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 “Sneeze” gave Clark a cold, gave Lois her first byline, and gave the series its first look at a slouchy, smirking billionaire with a bow. This week, Smallville trades sniffles for something a lot creepier. “Wither,” the third episode of Season Six and the 113th episode overall, aired on October 12, 2006. It was written by Tracy A. Bellomo and directed by Whitney Ransick, and it’s an episode that somehow finds room for a killer alien plant woman, a full band performance, and the moment Lex and Lana finally sleep together, all inside one hour of network television.

A Costume Ball With Strings Attached

Lex is still carrying the weight of Dark Thursday, the citywide destruction he caused while possessed by Zod, and his solution is the kind of grand gesture only a Luthor would think to make. He throws a charity costume ball to benefit the families affected by the disaster and hires the All-American Rejects to perform, because nothing says grief quite like a live rock show in your backyard.

What I find interesting about this plotline is how much it tells us about Lex without anyone having to say it out loud. He isn’t really processing guilt here. He’s managing his image while using the party as leverage in his relationship with Lana. When she brings up the newspaper photo captioning her “the next Lex girl,” he brushes off her discomfort by explaining that he was raised in front of cameras and she needs to get used to it. It’s a small moment, but it’s a good snapshot of how Lex treats other people’s feelings as inconveniences to be talked around rather than things worth actually addressing.

Lana pushes back a little, asking what happens once Lex actually gets the thing he claims he wants. It’s a fair question and a smart one, and Lex responds by getting angry and giving her an ultimatum. He wants to be more than roommates. When Lana says she needs time because she tends to trust people too easily, Lex cuts her down by bringing up how much trust she put in Clark, framing it in a way clearly designed to make her feel foolish. He tells her he’s done paying for Clark’s mistakes and that she needs to decide.

It’s a manipulative scene, and the show plays it that way rather than romanticizing it. Lana eventually does choose Lex, showing up at the ball and later sleeping with him at the mansion, and I don’t think the episode wants us to read that as a happy ending. It reads more like the sound of a trap clicking shut. Lex even jokes afterward that his “evil plan is working,” and Lana laughs like it’s just pillow talk between two people in love. The show already told us this was going somewhere much darker than that, since Lex has apparently been planning this relationship with Lana since before she and Clark ever broke up.

Lois Slams a Door in the CEO’s Face

While all of that is unfolding at the mansion, the show gives us one of its more purely fun sequences of the season. Lois answers the door at the Kent farm to find a tall, well dressed messenger from Queen Industries and immediately tells him he should aim higher than delivering packages for the rich and arrogant before shutting the door in his face. It’s only after Martha arrives that Lois realizes she just dismissed Oliver Queen, CEO of Queen Industries, to his own face.

Erica Durance is clearly having a blast in this stretch of the episode, and the writing gives her plenty to work with. Lois shows up at Oliver’s loft with an apology and a gift basket, and he agrees to accept it on one condition: she has to be his date to Lex’s ball. He’s already got a costume picked out for her, which tells you everything about how confident Oliver is that she’ll say yes.

Their chemistry here is doing a lot of quiet work for a relationship that won’t officially matter for a while yet. There’s an easy banter between them, the kind where Lois clearly enjoys being annoyed by him more than she wants to admit. By the end of the night, after the ball wraps up, Oliver drives her home and asks for a goodnight kiss. She tells him he’ll have to earn it and dares him to shoot a can off the top of a dumpster with an arrow. He appears to miss, she leaves satisfied, and then the camera reveals he actually nailed the shot dead center, pinning the pop tab to the wall behind it. It’s a small, confident flex, and it’s the kind of moment that lands even better once you know exactly who he’s about to become in the very next episode.

Chloe, Jimmy, and a Killer With Green Thumbs

The episode’s actual monster plot kicks off with Chloe and Jimmy staking out Lone Pine, the local make-out spot, looking for a story. Their relationship status is still a little unresolved at this point, something the show keeps circling back to in small ways, and it’s interrupted here by a scream in the woods that leads them to a girl impaled on a tree.

The creature responsible turns out to be Gloria, a Phantom Zone escapee who has taken the identity of a park ranger after killing the real one. She’s from a species that reproduces by using male human bodies to grow her offspring, which is a genuinely unsettling concept for a show that usually keeps its horror elements fairly restrained. Clark finds the first victim trapped under thorny vines using his x-ray vision, only to get cut himself when he tries to pull the vines away, an early sign that whatever this thing is, it’s not something his usual strength can just muscle through.

Jimmy becomes the episode’s most immediate danger once he wanders into the woods to take pictures and runs into Gloria directly. She traps him in vines that grow up out of the ground, and it’s genuinely one of the more frightening scenes the show has done, mostly because the vines don’t look supernatural so much as biological and wrong. Chloe ends up saving him using a defibrillator, having already figured out that electricity kills the alien plant matter, which gives the episode’s title a nice bit of double meaning. The vines wither and die when zapped, and there’s also something to be said for how the archaic word “whither,” meaning “to where,” fits a season that’s constantly asking its characters where they go from here.

Clark eventually gets caught by Gloria too, tied up and impaled through the chest while she announces her plan to head to Lex’s party and find more suitors among the guests. Chloe frees him with a taser, and his healing ability kicks in fast enough for him to get to the greenhouse and stop Gloria before she can claim another victim. He uses his heat vision to trigger the sprinkler system, which shorts out the greenhouse’s heat lamps and electrocutes her. It’s a fairly tidy resolution for a genuinely creepy villain, but Smallville was rarely interested in letting its monster of the week plots breathe much longer than that.

A Costume With A History

One of the more fun layers to this episode, at least for anyone who grew up reading the comics, is how much of the costume ball doubles as a wink toward Green Arrow’s comic book origins. Oliver shows up dressed as Robin Hood, a costume that closely mirrors the Silver Age Green Arrow look. In the comics, Oliver Queen’s crime fighting career actually began at a costume party where he dressed as Robin Hood and ended up stopping a robbery almost by accident, a story told in Secret Origins Volume 2, Issue 38. Seeing Justin Hartley’s Oliver wear that exact costume to Lex’s ball feels like a deliberate nod dressed up as a coincidence, and it’s the kind of detail that rewards longtime comic readers without alienating anyone who’s never picked up an issue.

Lana’s costume gets its own quiet reference too. She attends dressed as Cleopatra, which mirrors a much older comic appearance where Lana Lang dressed up as the Egyptian queen. It’s a small touch, easy to miss, but it’s a good example of how much research went into even the throwaway visual details of this show.

I also can’t talk about this episode without mentioning the moment that’s aged into one of its more amusing pieces of trivia. Years later, on their rewatch podcast, Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum have poked fun at just how easily Lois should have connected the dots between Oliver’s archery skills at this ball and his identity as Green Arrow down the line. It’s a fair point, and it’s also just the “Clark Kent effect” playing out one character over. Apparently all you need to hide a secret identity in this universe is a costume and enough charm to keep people from looking too closely.

Small Callbacks Worth Noticing

A couple of quieter details stood out to me on this rewatch. When Chloe describes just how sharp Gloria’s vines are, she compares them to a lightsaber, tossing in a quick reference to Obi-Wan Kenobi that feels exactly like something a reporter raised on genre fiction would say without thinking twice about it. It’s a throwaway line, but it’s the kind of pop culture shorthand that makes Chloe feel like a real person rather than just an exposition machine.

The closing image of Clark alone in his loft, tossing a ball against the wall, is also doing more work than it might look like at first glance. It’s the same coping mechanism he used back in Season Four after Alicia Baker’s death, and bringing it back here quietly underlines just how much Clark associates loss with this specific kind of restless, repetitive motion. He doesn’t get to process anything out loud in this episode. He just gets to sit with it, alone, while everyone else around him pairs off.

There’s also a fun bit of continuity in how the episode treats Lex’s living situation with Lana. He tells her that she’s the first woman he’s ever asked to actually move in with him, which is a claim that doesn’t hold up if you’ve been paying attention to the show’s earlier seasons. Helen Bryce moved in during Season Two, and Victoria Hardwick was already staying at the mansion back in Season One. Whether Lex is lying to make Lana feel special or has simply convinced himself of his own revisionist history, it’s another small crack in his credibility that the show trusts its audience to catch without spelling it out.

The Band, the Ball, and a Pattern Worth Tracking

It’s easy to treat the All-American Rejects performance as a bit of stunt casting, and to some extent it is, but it’s also part of a running pattern for this show. By this point Lex has now brought in three different mainstream bands to play at his events, following earlier appearances from Remy Zero and Lifehouse. Smallville leaned on its soundtrack budget constantly to sell the idea that Smallville, Kansas somehow attracted A-list musical talent on a regular basis, and it’s a strange bit of small town world building that the show never really bothers to explain. Nobody in Smallville seems to find it odd that a chart topping band just showed up to play a charity gala in a converted mansion ballroom, and at some point you just have to accept that as one of this show’s more charming eccentricities.

It’s also worth noting that this is the first episode since “Oracle” where Lois isn’t in any kind of physical danger. Given how often the show puts her directly in harm’s way, that alone feels like a deliberate choice, freeing her up to spend the entire hour on lighter, more character driven material with Oliver instead of getting kidnapped, possessed, or chased through the woods for a change.

Where This Leaves Everyone

By the end of the hour, Lex has gotten exactly what he wanted from Lana, even if it came at the cost of being honest with her about how deliberately he engineered it. Lois has agreed to a second date with Oliver without fully realizing what that relationship is going to become. Chloe and Jimmy are still dancing around the exact nature of their own relationship while proving they work well as a team under pressure. And Clark, having just stopped an alien predator from claiming more victims at a party he wasn’t even invited to, ends the episode alone in his loft, quietly reminded that everyone around him seems to be moving forward while he’s stuck watching from the outside.

It’s a busy episode, and not every piece of it lands with the same weight. The Gloria plot resolves quickly once the electricity gimmick clicks into place, and the show clearly cares more about the relationship fallout than the monster itself. But “Wither” does a lot of foundational work here. It cements Lex and Lana’s arc as something built on manipulation rather than genuine partnership, and it plants the Lois and Oliver dynamic that’s going to matter a great deal more as the show heads toward introducing Green Arrow properly.

Next week we head into “Arrow,” and given how confidently this episode set up Oliver Queen’s archery skills, I’m very curious to see how the show finally reveals what he’s actually been up to at night.

What did you think of Gloria as this season’s first stand-alone Phantom Zone villain? And were you rooting for Lana to walk away from Lex, or did you see this coming from a mile away? Share your thoughts in the comments below!