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 “Wither” gave us a killer alien plant woman, a Lex and Lana relationship built on manipulation, and the first real spark between Lois and Oliver Queen. This week, Smallville cashes in on that spark. “Arrow,” the fourth episode of Season Six and the 114th episode overall, aired on October 19, 2006. It was written by Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson and directed by Michael Rohl, and it’s the episode where Smallville finally lets Justin Hartley’s Oliver Queen become the character the show had been quietly building toward for weeks. This is the one where Green Arrow actually shows up.

A Necklace, a Blackout, and a New Nickname

The episode opens at a fundraiser where Lionel Luthor is showing off Martha Kent, dressed for a Senate run he’s clearly engineering behind the scenes. He’s loaned her a diamond necklace for the occasion, which tells you right away that nothing about tonight is really about Martha. When the lights cut out mid speech and the necklace vanishes off her neck, Lois gives chase and gets close enough to grab a ring off a chain around the thief’s neck before he escapes up an elevator shaft with a grappling arrow.

It’s a strong opening because it immediately puts Lois in the role she’s going to occupy for the rest of the hour, the one person determined to find out who’s behind the mask, without realizing she’s already dating him. The show leans hard into the dramatic irony here, and it works because Erica Durance and Justin Hartley have real chemistry, the kind that makes you enjoy watching two people needle each other even when you already know how the game ends.

Lois takes the recovered ring to Chloe at the Daily Planet, hoping to use the paper’s resources to chase the story. Chloe isn’t shy about pointing out that Lois barely knows how to use the database, and the two of them get interrupted by a knockout gas arrow before they can get very far. It’s a fun structural choice, because it means Lois spends most of the episode reacting to a mystery that Clark is solving in parallel, off screen, using very different tools.

Clark Meets Oliver, and It Doesn’t Go How He Expected

The episode’s biggest piece of business is the first meeting between Clark and Oliver, and it’s handled with more wit than I remembered. Oliver admits Clark isn’t what he pictured, expecting someone geekier based on how Lois talks about him. There’s an easy banter to their early scenes, mostly built around Oliver’s amusement at Clark’s obvious discomfort watching Lois date someone else, which Oliver clocks almost immediately and needles him about.

Clark wants the necklace back mainly so his mother doesn’t owe Lionel anything, which is a very Clark motivation, small, personal, and rooted in protecting the people closest to him rather than any bigger sense of justice. Oliver isn’t moved by that at all. He points out that over a dozen of Metropolis’s wealthiest citizens have been robbed and that Lionel never even reported the theft to police, which should tell Clark something about who these victims really are.

Once Clark pieces together that Oliver is Green Arrow, using the family crest on the ring and a bit of x-ray vision detective work, the show gives us its first real confrontation between the two. Clark catches Oliver mid heist and throws him across a room hard enough to trip the security system, and Oliver tries to talk his way out of it by insisting he’s on the right side of this fight even if the law disagrees. It’s a clean, efficient way to establish who these two men are before they’ve had a single honest conversation. Oliver breaks laws because he thinks the ends justify it. Clark still believes, at this point in his life, that the rules exist for a reason.

Their actual reckoning happens later, in Clark’s loft, and it’s the best material in the episode. Oliver already knows Clark lost Lana to Lex, and he doesn’t flinch from bringing it up, but he also doesn’t use it as a weapon the way Lex would. He’s making a real argument. He tells Clark that having abilities like his comes with an obligation that goes beyond the people standing closest to him. It’s a conversation the show has been circling for years without quite landing it, and Oliver is the first person in Clark’s orbit blunt enough to just say it out loud. Whether stealing is justified if it’s for a good cause is a question Clark visibly doesn’t have an answer to yet, and Oliver’s answer of yes, without hesitation, is exactly the kind of moral clarity Clark hasn’t earned for himself.

Lex Tests Lana, and Lana Reveals Something Darker

While Clark and Oliver are working out their differences, Lex is running his own experiment. He has Lionel approach Lana about the black box, the alien technology fragment recovered back in “Zod,” hoping to see whether Lana will side with Lionel’s plan to destroy it or stay loyal to Lex’s obsession with understanding it. It’s a genuinely cold move, using his own father as bait to test the woman he supposedly loves, and the show doesn’t ask us to read it as anything other than exactly that.

Lana passes the test, but not in a way that should make anyone feel reassured. She threatens Dr. Groll, the scientist studying the box, telling him she’ll ruin his life if he hands anything over to Lionel before coming to her first. It’s a small scene, but it’s a meaningful one, since it’s the first time Lana shows this particular kind of coldness on screen rather than just tolerating it in Lex. She’s not just protecting Lex from himself anymore, the excuse she gave herself in “Wither.” She wants the box’s power for her own reasons now, and if you’ve followed the show far enough to know where Lana ends up, this scene reads like the true starting point of Project Scion, even though the show won’t spell that connection out for another year.

Lex, for his part, isn’t satisfied by Lana passing his test either. He tells Lionel plainly that he has no intention of sharing what he knows about the box, keeping his father exactly as far away from it as Lana wants him to be. Everyone in this triangle is lying to everyone else in this triangle, and the show trusts the audience to keep track of who currently has the upper hand.

Milo, the Tank, and a Rescue That Complicates Everything

The episode’s danger beat comes from Milo, the head of Lionel’s security firm Safetex, whose business has been gutted by Green Arrow’s thefts. Furious that Lois has been publicizing the robberies and convinced she can lead him to the thief, Milo has her kidnapped and questioned. He tries to drown her in a water tank to get Green Arrow’s identity out of her, not realizing she genuinely doesn’t know it yet.

Green Arrow shows up to save her, deflecting a bullet meant to kill her and carrying her to a rooftop, and this is where the episode does something clever with its love triangle. Lois isn’t grateful. She wrestles his crossbow away and demands he unmask, and it takes Clark, standing on a nearby roof, shooting out the lights with his heat vision, to give Oliver the cover he needs to disappear. It’s a nice bit of superhero teamwork dressed up as an accident, and it’s also the moment where Clark fully commits to protecting Oliver’s secret, choosing to lie to Chloe about it rather than let her keep digging.

Chloe isn’t fooled for long. By the next morning she’s noticed her photographs of the ring have mysteriously vanished, and she puts together, correctly, that Clark and Green Arrow already know each other’s identities. It’s a small character beat, but it’s the kind of thing that makes Chloe consistently the sharpest person in any given Smallville scene, capable of connecting dots that take Lois an entire episode to get near.

The Comic Book DNA Underneath It All

What makes “Arrow” worth revisiting beyond the plot mechanics is how carefully it’s stitched into Green Arrow’s comic history. The diamond tipped arrow Oliver uses to split a security laser is a direct visual nod to a trick arrow from Justice League of America issue 4, published in May 1961, in which Green Arrow uses a similar arrow to help free the JLA from inside a giant diamond. It’s also the issue where he becomes the League’s first non founding member, so the reference carries a little extra weight if you know where to look for it.

There’s a sharper piece of trivia buried in the episode’s continuity notes too. Green Arrow is repeatedly referred to as “the Archer” throughout the hour, which happens to be the name of an actual one-off Superman villain from Superman issue 13, published in late 1941. That character, a wealthy big game hunter named Quigley who turned to hunting people, wore a green costume and carried a bow, making him a strange, mostly forgotten precursor to the hero this episode is introducing. It’s the kind of detail that only a handful of longtime comic readers would ever catch, and it’s a fun example of how much research this show quietly did even in episodes built around a monster or mystery of the week format that didn’t always require it.

Lois gets her own moment of comic book symmetry here as well. Just like she famously coined the name Superman in earlier adaptations of the mythology, she’s the one who comes up with the name Green Arrow, with a little help from Chloe. It’s a cute bit of world building that ties her journalistic instincts directly to the superhero naming conventions the wider DC universe eventually settles into.

Small Callbacks Worth Noticing

A few smaller details stood out on this rewatch. Chloe’s line comparing Lois’s fumbling research skills to watching Clark dance is a direct callback to two earlier episodes, “Tempest” and “Spell,” where the show actually put Tom Welling through some genuinely awkward dance sequences. It’s a throwaway joke, but it rewards viewers who have been paying attention across seasons rather than just this one.

There’s also a quiet piece of continuity in the article Clark finds detailing Oliver’s parents’ death, which is described as nearly identical to a headline Lionel was reading on a plane back in the pilot episode. Lionel has apparently been thinking about the Queen family tragedy for a very long time, long before this episode gives us any real reason to know why.

And in a detail I only caught because someone else pointed it out once, this marks the 41st time Clark has worn his red jacket over a blue shirt across the run of the series so far. It’s a silly thing to track, but it says something about how much this show relied on a handful of visual shorthand choices to keep its lead feeling consistent even as everything around him kept changing.

Where This Leaves Everyone

By the end of the hour, Clark has made his first real ally in this fight, even if he isn’t ready to admit that’s what Oliver is yet. Lois has no idea how close she came to unmasking her own boyfriend, and the show clearly isn’t done mining that irony. Lex and Lana have both proven, in their own separate ways, that whatever they have isn’t built on trust. And Chloe, once again, is a step ahead of everyone else in the room.

“Arrow” isn’t a perfect episode. The Milo plotline resolves about as quickly as it starts, and the fundraiser opening asks you to accept a fairly convenient blackout so the plot can get moving. But as an introduction, it earns its reputation. It gives Oliver Queen a real point of view instead of just a costume, and it plants the first seeds of the argument that’s going to define Clark’s slow walk toward becoming Superman, the idea that saving the people closest to you isn’t the same thing as saving the world.

Next week we head into “Reunion,” and after an episode this focused on secret identities and old wounds, I’m curious to see how the show handles a storyline built entirely around a decade old grudge from Lex and Oliver’s shared past.

What did you think of Clark and Oliver’s first meeting? And did Lois deserve to get closer to unmasking Green Arrow than she did, or did the show let Clark off the hook a little too easily? Share your thoughts in the comments below!