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, “Hypnotic” gave us Clark Kent completely stripped of his agency by a hypnotic amulet, a villain with genuine loneliness under her seductive surface, and the definitive end of Clark and Lana’s relationship — the one that had been coming apart at the seams since before it began. Lana walked away. Clark let her go. And Lex Luthor, who had engineered the whole outcome from a safe distance, calmly pivoted to the next phase of his plan. We left off with the board rearranged and everyone moving into new positions.

“Void” — the 105th episode of Smallville and the 17th of Season Five — doesn’t let anyone catch their breath. It picks up the emotional wreckage of that breakup and asks a harder question than “will they get back together?” It asks: what do you do with the shape of someone that’s missing from your life? And the answer it gives — for Lana, for Lex, and eventually for Clark — is that the void left behind is dangerous. Because it can be filled with almost anything.

The Drug That Isn’t Really About a Drug

The episode’s central premise sounds, on paper, like a standard Smallville meteor-freak-adjacent complication: a medical student named Lance has developed a kryptonite-based serum that temporarily flat-lines the user, inducing a near-death state in which they can communicate with dead loved ones. It is, structurally, a Smallville-ized version of the 1990 film Flatliners. The Wikipedia notes on this episode even acknowledge the resemblance directly, and it’s not subtle. The show isn’t pretending otherwise.

But here’s where “Void” earns its title rather than just borrowing it: the drug plot isn’t really about the drug. It’s about grief. It’s about loneliness. And it’s about the way that emptiness, when it goes unaddressed long enough, stops being something a person lives with and starts being something they’ll do anything to escape.

Lana Lang has been grieving her parents since she was three years old. That’s not a subplot — it’s the foundational wound of her entire character. She grew up defined by absence, raised on the periphery of a community that always kept one eye on the Kents’ adopted alien boy, falling for a person who held her close with one hand and pushed her away with the other for five years. The Clark and Lana breakup in “Hypnotic” didn’t just end a relationship. For Lana, it confirmed something she’s suspected her entire life: that people leave, that love is insufficient protection, and that she is fundamentally alone.

So she goes looking for the only two people who have never been able to leave — and who never chose to.

Kristin Kreuk does some of her best work in this episode. The desperation underneath Lana’s composed surface has always been there, but “Void” lets it come fully forward. There’s a scene early on where she’s negotiating with Lance for a longer session, and Kreuk plays it with a kind of quiet recklessness that’s more unsettling than any amount of dramatic crying. She’s not falling apart. She’s just decided that this is what she needs, and she’s going to get it. The composure is the scary part. It’s the face of someone who has stopped weighing costs.

The addiction element — Ally, who has clearly done this enough times that she’s deteriorating, who dies partway through the episode — is the show’s way of showing Lana where this road leads. It’s not subtle about it. But “Void” doesn’t need to be subtle about the destination to be honest about why someone starts walking.

Clark and Jonathan: The Conversation That Needed to Happen

Here’s where the episode earns its emotional weight in full.

Clark ends up injected with the kryptonite-laced serum during the confrontation with Lance — not because he chose it, but because he was trying to save Lana and got the syringe for his trouble. He flat-lines. And in the space between here and gone, waiting in the warm light of the Kent barn, he finds Jonathan.

John Schneider has appeared in Smallville since the pilot. Jonathan Kent was the moral compass of the series, the kind of father that Clark — and the audience — measured everything else against. His death in “Reckoning,” the 100th episode of the series, was the single most seismic event the show had produced to that point. Jonathan died from a heart attack following a confrontation with Lionel Luthor after winning a state senate race against Lex — a win that brought Lionel circling, and a confrontation that Jonathan’s heart simply couldn’t survive. The show has been living in the shadow of that absence ever since.

Five episodes later, Clark finally gets to stand in front of his father again.

And what Schneider does with the scene is exactly right. Jonathan doesn’t tell Clark what he wants to hear. He doesn’t reassure him that everything is fine, that Clark’s grief is proportionate, that the choices Clark has made since his death were the right ones. He tells Clark what he needs to hear: that he has to go back. That there’s a threat — Lionel Luthor knows Clark’s secret, all of it — and that the world needs Clark in it. And then, because Jonathan Kent has always understood that his son needs more than instructions, he tells Clark he’s proud of him. That he’s not to blame. That none of what happened was Clark’s fault.

It’s five minutes of television, and it lands like a gut punch every single time.

The genius of staging this moment inside Clark’s drug-induced near-death experience is that the show doesn’t have to resolve whether any of it is “real.” The Smallville wiki’s notes on the episode are careful to leave it open: the limbo drug may be connecting users to the actual afterlife, or it may be generating visions based on the user’s deepest knowledge and desires. The show doesn’t answer that question. But it doesn’t need to. What matters is that Clark wakes up having been reminded of who he is and what he’s supposed to be doing. Whether that came from Jonathan’s actual spirit or from Clark’s own understanding of his father — the result is the same. Clark needed his dad. One way or another, he got him.

Jonathan’s final line — “I’ll always be with you, son. Always.” — shouldn’t work as hard as it does. It’s the kind of thing that could tip into greeting-card territory without much effort. But Schneider earns it. He always did.

Lex and Lillian: The Warning That Won’t Be Heeded

If the Clark and Jonathan scene is the episode’s heart, the Lex and Lillian scene is its conscience — and the most interesting thing about it is that Lex doesn’t have one.

Lex gets pulled into the limbo drug by accident. Lance injects him during a struggle, and Lex wakes up at his grand piano to find his mother Lillian — played with restrained grief by Alisen Down — working her way through Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat Major. Lex immediately notes that he must be dreaming. Lillian, calmly, points out that the last time they were together in a space like this, Lex was dying. She would know.

What follows is the show’s most honest accounting of what Lex Luthor is becoming. Lillian doesn’t console him. She doesn’t tell him she loves him and that she’s proud. She does the opposite — she confronts him with the full weight of the path he’s on. She tells him what he did to get to her: he was shot coming out of a meeting with a man he’d hired to destroy Jonathan Kent’s reputation so Lex could win a Senate seat. She tells him that the path he’s chosen is going to hurt — not just him, but others. Many others. She begs him to stop before that blood becomes irreversible.

Lex wakes up and immediately lies about it.

When Lana comes to apologize to him later in the episode — for stealing his car, for the chaos her near-death spiral caused — Lex sits at the piano playing the same Schubert piece Lillian was playing in the afterlife. And when Lana asks what his mother said to him, Lex tells her that Lillian was proud of the man he was becoming.

It’s the most revealing moment of character in the entire episode. Lex Luthor has just been shown, by his own dead mother, the full horror of where he’s headed. He heard every word. And his first move is to weaponize the encounter — to use Lillian’s memory as a tool to build Lana’s trust and draw her closer. He doesn’t even need to think about it. The lie comes that easily.

Season five has been doing something remarkable with Lex, and “Void” is one of the clearest examples of it. The show isn’t depicting a man who has been pushed into villainy by circumstance or betrayal. It’s depicting a man who has been offered every possible off-ramp — his mother’s love, his best friend’s loyalty, the full knowledge of what he’s doing to the people around him — and has chosen, repeatedly and deliberately, to keep driving. The patience of Lex’s corruption is what makes it so chilling. He’s not being consumed. He’s deciding.

Lana tells him his mother should be proud. And Lex says nothing.

Chloe and the Mythology Threads

A brief word on the episode’s two other significant moving pieces, because both are doing important work.

Chloe continues to be the show’s most indispensable supporting character. She’s the one who spots Milton Fine in a photograph from Honduras and realizes he may still be alive despite what the gang believed after “Solitude.” She’s the one tracking Lana’s movements, putting the pieces together, and ultimately helping to revive Lex after Lance injects him. This is what Chloe does — she holds the information and the relationships together while everyone else is in freefall. Allison Mack makes it look effortless, which means the audience sometimes misses how much lifting the character is actually doing.

Clark’s brief trip to Honduras confirms that Fine’s ship has been there — there’s a massive scorched mark where it landed, and a carved wooden toy in the shape of the spacecraft in the hands of a local boy. It’s table-setting, not payoff. But James Marsters’ Milton Fine/Brainiac has been one of the most compelling presences of this season, and “Void” makes clear that whatever he’s been building toward in the jungle, it isn’t finished. The threat is still growing.

And then there’s the Lionel development, which arrives like a slow-moving storm front. Clark wakes from his near-death experience with Jonathan’s warning ringing in his head: Lionel knows his secret. When Clark gets home and tries to tell Martha about it, Lionel knocks on the door — here to take Martha to dinner — before Clark can get the full story out. Martha descends the stairs in a red dress and leaves with Lionel, and the camera holds on Clark standing alone in the farmhouse, watching the door close.

John Glover plays Lionel Luthor with the kind of smoothness that makes him genuinely hard to read. Is he a threat? An ally? Someone who knows Clark’s secret and has chosen, for reasons of his own, to protect it? The show has been deliberately ambiguous about this since the Jor-El possession arc, and “Void” doesn’t resolve the ambiguity — it deepens it. Clark doesn’t know whether Lionel is a danger to his mother or a man who has, in some complicated way, earned a measure of trust. The audience isn’t sure either. That uncertainty is exactly where the season wants everyone.

The Void Is Always There

“Void” is not the flashiest episode of Season Five. It doesn’t have the cultural moment of “Reckoning” or the structural ambition of “Lexmas.” What it has is honesty about grief — about the specific, aching shape that loss leaves behind, and about the different ways people try to fill it.

Lana tries to fill hers with a drug that lets her pretend, for a few minutes at a time, that the absence isn’t real. Clark fills his with the unexpected gift of five minutes with his father’s voice, reminding him of who he is and what he’s supposed to do with it. Lex encounters the truth about the shape of his own emptiness and decides, without hesitation, to close the door.

Martha, meanwhile, descends those stairs in a red dress and goes to dinner with a man her son has just been warned about. The show is doing something with her this season that it hasn’t quite articulated yet, but there’s a quality to how Annette O’Toole plays Martha around Lionel — not naïve, not oblivious, but something more complicated than that. She’s a widow who is slowly, carefully, allowing herself to be seen as a person again. That’s not weakness. But it’s vulnerability. And in Smallville, vulnerability has a way of attracting exactly the wrong kind of attention.

The episode ends quietly. Lana and Clark part on something approaching peace. She tells him she’ll be okay, and for once, the show lets her actually mean it. She’s not going to stop hurting. But she’s done depending on something she can’t hold. That’s not resolution — it’s just a different way of standing. Sometimes that’s enough.

“Void” is a quieter, character-driven hour than the season has been producing lately. But it earns its title. It understands that emptiness isn’t just something people feel — it’s something they act on. And what they reach for when they do tells you everything about who they really are.

What do you think about Lana’s spiral in this one — did the near-death addiction storyline land for you, or did it feel too much like a plot mechanism? And that Lex and Lillian scene: does Lex’s decision to lie about it read to you as denial, or something colder than that? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!