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 ended about as badly as a season can end. Zod had a vessel, Clark was drifting through the Phantom Zone, and the only consolation prize anybody got was a kiss that may or may not have been goodbye. So naturally, Season Six picks up by making things worse before it makes anything better.

“Zod,” the season premiere and the 111th episode overall, aired on September 28, 2006. It was written by Steven S. DeKnight and directed by James Marshall, the same director who closed out Season Five with “Vessel.” There’s a nice bit of continuity in that choice, since this episode is really the back half of a story “Oracle” and “Vessel” started. It also carries a small footnote in broadcast history of its own. The WB shut down for good on September 17, 2006, and The CW launched the following night. “Zod” was the first Smallville episode to air on the new network, which means the show closed out one era with Clark vanishing into a portal and opened the next with him trying to claw his way back out of one.

Welcome to the Phantom Zone

Clark wakes up powerless in a frozen wasteland, which is a phrase I never get tired of typing about a show whose main character spends an unreasonable amount of time losing his abilities. This is, by the show’s own math, the seventh time Clark has lost his powers and the second time it’s happened in a season premiere. If you’re keeping a tally at home, that’s the kind of running gag Smallville never quite admits to running.

What makes the Phantom Zone sequences work, at least for an opening stretch, is Raya. She’s Jor-El’s former assistant, exiled here for her own safety as Krypton was dying, and she’s the one who explains the rules of the place to both Clark and the audience. Most prisoners eventually lose their bodies and become phantoms. There’s a gateway out, but it only opens for a member of the House of El. And conveniently, there happens to be a medallion that can get them there, one that bears a symbol fans would recognize as the eventual S-shield.

I appreciate that the show doesn’t try to make the Phantom Zone visually clever. It’s just ash and cold and people who want Clark dead because his father put them there. Two of those people, Aethyr and Nam-Ek, turn out to be the Disciples of Zod that Clark himself banished back in “Arrival,” which is a nice bit of payback the show clearly enjoyed setting up. Raya sacrifices herself covering Clark’s escape, and for a few seasons the show lets us believe that sacrifice was final. It wasn’t, but I won’t spoil how that gets walked back since it’s a story for a future episode.

Clark reaches the gateway, bleeds on it as required, and gets thrown back to Earth along with seven other escapees. The show frames this as a genuine accident rather than a heroic jailbreak, and Clark spends the rest of the hour visibly guilty about it. That’s a smart instinct. Letting Clark feel responsible for unleashing a season’s worth of future villains is more interesting than letting him treat his own escape as an unambiguous win.

Kneel Before Zod

Back on Earth, Lex’s body is fully Zod’s now, and Michael Rosenbaum gets to do something he rarely gets the chance to do on this show: play a flatly evil character without any of Lex’s internal conflict weighing it down. Zod keeps Lana captive, announces his plan to use her to produce an heir, and starts working toward turning Earth into a new Krypton using the alien ship’s hard drive.

Lana’s response to all of this is very on brand for her character at this point in the series. She doesn’t run. She tells Zod she’ll bear his heir, gets close enough to use Jor-El’s dagger against him, and very nearly succeeds before Zod shatters the blade and chokes her unconscious for her trouble. It’s a dangerous plan executed with the kind of conviction that’s been defining Lana’s choices ever since she found out what Clark was hiding from her. She’s wrong about almost everything by the end of the season, but she’s rarely passive, and this episode is a good example of why.

Lionel, meanwhile, gets one of his more quietly interesting beats of the hour. He tells Chloe his connection to Jor-El is gone now that Clark has left the picture, and he heads to the Kent farm to retrieve the dagger himself, fully prepared to do what Clark wouldn’t. It’s worth remembering that just one episode ago, Lionel was the one arguing that sometimes the greater good requires an evil act. Watching him follow through on his own advice, even briefly, gives “Vessel” a little more weight in hindsight.

Thirty Thousand Feet, Revisited

The Lois and Martha plane crash, set up at the end of “Vessel,” pays off here in the episode’s other major thread. Martha drags an unconscious Lois to the Fortress of Solitude, and what follows is genuinely one of the more affecting scenes Smallville has given us. Jor-El speaks to Martha directly for the only time in the series, thanks her for raising his son, and tells her plainly that he couldn’t have wished for a brighter light to guide Clark.

It’s a small scene in terms of plot mechanics. Jor-El explains the dagger, explains that Zod must be killed, and sends Martha and Lois back to Smallville. But the emotional function of the scene is doing a lot of work. This is a show that has spent five seasons treating Jor-El as a cold, demanding, often cruel presence in Clark’s life. Letting him express genuine gratitude to the woman who actually did the parenting is the closest thing to an apology the character ever offers, even if it’s indirect.

It also happens to be the only time in the entire series that Martha and Jor-El speak to each other directly, which makes the scene feel less like a recurring beat and more like something the writers were saving for exactly this moment. Given how much of Season Five spent positioning Lionel as Jor-El’s chosen vessel and mouthpiece, there’s something quietly pointed about the show finally letting the actual parent in the room get the acknowledgment instead.

A Familiar Face at the Planet

While Metropolis burns and Lex’s body plots planetary conquest, Chloe gets the episode’s lightest subplot, and it’s one that matters a lot more in hindsight than it does in the moment. She runs into Jimmy Olsen at the Daily Planet, a photographer she had a summer romance with back in high school. It’s Aaron Ashmore’s first appearance on the show, and the chemistry between him and Allison Mack is immediate enough that you understand exactly where the writers are planning to take this.

There’s a sly bit of franchise history baked into the casting here too. Ashmore’s twin brother Shawn previously played a different character on Smallville, a meteor freak named Eric Summers, back in Season One. It’s the kind of trivia that only matters to people who’ve been watching this closely for years, which I assume includes most of you reading this.

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t quite Jimmy’s first mention on the show. Chloe had referenced him back in Season Four, telling Lana about a summer romance with a boy she lost her virginity to between sophomore and junior year. “Zod” is simply where that name finally gets a face attached to it, which is a nice example of how patient Smallville could be with its long-game continuity when it wanted to be.

The introduction lands with a little extra sting because of what just happened between Clark and Chloe. When Clark finally gets back from the Phantom Zone and tries to bring up their kiss before he left, Chloe waves it off as an end-of-the-world moment that doesn’t need to mean anything. Then she introduces him to Jimmy. Clark’s reaction is brief, but Tom Welling plays it with just enough hurt that you know the show wants you to notice.

The Field… and a Trick Worth Knowing

The episode’s climax brings everything together in the most literal way possible. Clark arrives just in time to stop Zod from finishing off Lana, blasts the hard drive with his heat vision to shut down the earthquake Zod triggered, and the two of them tear through a window into a field for the fight the whole episode has been building toward.

Zod gets the upper hand and offers Clark a deal: kneel and join him, and the humans Clark loves most get to live. It’s a scene that borrows directly from Superman II, right down to Zod’s demand and his habit of referring to himself in the third person. Smallville has never been shy about pulling from the films when a scene calls for it, and this is one of the more effective examples. Clark appears to accept, takes Zod’s hand, and instead presses the Kryptonian crystal Raya gave him into Zod’s palm. Zod gets pulled out of Lex’s body and sealed away, and the trick Clark uses here is close enough to how Christopher Reeve’s Superman dealt with Zod in 1980 that it plays as a deliberate homage rather than a coincidence.

It’s a satisfying resolution mechanically, but the episode doesn’t let Clark walk away feeling like a winner. Lex collapses, unconscious and seemingly without memory of anything Zod did in his body. Lana is left with a stab wound and a complicated mix of relief and distrust. And when Clark goes to the Fortress afterward, hoping to talk to Jor-El the way Martha just did, he gets nothing. The Fortress is silent. Whatever connection existed between Clark and his father is gone, at least for now.

Where That Leaves Everyone

The episode’s final stretch is Clark taking stock of a life that’s been rearranged in the span of two episodes. His father is dead. Jor-El isn’t answering. Lex is now, definitively, an adversary rather than a friend who happens to make bad decisions. Lana can barely look at him. It’s a genuinely bleak place to start a season, and Martha’s closing line to him, that every world needs its heroes because they inspire people to be better and protect them from the darkness, lands as much as a challenge as it does comfort.

There’s also a final image worth sitting with. In Argentina, a phantom rises out of the water and speeds off into the world, the first hint that Clark’s escape brought more than just himself back to Earth. Smallville loved a season-long mystery box, and this is the one it just quietly dropped into the season’s pocket for later.

Looking at “Zod” as a whole, it’s a strong premiere precisely because it refuses to treat the Zod storyline as fully resolved just because Zod himself is gone. Clark wins the fight in the field, but he loses almost everything else that mattered to him along the way. That’s a more honest way to handle the aftermath of a finale this dark than a tidy victory lap would have been.

Next week, we move into “Sneeze,” and I’m curious to see how the show handles the actual rebuilding, both of Metropolis and of all these relationships Clark just watched fall apart.

What did you think of how the show paid off the Lois and Martha plane crash with that Jor-El scene? And does Clark’s trick with the crystal work better or worse for you knowing it’s borrowed straight from Superman II? Share your thoughts in the comments below!