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, “Mercy” put Lionel Luthor through a series of elaborate, Saw-style traps orchestrated by a man whose life Lionel had quietly destroyed. What made the episode work wasn’t the spectacle of the games themselves but the quieter, more dangerous thing happening in Lionel’s office afterward, when Clark learned that Lionel had known his secret since the Season Four finale and had chosen, so far, to keep it. The episode ended with Clark issuing a cold, clear warning, and Lionel apparently receiving it. The dynamic shifted. The season’s most complicated relationship got even more complicated.

“Fade,” the 20th episode of Season Five and the 108th episode overall, aired on April 27, 2006. Written by Turi Meyer and Al Septien, and directed by Terrence O’Hara, it doesn’t carry “Mercy”‘s mythology weight. It’s a more contained, almost breezier hour, at least on the surface. Underneath, it’s doing something worth paying attention to: using a fairly straightforward villain-of-the-week to put Clark’s most personal Season Five wound directly in front of him, while also quietly marking a genuine milestone for Chloe Sullivan.

The Hit Man Who Just Wanted to Help

The setup is efficient and, in its way, kind of charming. Clark is in Metropolis when he spots a man about to get hit by a car. He does what Clark does. He saves the guy. The man’s name is Graham Garrett, and he is, as it turns out, a professional assassin.

Graham is played by Alexander Scarlis with an easy, slightly unsettling likeability. He isn’t menacing in the traditional Smallville villain mold. He doesn’t have a grudge against Clark, doesn’t want revenge on anyone Clark loves, and isn’t pushing some sinister agenda. His logic is its own kind of twisted generosity: Clark saved his life, so Graham wants to do something meaningful in return. And the most meaningful thing he can think of, given his particular skill set, is eliminating Lex Luthor. That way Clark can get Lana back.

It’s a bonkers premise that the show plays almost entirely straight, and it works better than it probably should. Graham is a mirror held up to Clark’s actual emotional state. He sees Clark’s longing for Lana and treats it as a problem with a practical solution. The fact that Clark would never want that solution, that he is genuinely horrified by it, is part of what makes their eventual confrontation land. Clark isn’t just fighting a metahuman. He’s fighting a dark, warped version of his own grief made literal and walking around in a nice suit.

Graham’s ability is worth a note for the comics-curious. He is identified in the episode as the 29th DC Comics character adapted into the series, and the original comics version of The Chameleon goes back to the Golden Age, first appearing as a Superman villain in Action Comics #126, published in November 1948. On the page, the Chameleon had no superpower; he was a con man in the classic mold. The show retools him entirely, giving Graham a genuine metahuman ability to turn invisible, which the episode distinguishes nicely from the invisibility seen back in the Season One episode “Shimmer.” Jeff Palmer from that episode used a special cream to achieve the effect. Graham’s ability is intrinsic, and Clark notably doesn’t use X-ray vision to track him, suggesting the show is quietly acknowledging that Graham’s cloaking operates across a broader spectrum. It’s a small touch, but it’s the kind of internal consistency that fans of this show tend to appreciate.

Clark Finding Out: The Part He Was Dreading

The villain plot gives the episode its structure. The more emotionally resonant thread is Clark walking into Lex’s office and discovering Lex and Lana kissing.

He doesn’t say anything. He just leaves. And the show is smart enough to stay with Tom Welling’s face in that moment rather than cutting away, because what Welling does in that silence is more interesting than any line of dialogue could be. Clark isn’t furious. He’s gutted. There’s a difference, and Welling has always been better at playing the second one than he sometimes gets credit for.

The fallout with Chloe is one of the better character beats the episode offers. Clark confronts her for keeping the secret, and Chloe’s response is measured and fair. She points out that Lana asked her to stay quiet, that she is Lana’s friend too, and, most importantly, that Clark was the one who ended things with Lana. Chloe is right on all counts. The show doesn’t let Clark off the hook for this, and it shouldn’t. He made a choice, and now he’s living with the consequences of it, and the fact that the consequences are painful doesn’t give him the right to be angry at the people who respected Lana’s privacy.

There’s also a conversation later in the episode where Clark tells Chloe he doesn’t understand how she could be okay with Lana dating Lex. He says, “You have no idea how hard it was to see them like that. It was like I couldn’t breathe.” The line could read as self-pity from a lesser show, but the episode’s continuity note here is sharp: Chloe knows exactly how he felt, because she experienced the same thing in Season Two’s “Calling,” when she was still in love with Clark and watched him and Lana kiss. She was devastated. She kept that to herself. She never used it against him. That history is present in Allison Mack’s performance even without the show spelling it out directly, and it gives the scene a texture it wouldn’t otherwise have.

By the end of the episode, Lana visits Clark in the barn and tells him the truth about her relationship with Lex. Clark warns her away from Lex. She reminds him, again, that he was the one who chose to end things between them. She leaves. Clark is left with a disassembled telescope, which the show uses as one of those simple, almost too-obvious-but-it-works visual metaphors: the telescope he used to watch Lana from the loft when they were younger, when the distance between them was geographical and not yet permanent. He’s dismantling it because it doesn’t serve a purpose anymore.

The title earns its meaning on a few levels. Fade describes what Graham does. It also describes what is happening, slowly and painfully, to whatever remaining hope Clark has been carrying about his relationship with Lana.

Graham, Lois, and the Episode’s Lighter Register

One of the things “Fade” does well is balance its heavier emotional material with a B-plot that actually has a sense of humor about itself. Graham’s efforts to get close to Clark bring him through the Kent Farm and eventually into the orbit of Lois Lane, and the episode plays their dynamic with a light touch that Erica Durance handles well.

The sequence where Graham throws a party and sets Clark up with a woman named Gia, while Lois is there as Graham’s date and is not at all happy to see Clark, is one of the more comfortable pieces of comic misdirection the show has managed this season. It’s not trying to be a romantic subplot. It’s just enjoying the absurdity of Clark’s social life for a few minutes before the episode gets back to business.

The Talon scene, where Clark follows Graham’s heartbeat to warn Lois and inadvertently ends up outside the bathroom door at precisely the wrong moment, is exactly the kind of thing the show has always enjoyed doing with Clark and Lois. The show has been quietly laying track on this relationship for a while now, in the background of whatever louder thing was happening in a given episode. These moments are part of that.

What’s interesting about the Lois material here is how Martha handles the aftermath. After Graham is dead and the dust has settled, Lois sits with Martha and wonders aloud why her relationships keep going wrong. Martha’s response is essentially to tell her that she went through quite a few bad relationships before she found Jonathan, and that the right person comes when you’re not forcing it. It’s a sweet scene and a gentle one, and it gestures toward a kind of long-term hope for Lois without making any promises the show isn’t ready to keep yet.

Chloe Gets Her Front Page

The episode’s smallest payoff is also, quietly, one of its most satisfying.

Throughout the episode, Chloe is doing what Chloe does: researching, tracking leads, identifying Graham as “The Chameleon” based on his pattern of leaving no prints, no surveillance footage, and no usable evidence. She’s the one who figures out who he is. She’s the one who finds Clark buried under construction debris, kryptonite nearby, and throws the rock far enough away to revive him.

After Graham is dead and everything has been wrapped up, Clark visits Chloe at the Daily Planet to congratulate her on her first front-page byline. The Graham Garrett story ran under her name. It’s a small moment, but it matters. Chloe Sullivan has been working toward the Daily Planet since the show started. She has wanted to be a journalist in the way that Clark has wanted to be normal: completely, without reservation, as the core definition of who she believes she is. The front page is a milestone that the episode earns honestly because we’ve watched her do the actual work. Allison Mack plays the moment with the right mixture of pride and deflection, because Chloe has never been someone who lingers in a triumph when there’s usually something else that needs doing.

Some Notes Worth Flagging

A few smaller things the episode gets right that don’t fit neatly elsewhere.

The moment where Clark shatters the statue Graham swings at him and accidentally reveals his invulnerability is a nice bit of staging. Clark is so focused on confronting Graham about the attempted murder that he doesn’t calculate the optics of catching a statue barehanded. It’s one of those moments where Clark’s emotional state makes him careless, and the show treats that as a natural consequence of him being upset rather than a plot contrivance.

Lex’s storyline this week involves instant messaging with Milton Fine and a reference to the compound virus being ready. It’s brief, but it’s there, and it’s a reminder that while Clark has been dealing with grief and Lana and a hit man who wants to do him favors, Lex and Brainiac have been continuing to move toward whatever the season’s endgame is. The show is keeping the larger threat alive in the margins without letting it overpower an episode that has a different job to do.

The note that Graham might have driven through Smallville the previous year “on business” is never followed up on, but it’s a nice piece of texture. It implies a history to the show’s meteor-freak ecosystem that extends beyond what we see in any given episode.

And one last thing: Clark’s confrontation with Graham at the end, catching the bullet in real time while Lex and Lana embrace and neither of them sees it, is a quietly perfect encapsulation of Clark’s situation in Season Five. He saves the people he loves. They don’t always know he did it. Sometimes they don’t know because he has reasons to keep them from knowing, and sometimes they don’t know because they’re looking at each other.

Where This Leaves Us

“Fade” is not a heavy-lift episode. It doesn’t ask big questions or shift the season’s mythology in significant ways. What it does is use a sharply constructed villain-of-the-week to put Clark’s most personal, ongoing ache directly in front of him, let him feel it fully without collapsing under it, and then send him back to the loft with a disassembled telescope and a warning from Lana he already knew was coming.

The episode also does something the show is occasionally too busy to do: it lets a supporting character have a genuine win. Chloe Sullivan earned that front page, and the episode gives her the moment to know it.

It’s a confident, well-paced episode that trusts its emotional throughline. For an installment this deep into a season with a lot of moving parts, that’s no small thing.

What did you think of Graham Garrett as a villain? Did the invisible-hit-man-with-a-warm-heart concept work for you, or was the premise a little too out there to track? And how did you feel watching Clark discover Lana and Lex for the first time? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!