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, “Vengeance” did something quietly admirable — it followed one of the most emotionally charged episodes in Smallville‘s run and didn’t try to match it. It just sat in the grief and let Clark be human about it. A man who can bend steel, reduced to near-throttling a gang leader over a watch that was never really about the watch. It worked.

This week, we shift focus from Clark’s grief to something the show has been building for five seasons: Chloe Sullivan’s secret. The one she carries in her blood. The one that has a name but no easy answers.

“Tomb” is episode 102, and it is, in the best possible way, an Allison Mack showcase dressed up as a ghost story.

What’s Behind the Wall

The cold open does exactly what a cold open should do — it earns your attention fast and then earns your discomfort. Chloe is in the shower at Lois’s Talon apartment during a thunderstorm. The power goes out. There is, if you’re watching closely, a ghost peering through the shower curtain. And then Chloe steps out, sees a bloodied girl pleading for help, and screams.

Lois rushes in. Chloe is crouched in a corner, wrists cut, asking for help. She doesn’t remember anything.

The setup works because the show has enough history with Chloe to make the immediate assumption — that this might be a mental health crisis — genuinely plausible. Her mother, Moira Sullivan, is institutionalized. That fact has hovered at the margins of Chloe’s story since early in the series, mentioned and then carefully, deliberately not mentioned again. “Tomb” brings it back to center stage, and it does so by putting Chloe in precisely the scenario she’s spent years dreading: being the girl in the hospital who everyone suspects might be broken in a way that can’t be fixed.

That’s the real engine of this episode. Not the ghost — though the ghost is a good ghost, as ghosts in procedural-adjacent genre shows go. The engine is Chloe Sullivan being confronted, involuntarily and very publicly, with the thing she’s been most afraid of about herself.

Allison Mack, Working Overtime

Here is where the post has to stop and acknowledge what Allison Mack is actually doing in “Tomb,” because she is doing a lot of it, and she is doing most of it exceptionally well.

The episode asks her to play Chloe in at least three distinct registers: frightened and disbelieved Chloe, possessed-and-not-herself Chloe, and finally, at the end, Chloe who has come out the other side of something and is trying to figure out what it means. That’s a tidy dramatic arc for one actress across one episode, and Mack navigates it without making any of the transitions feel like gear-grinding.

The frightened-and-disbelieved stretch in the hospital is the quietest and, arguably, the most affecting. There’s a scene where Chloe tries to tell her doctor about the bloody footprints only she can see, gets increasingly agitated as he refuses to engage, and eventually has to be sedated. The frustration is completely believable — she knows what she saw, she knows she didn’t cut her own wrists, and she is surrounded by people whose professional training is leading them to exactly the wrong conclusion. Mack plays it hot, then desperate, then defeated. It’s a good sequence.

Then she gets possessed.

The possessed-Chloe section is where the episode lets Mack do something genuinely different. Gretchen Winters, the girl whose spirit has taken up temporary residence in Chloe’s body, is not Chloe. She moves differently, speaks differently, processes the world differently. There’s a jitteriness to the performance — nail-biting, erratic emotional shifts, a kind of hollow intensity in the eyes — that reads as distinctly not-Chloe even while wearing Chloe’s face. It’s the sort of acting trick that sounds straightforward in a pitch meeting and is much harder to execute in practice without tipping into parody.

Mack doesn’t tip. She finds a version of the character that is clearly alien to the Chloe we know while remaining grounded enough to track. When possessed-Chloe arrives at Lana’s dorm, asks to borrow her own stun gun, and then uses it on Lex — who, to his credit, had genuinely good intentions in this scene — it reads as someone operating on different emotional software entirely. The move to stun Lex isn’t Chloe’s calculus. It’s Gretchen’s. And Mack has calibrated the performance carefully enough that you can feel the difference.

There is also, buried in the middle of the episode, a small moment that could easily be missed: the scene where Gretchen-as-Chloe sees herself in a mirror and sees Gretchen’s face looking back. It’s a brief beat, visually efficient, and Mack’s reaction to it — this flash of recognition that is somehow both the character and not the character — is better than the scene technically requires.

The Ghost as Mirror

Gretchen Winters is, in narrative terms, doing double duty. She’s the mystery to be solved — killed by Michael Westmore ten years ago, sealed in the wall of the Talon, waiting to be found — and she’s also a mirror for Chloe in the way that the best genre-episode guest characters tend to function.

Gretchen was a girl who couldn’t get anyone to help her. Whose suffering went unwitnessed. Who died in a place where she shouldn’t have been, and was quietly walled up and forgotten. The reason she chooses Chloe — and Clark’s explanation at the end, that Gretchen chose Chloe because Chloe cares more about other people than anyone else he knows, is one of the sweeter things Clark says all season — is that Chloe is the kind of person who, if she saw a girl no one else could see, would not simply decide she was imagining things and go back to bed.

That instinct, that reflexive inability to let someone else’s pain go unaddressed, is one of the most consistent and appealing things about Chloe Sullivan as a character. And “Tomb” uses it to do something kind of structurally elegant: the episode is Chloe being haunted by a girl whose death was ignored, while simultaneously being a girl whose distress is being ignored. The parallel is drawn without being underlined in red ink, which is the right choice.

Michael Westmore himself, as a villain, is serviceable rather than memorable. He’s creepy in the way small-town procedural antagonists often are — the orderly who’s been at the hospital too long, whose father managed the Talon when it was still a theater, who makes kryptonite-gem bracelets as a hobby and also murders young women. Damon Johnson plays the role with commitment, and the basement sequence where he forces Lois to choose between her life and Chloe’s is effective as tension-generation. But he’s not a villain who gets under your skin the way the best Smallville antagonists do. He’s a mechanism for getting the characters to the moment where Gretchen’s spirit can find its resolution.

That resolution — Gretchen leaving Chloe’s body, entering Westmore’s, and then using his body to end things — is a satisfying piece of genre economy. The ghost gets justice. The villain is undone. Clark is saved from the kryptonite bracelet’s proximity effect. It’s tidy in a way that genre shows earn the right to be when they’ve done the slower, messier emotional work earlier in the episode.

The Subplots, Briefly

“Tomb” has a couple of peripheral plot threads that don’t demand much but keep the season’s larger machinery turning.

Martha’s subplot — Lionel Luthor letting himself in through the back door to ask whether she’s considering Jonathan’s Senate seat — is more unsettling than it probably intends to be, and entirely because of how John Glover plays the scene. Lionel’s condolences land somewhere between genuine and predatory, and the show is smart enough to let that ambiguity sit. Martha’s discomfort is warranted. So is her request that he use the front door next time. The Senate seat question is worth noting because it will matter, but the scene’s real function is to remind us that Lionel Luthor’s idea of keeping a respectful distance is to simply walk in anyway and be charming about it.

The Lex-and-Lana thread does something more substantive. Lex, on the phone angrily demanding that someone locate Professor Fine (Brainiac is out there doing something, this season keeps reminding us), is interrupted by a shaken Lana asking for his help with Chloe’s situation. He agrees, immediately and with what reads as genuine concern, to get her better doctors. Clark, of course, breaks Chloe out before that can happen — which puts Lex in the position of being, objectively, the more measured option in this particular situation, at least for a moment.

The episode is careful to note that this is exactly what Lex wants Clark to notice. He marks it for Clark explicitly: Lana came to him. Not her boyfriend. Him. This is Lex’s long game in action — not dramatic manipulation so much as patient observation, filing away the places where Clark’s instincts and Lana’s needs don’t quite line up, and waiting.

The Ending That Earns Its Weight

Clark and Chloe’s final conversation is where the episode cashes its emotional check, and it lands cleanly. Chloe doesn’t understand why Gretchen chose her. Clark tells her it’s because she cares about people. And then Chloe, with the kind of quiet dread that Allison Mack has always been good at, says: “What if I look into her eyes and see myself?”

She’s not talking about Gretchen.

Clark’s response is direct and not unkind: visit before it’s too late. And Chloe does.

The final scene — Chloe arriving at her mother’s facility, and the two of them embracing wordlessly — is a small scene that the episode has quietly been working toward since the cold open. Moira Sullivan, barely glimpsed, barely acknowledged for most of the series, finally gets to exist in the same physical space as her daughter. No dialogue. Just the embrace, and the fact of it.

It’s the earned moment the episode deserves, and it’s also, for anyone paying attention to where this season is going, a bridge. Moira Sullivan will matter again. The fact that Chloe has finally walked through that door — literally and emotionally — is setup, even if it doesn’t announce itself as such.

For now, what matters is that Chloe Sullivan, who has spent five seasons helping everyone else find their way out of impossible situations, finally let someone help her find her way to the door she was too afraid to open. The ghost in the wall had to possess her body to make it happen. That’s a very Smallville solution to a very Smallville kind of emotional avoidance. And it works.

The Bottom Line

“Tomb” is not a landmark episode in the way that “Reckoning” is a landmark episode. It doesn’t carry the weight of a milestone, and it isn’t trying to. What it is instead is exactly what the middle stretch of a strong season needs: a character-driven genre episode that takes its emotional stakes seriously, gives its lead actress something genuinely interesting to do, and advances the season’s longer arcs without making a production of it.

Allison Mack carries it. The ghost earns its place. The mother gets her moment. And Chloe Sullivan walks through a door she’s been standing outside for years.

That’s enough. More than enough, actually.

What do you remember about “Tomb”? Did possessed-Chloe register as a different performance to you, or did it blur together on first viewing? And did the Chloe-and-her-mother thread pay off the way you hoped when Season Six finally revisited it? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!