “Lexmas”? Does Lex’s final choice feel earned after everything the show has built, or does it arrive too abruptly? And what did you make of the Clark and Chloe subplot — charming holiday palette cleanser, or an awkward tonal mismatch? Let me know in the comments below!