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!
“Reunion,” the fifth episode of Season Six and the 115th episode overall, aired on October 26, 2006. It was written by Steven S. DeKnight and directed by Jeannot Szwarc, and it’s the episode that finally explains something the show had been sitting on for years without ever saying it out loud: why Oliver Queen and Lex Luthor can’t stand each other. I went in expecting a monster of the week built around some mysterious deaths at a prep school reunion. What I got instead was one of the more quietly devastating character studies the show has ever done, and it isn’t really about Oliver at all. It’s about Lex, and about how early he learned that betrayal is just the price of belonging.
A Reunion, and a Body Count
The episode opens on October 26, 1996, ten years to the day before it airs, at a boarding school called Excelsior Academy. Two teenagers, Lex Luthor and a boy named Duncan Allenmeyer, are quietly reading a Warrior Angel comic when Oliver Queen and his friends Alden and Geoffrey show up to make their lives miserable. They shove Lex down, mock his baldness, and tear apart the comic Duncan clearly can’t afford to replace. It’s a small, ugly scene, and it does exactly what it needs to do. It tells you Lex Luthor wasn’t always the smoothest guy in the room. He used to be the kid getting knocked down in the hallway.
Ten years later, the survivors of that friend group gather at Excelsior for an alumni social, and the show wastes no time turning nostalgia into horror. Alden notices Duncan is the only one missing from the reunion, gets told to drop it, and then gets impaled by a falling statue sword in a death so abrupt it barely registers before the episode moves on. It’s the kind of kill Smallville does well: quick, a little absurd if you think about it too hard, and mostly there to establish stakes rather than to be scary in its own right.
What Lex and Duncan Actually Had
The flashbacks are where this episode earns its runtime, and they work because the show resists the urge to make young Lex a smaller version of the Lex we already know. In 1996, Lex and Duncan aren’t rivals or manipulators. They’re two kids who don’t fit in, planning to do good in the world together once they’re old enough to matter. It’s a genuinely sweet dynamic, which makes it worse when you realize the show is building toward the moment that friendship gets destroyed.
That moment arrives when Lex and Duncan catch Oliver and his friends stealing test answers from an instructor’s office. It’s real leverage, the kind of thing that could actually humble the boys who’ve been tormenting them for years, and Duncan wants to use it to expose them. Lex has a different idea. He wants to use it to buy his way into their group instead. Duncan realizes what’s happening before Lex ever says it plainly, which might be the saddest beat in the whole flashback. He doesn’t need Lex to confirm the betrayal. He can just see it happening in real time on his friend’s face.
What follows is the scene the whole episode has been building toward. Duncan gets upset, Lex gets defensive, and under pressure from his new friends to prove his loyalty, Lex actually starts beating up the one person who ever treated him like an equal. It takes the other boys pulling him off. Duncan runs, gets hit by a car in the street, and survives in the most technical sense of that word only. Lionel Luthor, ever efficient about cleaning up his son’s messes, buries the whole incident and keeps Duncan’s mother quiet for a decade while Lionel’s own scientists secretly use him as a test subject for a meteor rock treatment meant to bring him back.
If you want to know why adult Lex is the way he is, and why he’s capable of both real tenderness and real cruelty depending on which version of himself feels useful in the moment, this is about as clean an origin as the show ever gives him. He learned as a young teenager that acceptance was available if he was willing to hurt the person who trusted him most to get it. Everything Lex does with Lana, with Lionel, with anyone who claims to love him, traces back to a kid who found out that lesson worked.
Duncan as Villain, Which Isn’t Really the Point
The mechanism driving this episode’s deaths is that Duncan, kept alive in a permanent vegetative state and pumped full of experimental meteor rock serum for ten years, has developed an ability to astrally project and take violent revenge on the boys who ruined his life. It’s a fun bit of Smallville sci-fi weirdness, and Clark eventually stops him by using one of Oliver’s new electromagnetic pulse arrows to short out Duncan’s brainwaves during an attack on Lex and Oliver, which ends up killing him for real this time.
But I don’t think the show actually wants us thinking of Duncan as the villain here, not in any meaningful sense. He’s presented more as a consequence than a threat, the physical manifestation of a debt that’s been quietly accruing interest for a decade while everyone who owed it moved on with their lives. Oliver got to grow up into Green Arrow. Lex got to become a Luthor in full. Duncan got a hospital bed and a body that occasionally leaves it to settle scores nobody else remembers owing. The show frames his rage as earned even while it can’t let him actually win, which is a more interesting choice than just handing us another meteor-freak-of-the-week plot.
Oliver’s Reckoning Looks Different From Lex’s
Oliver gets his own version of this reckoning, and it’s worth noting how differently he handles it compared to Lex. When Clark presses him for the full story, Oliver doesn’t dodge or minimize it. He admits he was the ringleader, admits he still feels guilty about what happened to Duncan, and later tells Lex directly that he regrets it. It’s not a full redemption, since regret ten years late doesn’t undo what happened to anyone, but it’s an honest accounting, and honesty isn’t something this show hands out to its characters for free.
Lex, by contrast, can only manage a version of honesty that’s really just another move in a longer game. He finally tells Lana about Duncan, but only after Lex nearly dies and clearly calculates that the truth is less dangerous to him than her finding out some other way. When Oliver thanks him for saving his life and apologizes again for the bullying, Lex’s only real response is that he regrets ever thinking he needed friends like Oliver in the first place. It’s a good line, and it’s also a complete dodge. He’s not reckoning with what he did to Duncan. He’s just retroactively deciding the whole friend group was beneath him, which conveniently lets him skip the part where he was the one who swung first.
Small Threads Worth Pulling
A few smaller pieces of this episode are doing more work than they first appear to. Clark casually mentions to Chloe that Oliver Queen owes him one, a reference to the events of “Arrow” that Chloe has no context for, since Clark never told her about protecting Oliver’s identity. It’s a small continuity wrinkle, but it’s a believable one, the kind of thing that happens naturally when a character starts keeping more secrets than he used to.
The Duncan and Lex comic book conversation about Warrior Angel and his supposed friend Black Diamond is doing some quiet thematic doubling too. Duncan can’t understand why two characters who are supposed to be friends end up fighting, and Lex explains that Black Diamond’s father breaks out of jail, forcing Warrior Angel to stop him in a confrontation that turns fatal. It’s not subtle once you notice it, given that Lex’s own father is the puppet master hovering over this entire episode, but it’s the kind of layering the show did well when it bothered to try. For what it’s worth, Black Diamond himself is a real, if extremely minor, Golden Age Batman villain, first appearing in Batman #58 back in April 1950 as a crime boss who springs convicts from prison to do his dirty work.
This is also the first time Chloe and Oliver actually meet, and while the episode doesn’t make much of it beyond a flustered “wow” from Chloe after he leaves the room, longtime fans know exactly where that thread eventually leads. It’s a nice, understated seed for a relationship the show won’t pay off for a few more seasons yet.
What’s in a Title
It’s worth sitting with the title for a second, because “Reunion” is doing more than just describing the alumni social that kicks the episode off. The word applies just as easily to what happens between Lex and the memory of Duncan, a reunion he never wanted and can’t control, arriving a decade after he assumed the whole mess was safely buried. It also works as a quiet, grim joke on the word itself. A reunion is supposed to be a happy gathering of old friends. This one kills two of them and nearly kills a third, which tells you everything about how the show views nostalgia in general. Looking backward on Smallville rarely goes well for anyone.
A Small Production Note Worth Knowing
There’s a piece of behind-the-scenes trivia about this episode that’s stuck with me since I first read about it years ago. The original draft of the script reportedly had Duncan attempting to take his own life after Lex’s betrayal, an act he would technically have survived given what we later learn about his condition. The producers apparently found that beat too disturbing for the show to depict, so the final version has him fleeing into the street and getting struck by a car instead. I mention it not to dwell on the darker version that didn’t make air, but because it’s a useful reminder of how carefully a show aimed at teenagers had to calibrate even its most tragic beats. The version we got is plenty devastating without needing to go further.
Lionel’s Fingerprints Are Everywhere
It’s easy to focus on Lex and Oliver here and miss how much of this episode is quietly about Lionel. He’s the one who buried Duncan’s death a decade ago. He’s the one who’s been running secret experiments on a comatose teenager for ten years without a flicker of guilt about it. And he’s the one Lex goes to at the end of the hour, not to make peace, but to demand access to research Lionel clearly never intended anyone to see. Every terrible thing in this episode eventually traces back to a Luthor cleaning up after another Luthor, and the show is careful to make sure we notice that Lex learned his instinct for damage control from somewhere. He didn’t invent the cover-up. He just inherited it.
A couple of smaller details rounded out this rewatch for me. Lucas Grabeel plays young Lex here, several years before he’d return to the show as Conner Kent, the clone built from both Lex and Clark’s DNA. Knowing that in advance makes his casting as a teenage Lex feel almost intentional in hindsight, even if nobody involved could have planned it that way at the time. And for anyone still tracking it along with me, this marks the 42nd time Clark has worn his red jacket over a blue shirt across the series, a small visual constant in an episode that’s otherwise about how much people can change in ten years.
Where This Leaves Everyone
By the end of the hour, Duncan is dead again, this time for good, and Lois has decided not to write the story that could have exposed the whole rotten history behind it. Lex has told Lana the truth, more or less, and confronted Lionel demanding to see the medical data on Duncan’s treatment, which tells you Lex is more interested in what his father did than in sitting with what he did. Oliver and Clark are left with something closer to real trust than they had after “Arrow,” built on the kind of history where you’ve actually seen someone flinch honestly instead of performing regret.
Meanwhile, Clark has his own loose thread dangling. Chloe’s satellite research turns up four more craters from the day he escaped the Phantom Zone, meaning Duncan’s rampage was never really the main event this week. Other escapees are out there, and Clark is going to spend the rest of this season finding out exactly how bad that’s going to get.
“Reunion” isn’t a perfect hour of television. The astral projection mechanics get a little hand-wavy if you poke at them too hard, and Alden and Geoffrey barely register as characters before they’re gone. But as an origin story for the animosity between two of the show’s most important adult characters, it’s some of the strongest work Smallville ever did with its flashback structure, and it makes Lex Luthor a little more tragic and a little more damning at the exact same time.
Next week we’re on to “Fallout,” and after an episode built around what happens when guilt finally catches up to you, I’m curious to see how Lex and Oliver carry what they learned about each other into whatever comes next.
What did you make of young Lex’s betrayal? Do you think he ever really reckons with what he did to Duncan, or does he just find a new way to blame everyone else for it? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
