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, “Cyborg” gave us Victor Stone’s origin story stripped down to its emotional core — a young man waking up half-machine, wondering if he was still a person, wondering if the woman he loved could possibly still love what he’d become. It was a better episode than it’s usually given credit for, and Lee Thompson Young made the most of every quiet moment he was given.

This week, Smallville gives us something very different. It gives us a villain-of-the-week episode with a magical jewelry-powered seductress, a hypnotized Clark Kent doing things that are deeply uncomfortable in retrospect, and — tucked inside all of that chaos — the ending of something that’s been building all season long. Clark and Lana finally, definitively, agonizingly break up.

“Hypnotic” is episode 104. It’s messy in places, more uncomfortable in others than the show seems to realize, and it sticks the landing in ways that matter.

The Setup: A Gem and a Plan

Simone Chesterman arrives in Smallville the way most trouble arrives in Smallville: with a smile, a story, and something meteor-adjacent that gives her power over other people. In her case, it’s her father’s amulet — a blue gemstone with hypnotic properties that she almost certainly killed him to obtain. She catches Clark’s eye at the Talon, gestures toward the gem, and just like that, Clark Kent is completely, helplessly enthralled.

What follows is the kind of episode that relies on the audience’s patience with watching beloved characters do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Clark introduces Simone to Lois as his new girlfriend. He takes her back to the farm and demonstrates his powers with cheerful, reckless abandon — super-speeding to Metropolis for champagne, bending a baseball bat into the shape of an S, doing everything short of handing her a laminated card with all his weaknesses on it. And then Lana walks into the loft at exactly the wrong moment, finds Clark and Simone together in a deeply compromising position, and runs out in tears.

Nichole Hiltz plays Simone, and it’s worth spending some time with the performance because the character is more interesting than she might first appear. Hiltz plays her as someone who is fully in control of every room she enters — and who is, underneath that control, genuinely miserable about it. There’s a scene early on where Simone reports back to Lex via closed-circuit television (Lex, wisely, has been conducting this entire operation by video call, specifically to avoid her line of sight) and Hiltz lets something slip in the way Simone says she’s done what was asked and wants to be left alone. She doesn’t want to keep doing this. She’s not evil for the pleasure of it. She’s trapped — by the amulet’s pull on her own life, by Lex’s blackmail, by the fact that her particular power makes genuine human connection essentially impossible. Everyone around her is either enchanted or keeping their eyes carefully averted.

That’s actually a compelling character, and the episode doesn’t entirely waste it. Simone’s final moments — shot through her own amulet after a struggle over Lex’s gun — have a grim symmetry to them. She’s killed by the thing that defined her. Hiltz doesn’t get a lot of space to develop Simone into something more than a plot mechanism, but she finds the loneliness underneath the confidence, and the performance is better for it.

The Part We Should Talk About

Let’s be direct about something the episode is not direct about at all.

What Simone does to Clark is assault. It’s not a gray area, and it’s not a technicality. She uses the amulet to override his will entirely, strips him of any ability to consent or refuse, and then compels him into sexual activity while he has no meaningful agency over what’s happening to him. The episode treats this as dramatic complication. It’s played with the breezy energy of a network TV hypnotism storyline — look at Clark doing ridiculous things, look at him bending the bat, look at him making out with a stranger in the Talon alley.

The Talk Ville podcast, years after the fact, addressed this directly. Michael Rosenbaum, discussing it on the podcast, described what Simone did as essentially rape. The episode itself never arrives at that word or anything close to it. Clark doesn’t process it as something that happened to him. The show doesn’t linger on the violation of it. And in 2006, on the WB, it probably wasn’t going to — that’s not an excuse so much as a context. Smallville was a network drama aimed at teenagers, and a serious, sustained examination of male victimhood in the context of magical sexual coercion was simply not on the table.

But here’s what makes it worth naming in 2026, watching this episode again: Clark spends most of “Hypnotic” as a victim of a manipulation he cannot fight, cannot even recognize while it’s happening, and the show never really gives him the space to reckon with that. It’s not that the episode intends to be breezy about something serious. It’s that it genuinely doesn’t see the serious thing at all. And that gap between what the episode thinks it’s doing and what it’s actually depicting is real, and it’s worth sitting with, even if it doesn’t make “Hypnotic” unwatchable. It just makes it a more complicated watch than the show intended.

Lex’s Long Game

Here’s the detail that recontextualizes the entire episode once you catch it: Simone works for Lex. She always has.

Lex knew about the amulet. He knew what it could do. He specifically deployed Simone at the Talon knowing exactly what would happen. He’s been watching Clark and Lana’s relationship straining under the weight of Clark’s secrets for most of the season — planting doubts, creating distance, working patiently — and “Hypnotic” is the finishing move in a strategy that’s been running quietly for months. When Simone reports that Clark and Lana have broken up, she’s essentially delivering a mission accomplished. And then Lex immediately turns around and tries to send her to Honduras, and when she objects, he blackmails her into compliance. The thoroughness is almost impressive.

What makes this interesting rather than simply villainous is what Rosenbaum does with Lex in the episode’s final minutes. Lana comes to him and tells him about the breakup. Lex is clearly intrigued — but he plays it carefully. He doesn’t gloat. He almost defends Clark. He positions himself as a trusted confidant who happens to be available at exactly the right moment. It’s a chess move dressed up as kindness, and Lana has no reason yet to see the board she’s standing on.

Season five is doing something genuinely interesting with Lex. It’s letting us watch him choose, deliberately and repeatedly, to become the villain — not because he’s been deceived or pushed past a breaking point, but because he’s decided to be. The patience is the most chilling thing about him. Lex doesn’t lose his temper in this episode. He doesn’t make a mistake. He executes a months-long plan against someone who used to be his best friend, watches it succeed, and then calmly pivots to the next objective. That’s not corruption. That’s character.

Honduras (In Brief)

James Marsters shows up in Honduras as Brainiac/Milton Fine, collecting blood samples, incinerating witnesses, and generally advancing the season’s larger mythology in ways that don’t connect to the Simone storyline at all. Marsters is always a compelling presence, and Fine/Brainiac remains one of the more genuinely threatening antagonists the show introduced. But his material in “Hypnotic” is largely table-setting — a reminder that the bigger threat is still out there, still building toward something, even as this episode is busy with its more contained drama. The Honduras plot pays off later. Here it’s a placeholder.

Chloe Does the Actual Work (Again)

A proper word for Allison Mack, who quietly carries more of this episode than the plot gives her credit for. Chloe is the one who immediately knows something is wrong with Clark. She’s the one who investigates Simone’s background and connects the amulet to her father’s death. She’s the one who pockets a piece of kryptonite before heading to the Kent farm. And she’s the one who saves Clark — and Lex, and technically Lois — by slipping that kryptonite into Clark’s pocket while he’s in the process of strangling Lex to death.

The episode notes, almost as a footnote, that ‘Hypnotic’ marks both Allison Mack’s and Annette O’Toole’s 100th appearances — as Chloe Sullivan and Martha Kent respectively. That milestone deserves more than trivia-section treatment. Chloe has been the show’s most consistently reliable character since the pilot — curious and sharp and loyal past the point of reason — and her friendship with Clark is one of the only relationships on this series that has never felt like it’s running out of road. She comes through for him again here, the way she always does, with no expectation of anything in return. A hundred episodes of that is worth celebrating.

Lois gets a good moment too — threatening Simone in the farmhouse with the specific fizzing energy that only Erica Durance can produce, before being flicked unconscious by a hypnotized Clark in what the episode plays for laughs and is, in light of everything we’ve discussed, also kind of a lot. Lois waking up to Martha pointing a shotgun at her is the episode’s funniest bit regardless. “The woman was about to wallpaper her living room with my brain matter” is a perfect Lois line.

The Breakup That Was Always Coming

Here’s the thing about the Clark and Lana breakup in “Hypnotic”: it shouldn’t work emotionally, and it does anyway.

Clark, restored to himself after Chloe’s intervention, meets Lana at the barn. She knows he was under Simone’s control. She knows none of it was really him. She gives him the out explicitly — she tells him she doesn’t want another Clark Kent apology, but she’s clearly leaving space for one. And Clark doesn’t take it.

He tells her his feelings have changed. She asks him to look her in the eye and tell her he doesn’t love her. He does.

It’s a lie — obviously, completely a lie to anyone who has watched this show for five seasons — and Lana knows it’s a lie, and she leaves anyway. Because at some point, the lie stops being the point. What matters is that Clark will always find a reason to push her away. Whether the mechanism is Simone’s amulet or his own stubborn, exhausting inability to trust her with the truth of what he is, the outcome has always been the same. Lana standing on the outside. Clark behind glass, protecting something he can’t even name to her.

Martha says it plainly, the way Martha always does when the show needs someone to say the true thing: he didn’t just break Lana’s heart. He gave her a reason to hate him. And then she wonders aloud whether, somewhere deep down, Clark doesn’t actually believe Lana is the one.

That’s a significant thing to say. And it’s not wrong.

The show has been circling this conclusion since at least season three. Clark loves Lana — genuinely, completely, and at considerable cost to both of them. But love and right for each other have never been the same thing on this series, and the secrets that Clark keeps from Lana aren’t incidental to their relationship. They’re structural. You can’t remove them without the whole thing coming down. The breakup lands because it’s not really about Simone. Simone just cleared the brush and let everyone see what was already there. Lana understood it before Clark did — which is true to both of them — and she made a choice. She’s not being passive. She’s deciding she’s done standing in the doorway waiting for Clark Kent to finally let her in.

That she ends up walking toward Lex — a man who engineered this outcome from the beginning, who is even now positioning himself as her safe harbor — is the show’s way of reminding us that getting out of one painful situation doesn’t mean landing somewhere safe. It just means the board has been reset.

Lex is patient. Clark is alone. Lana is walking toward something she doesn’t yet know is a trap.

Season five has been building toward this rearrangement for a long time. “Hypnotic” is where it finally arrives.

What do you remember about this one? Did the Clark and Lana breakup hit the way the show intended, or did the mechanism feel too contrived for the emotional weight to land? And how do you feel about Simone as a villain — functional plot device, or something more? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!