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, “Fragile” gave us Clark in his most elemental mode. A kid who understands what it costs to be eleven years old and afraid of yourself, showing up for someone the world has already decided is too much trouble. Tom Welling directed the episode himself, and the result was an hour that felt unusually grounded. It stepped back from the season’s mythology machinery and asked a simpler question. We ended with Martha hiring Lois as her new Chief of Staff, Lex sitting alone with a satisfied smile after finally kissing Lana, and the quiet understanding that things are continuing to shift underneath the surface of Smallville in ways that are going to matter.

“Mercy,” the 107th episode of Smallville and the 19th of Season Five, picks up that thread of slow-burning consequence and yanks it hard.

A Game You Can’t Win

The cold open is one of the better ones the season has produced. Lionel Luthor is in his limo, doing what Lionel always does… conducting business with casual contempt, firing people over the phone mid-sentence… when a masked figure appears on the car’s television and forces him to play a game of hangman on the train tracks. The phrase? “No Mercy.” The limo is destroyed. Lionel walks away, rattled, past a Smallville sign that someone has spray-painted with “Having fun yet?”

It’s a genuinely effective setup, and the episode leans into the Saw comparison without apology. The games that follow have the same basic architecture as that franchise: elaborate traps, moral lessons dressed up as survival tests, a villain who believes that putting someone through hell is a form of justice. Lincoln Cole, played with quiet precision by Ian Tracey, lost his house, his wife, and everything he had invested when Lionel used the Apex Group as a shell to try to reclaim LuthorCorp from Lex. In the process, Apex collapsed, and investors like Cole lost everything. Lionel’s collateral damage, as Cole puts it, has a name. Cole just wants him to know it.

The games themselves are well constructed for a weekly television budget. Fire. Water. A falling elevator. There’s even a structural elegance to the way they mirror Lionel’s earlier involvement with the three Stones of Power, each retrieved at significant personal cost. Whether that was intentional on the writers’ part or a happy coincidence is impossible to know from the outside, but it gives “Mercy” a symmetry that makes it feel more purposeful than your average standalone thriller episode.

What pushes it past genre exercise is Martha Kent. The moment when Lionel finds her sealed inside the water-filling chamber is genuinely distressing, and Annette O’Toole plays the rising panic without overplaying it. More importantly, it changes the stakes. This is no longer just Lionel getting what he arguably deserves. This is Clark’s mother, and the episode is smart enough to let that shift register fully before the rescue arrives.

The Conversation That’s Been Coming All Season

Clark catches the falling elevator. That’s the spectacle. But the real payoff happens later, in the quietest scene of the episode, when Clark visits Lionel’s office and Lionel tells him, plainly and without leverage, that he has known Clark’s secret since he held the Crystal of Knowledge, the crystal that helped form the Fortress of Solitude, back in “Commencement” at the end of Season Four.

Clark’s response is immediate and cold. He wants to know why Lionel hasn’t told anyone. Lionel’s answer is that revealing Clark’s secret would change his destiny and harm Martha. He is protecting Clark not because he was caught, not because Clark has something on him, but because he has chosen to.

Clark doesn’t buy it. And the scene is much more interesting for that.

This is the central question “Mercy” puts on the table: what do you do with someone who keeps doing the right thing for reasons you can never fully verify? Lionel was willing to shoot himself in that elevator rather than let Martha die. He told Martha that Clark is a “special boy” who needs her, particularly now that Jonathan is gone, a statement that protects Clark’s secret while also being, by every available measure, true. He tells Lex nothing when Lex presses him afterward. He has every opportunity to use what he knows, and he doesn’t.

And yet.

Clark’s closing warning… stay away from my mother… lands with the full weight of everything the audience knows about how Lionel has operated for the last four seasons. This is the man who murdered his own parents to escape Suicide Slum. Who manipulated and maneuvered and destroyed people at industrial scale without visible remorse for most of the show’s run. Who, even now, in the same episode where he protects Clark, is also keeping a secret that gives him enormous power over Clark’s life. The mercy he’s shown is real. The leverage is also real. Those two things exist simultaneously and neither cancels the other out.

John Glover has been doing extraordinary work with this character for years, and the scene in Lionel’s office after Clark leaves… Lionel gripping his head in pain, sinking to his knees, then writing furiously at his desk, is a perfect encapsulation of why. You don’t know if that’s Jor-El’s influence asserting itself, a man having a genuine moment of crisis, or something else entirely. Glover plays it as all three possibilities at once. That ambiguity is not a failure of the writing. It’s the whole point of Lionel Luthor.

Clark and the Weight of “Son”

There’s a smaller moment mid-episode that’s worth noting. After Clark catches the elevator and everyone is safe, Lionel, stunned and grateful, calls him “son.” Clark’s face closes immediately. “You don’t call me that,” he says. “Jonathan Kent was my father.”

It’s a brief exchange, but it carries significant freight at this particular point in the season. Jonathan has been dead since “Reckoning.” Clark has been carrying that grief largely internally, and the show has been careful about how often it surfaces directly. When it does surface, it tends to feel earned. This is one of those moments. Clark is not simply setting a boundary with Lionel. He is defending something… the specific, irreplaceable weight of the word his actual father earned.

The show has been threading this needle carefully since Jonathan died. Clark hasn’t fallen apart. He’s been functioning, investigating, saving people. But the grief is there, just underneath the competence, and “Mercy” gives it a brief, sharp outlet without turning the episode into a grief episode.

The Ensemble Does Its Job

As noted, Lex operates in functional mode this week rather than dramatic mode. He works alongside Clark to track down the device, he presses Lionel afterward about what he meant by calling Clark special, and he gets no satisfying answer. Michael Rosenbaum does what he always does in these ensemble episodes. He makes Lex feel present and dangerous even when he’s not the focus, and the moment where Lex confronts Lionel about Clark carries the same underlying menace that has been building all season. He’s not done pulling at that thread.

Chloe is in full research-engine mode, which Allison Mack makes feel effortless. Her “Darth Luthor” line is one of the episode’s better comedic beats, and her ability to trace the signal from the device is what gives Clark and Lex their lead. Lois exists in the episode almost entirely via phone call… she’s the one who tips off Clark that Martha never arrived at the fundraiser… which is a sensible use of Erica Durance given the episode’s focus. It keeps her connected to the story without requiring a subplot.

The Martha and Lionel material in the elevator, where they have to debate who shoots whom, is played with the right mixture of absurdity and genuine tension. Martha refusing to shoot Lionel even to save her own life says something clear about who she is. Lionel’s willingness to shoot himself says something considerably more ambiguous about who he’s becoming.

Where Does This Leave Us?

“Mercy” is not a mythology-heavy episode, but it does several important things for the season’s ongoing architecture. Lionel’s secret knowledge about Clark is now confirmed and out in the open between the two of them. The dynamic has shifted. Clark knows Lionel knows. Lionel knows Clark knows he knows. And the question of whether that shared knowledge creates a working alliance or a ticking clock is one the show is going to be living with through the end of the season and well beyond.

Lincoln Cole ends the episode sedated in a police station, toasting Lionel’s demise before anyone got around to telling him Lionel survived. He doesn’t matter anymore as a character. But he mattered as a function. His entire purpose was to put Lionel Luthor in a situation where his choices would be visible, where the audience and Clark could watch him decide who he is under genuine pressure. That’s a well-constructed use of a villain-of-the-week. The game was Lincoln Cole’s. The question it raised belongs to the rest of the season.

Lionel walking that line of protecting Clark, leveraging Clark, genuinely changed and also genuinely dangerous, remains one of the more compelling ongoing tensions the show has managed to sustain. “Mercy” doesn’t resolve it. It sharpens it. And Clark’s final warning, delivered in Lionel’s office with full knowledge of what Lionel is capable of and what Lionel has chosen not to do, is one of the best Clark Kent moments Season Five has given us.

He’s not naive. He’s not forgiving. He’s watching. And so are we.

Are you as fascinated by the Lionel tightrope act as I am? Has the show earned your trust that he’s genuinely changing, or do you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop? And did the Lincoln Cole games land for you as a satisfying thriller setup, or do the Saw comparisons feel a little too on the nose? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!