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’s premiere ended with Zod defeated, Lex unconscious, and Clark standing in a field surrounded by the wreckage of his own life. It was a heavy way to open a season. This week, Smallville does something it rarely gets enough credit for: it lets the hero be a little bit ridiculous for forty minutes.

“Sneeze,” the second episode of Season Six and the 112th episode overall, aired on October 5, 2006. It was written by Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer and directed by Paul Shapiro. After the operatic scale of “Zod,” this episode downshifts hard into something smaller and stranger. Clark catches a cold. That sentence alone tells you everything about the tonal whiplash Smallville was capable of pulling off from one week to the next.

Not Really That Sick

Clark spends the opening minutes of this episode doing what Clark always does after a catastrophe: quietly cleaning up a mess that wasn’t entirely his fault while insisting that it was. He’s been out all night repairing Metropolis, he’s exhausted, and Martha wants him to rest. Naturally he heads to the barn to do chores instead. That’s when the sneeze happens, and it’s strong enough to rip the barn door off its hinges and launch it into the sky, where it lands in a field just narrowly missing a jogging Lois Lane.

I love how matter-of-fact the show is about escalating Clark’s powers at this point in the series. He’s already survived losing his abilities, regaining them, and discovering he can fly in previous seasons. So a new power showing up isn’t treated as some grand mythological event. It’s treated like an inconvenience, which is funnier than it has any right to be. Martha assumes he picked up some kind of alien flu in the Phantom Zone, and honestly, that explanation tracks better than most of what this show has asked us to accept over the years.

What makes the episode work is that nobody around Clark takes the sneezing seriously until it’s actively destroying property. Chloe brushes him off entirely, right up until a second sneeze sends papers flying across the Daily Planet bullpen. It’s a nice comedic beat, and Allison Mack sells the shift from annoyed to alarmed about as well as anyone could with material this silly.

The title itself is almost too on the nose, and I appreciate that the show didn’t try to dress it up. Clark sneezes. That sneeze becomes his super breath. It’s a rare episode where the title tells you the entire plot and the show is completely fine with that.

Clark spends most of the hour visibly miserable, which is a fun choice given how invincible he usually gets to feel. There’s something satisfying about watching Tom Welling play sick and exhausted right after an episode where his character wrestled a Kryptonian general in a cornfield. Being human, even briefly and involuntarily, clearly isn’t something Clark enjoys. He says as much to Martha, and it’s a small line that says a lot about how he actually feels about his own nature.

Huff, Puff, and Blow the Door Down

The best stretch of the episode belongs to Clark and Chloe, and it’s a reminder of why their friendship worked so well before the show started complicating it in other directions. When Clark needs to break into Pontius’s office and doesn’t have the strength to do it the usual way, Chloe is the one who suggests he try blowing the door down instead of ripping it down. It’s a small moment, but it’s a good example of Chloe functioning as the person who understands Clark’s abilities almost as intuitively as he does, sometimes more so in the moment.

The scene where Clark actually discovers he can direct the breath with some control is genuinely fun, especially because Chloe treats the whole thing with the kind of dry amusement that only she seems capable of when Clark’s powers misbehave. It’s also worth noting how sick Clark looks throughout this whole sequence. He admits to Chloe that he had to jog part of the way there because he was too exhausted to run at superspeed, which is a detail that undercuts the invincibility fans usually associate with him. Smallville liked reminding its audience that Clark’s powers came with limits, and illness turning out to be one of those limits is a clever wrinkle.

By the end of the episode, Clark has fully weaponized the ability, using it to blow out a fire that would have killed Lana and Lex, and later to clear a cloudy sky just so Lois will agree to a lake trip. It’s a nice showcase of the power going from destructive accident to controlled tool over the course of one episode, which is about the pace this show liked to work at when introducing something new.

A Crusade of Her Own

While Clark is dealing with his cold, Lois is dealing with something that matters a great deal more in the long run. She can’t let the barn door mystery go, and her persistence in chasing down an explanation nobody wants to give her becomes the spark for her entire journalism career. Chloe shuts her down at the Planet, criticizing her writing and refusing to run the story, so Lois takes it elsewhere and lands her first byline at the Inquisitor instead.

It’s easy to overlook this subplot because it’s playing against the much louder Lex kidnapping storyline, but it’s arguably the most important thing that happens in the episode. This is the moment the show plants the seed for Lois Lane, reporter, rather than Lois Lane, houseguest with an attitude. Erica Durance plays the excitement of that first byline with real sincerity, and there’s something charming about watching her realize what she wants to do with her life over the course of chasing down a story about a flying barn door.

It also sets up a running tension that defines a lot of her character going forward. Lois investigates because she genuinely can’t stand being told to drop something, and that instinct is going to matter a great deal more once she starts investigating things with actual stakes. Watching her get her start on a tabloid story this small makes her eventual career at the Daily Planet land with a little more weight.

Big Brother at the Mansion

Lana’s storyline this episode gives us one of the more uncomfortable Lex reveals of the series so far. After moving into the mansion, she discovers Lex has been running a full security camera network throughout the property, including a camera in her own bedroom. The scene where she rewinds the footage and realizes she’s been watched while undressing is genuinely unsettling, and it’s handled with the seriousness it deserves rather than played for cheap shock value.

Lex’s justification, that the cameras are simply how he ensures safety on his own property, is the kind of half truth that defines his character at this point in the show. He’s not lying about being paranoid or about having real enemies. He’s just using that paranoia to justify behavior that’s clearly a violation, and Lana calling him out on it directly is a good example of her refusing to just accept his explanations at face value, even while she stays under his roof.

This subplot connects to the kidnapping plot once Lana uses Lex’s own surveillance system against him, tracking down his location after he goes missing. There’s a nice bit of irony in that. The tool Lex built to control his environment ends up being the thing that saves his life, in the hands of the one person he was using it against.

An Arrow Worth Watching

The episode’s other major development is one that barely registers as a big deal in the moment but ends up mattering a great deal for the rest of the series. Justin Hartley makes his first appearance as Oliver Queen, introduced here as the wealthy former schoolmate of Lex with a grudge and, we later learn, an unusual set of skills of his own. He’s the one behind Lex’s kidnapping, using Orlando Block and Wagner to get answers about what Lex was capable of on the night the world now calls Dark Thursday.

Oliver would go on to become a recurring presence for the rest of Season Six, a guest star the following season, and eventually a full series regular for three more seasons after that. It’s genuinely fun to watch his introduction knowing where the character ends up, especially because this first appearance plays him almost entirely as a mystery antagonist rather than the hero fans would eventually root for. Hartley brings a controlled, faintly amused menace to the role here that reads very differently once you know Oliver Queen is Green Arrow.

The episode saves its best flourish for Oliver’s closing scene, when he demonstrates his archery skill by launching an arrow at the spinning globe on top of the Daily Planet building, calling out Borneo before the arrow lands precisely there. It’s a small moment, but it’s the show tipping its hand just enough for anyone paying close attention. Oliver Queen is the 30th DC Comics character the series had adapted by this point, and this scene is doing a lot of quiet work to convince the audience he’s worth caring about before his identity as Green Arrow ever gets confirmed on screen.

Kidnapped, Tortured, and Somehow Fine By Dinner

The Lex kidnapping plot itself is a strange mix of genuinely tense and a little too tidy. Orlando Block, working for Oliver, grabs Lex under the belief that his powers during Dark Thursday can be extracted or explained through torture. Lex tells the truth, that an alien being possessed him and is now gone, and Block doesn’t believe a word of it. It’s a scene that puts Michael Rosenbaum in an unusually vulnerable position, and he plays the fear convincingly enough that the sequence carries real weight even though we know Lex will make it out.

Lana ends up caught in the same warehouse trying to save him, and the fire that nearly kills them both gets snuffed out by Clark’s newly discovered super breath, delivered anonymously before he slips away unseen. It’s a satisfying use of the episode’s central gimmick, tying the comedic A plot directly into the more dangerous B plot in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

What’s a little harder to buy is how quickly everyone moves on. Lex gets kidnapped, shot, and threatened with an unknown serum, and by episode’s end he’s simply back at the mansion having a testy conversation with Lana about surveillance cameras. Smallville was never especially interested in dwelling on trauma for more than an episode at a time, and this is a clear example of that instinct working against the story a little. Still, given how bleak “Zod” ended, there’s an argument that the show needed exactly this kind of quick reset to get the season moving.

Where That Leaves Everyone

By the end of the hour, Clark has his new power under control, Lois has found her calling, Lana has drawn a line with Lex that he’ll almost certainly cross again, and Oliver Queen has quietly established himself as someone worth watching closely. It’s a much lighter episode than “Zod,” and that’s clearly the point. After an opener that stripped Clark of nearly everything that mattered to him, “Sneeze” spends its runtime rebuilding some of the show’s sense of humor before diving back into heavier material.

It’s not a flawless episode. The Lex kidnapping plot resolves a little too neatly, and the show clearly knows the sneezing gimmick is silly enough that it leans into the comedy rather than trying to justify it scientifically. But as a palette cleanser after a genuinely dark premiere, it does its job well, and it plants at least two seeds, Lois’s journalism career and Oliver Queen’s arrival, that pay off across the rest of the series.

Next week, we move into “Wither,” and given how this season likes to escalate, I’m curious whether Clark gets any real recovery time before the next crisis lands on his doorstep.

What did you think of Clark getting his super breath through something as mundane as a cold? And did Oliver Queen’s introduction land for you as a mystery villain, or did you already know exactly who he was going to become? Share your thoughts in the comments below!