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!

“Rage,” the seventh episode of Season Six and the 117th episode overall, aired on November 9, 2006. It was written by Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer and directed by Whitney Ransick, and it’s an episode that somehow manages to be about three completely different kinds of family dysfunction at once while still landing a genuinely sweet Thanksgiving ending. Oliver Queen spirals into addiction. Lana Lang finds out she’s pregnant. Martha Kent gets kissed by a man she has every reason to distrust. None of it resolves neatly, and none of it needs to. That’s the show working at its most confident.

Oliver’s Drug Problem Isn’t Really About the Drug

The episode opens with Oliver and Lois in the middle of a make-out session in his apartment, the kind of domestic normalcy this show rarely lets its heroes keep for long. Lois steps away to change, and Oliver hears a carjacking in progress outside. He suits up, saves the couple, and gets shot for his trouble. It’s a clean, efficient cold open that tells you everything you need to know about who Oliver is when nobody’s watching: he can’t not help, even when help costs him.

What follows is the meat of the episode. Clark discovers Oliver has been self-medicating with an experimental healing drug called RL65, developed by a scientist named Dr. Pamela Black, who has already tried to walk away from the project once the lab mice started showing violent side effects. Oliver, being Oliver, tells her she doesn’t get to quit because he’s paying for it. That line does a lot of quiet work. It’s the first moment in the episode where his wealth stops looking like a resource and starts looking like a weapon, something he can point at people to make them keep doing what he wants.

The drug heals him fast, but it also makes him erratic and cruel in ways that feel uncomfortably plausible rather than cartoonish. He knocks Lois through a glass table without recognizing her. He tells Clark to let Lex die rather than save him. He and Lex eventually shoot each other in Lex’s office, and Oliver only survives because he’s carrying enough of the drug to cure himself on the spot. It’s the kind of dark turn Smallville handles well when it commits to it, and this episode commits.

Clark uses his abilities, super speed, x-ray vision, and superhuman strength among them, to track the source of the drug back to the halfway house LuthorCorp sponsors, which is its own quiet indictment of Lex’s charitable instincts. By the time Clark finally gets Oliver away from Lex, the fight isn’t really about the drug anymore. It’s about whether Oliver still recognizes the difference between protecting people and punishing them.

What makes the ending work is that the show doesn’t pretend the addiction gets solved because Oliver survives the night. When Clark visits him afterward, the two of them have a small, honest conversation about what it means to have abilities that other people don’t, and Oliver says he’s grateful for who he is and what he can do, which Clark echoes back. It’s not a full recovery arc. It’s a start, and the show is smart enough to let it be exactly that size.

If you know your comics, this whole storyline is a fairly direct nod to the Roy Harper heroin arc from the classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow run, with Oliver taking on the addiction role usually reserved for his own sidekick. The healing-factor angle also draws a little from Connor Hawke, the second Green Arrow in the comics, who canonically has some enhanced physical resilience of his own. Neither reference gets explained onscreen, and neither needs to. It’s the kind of detail that rewards people who know the source material without punishing anyone who doesn’t.

Lana’s Pregnancy Reveal Changes Everything Without Announcing It

While Oliver is falling apart in Metropolis, Lana is quietly falling apart at the mansion. She tells Lex she wants to volunteer at the same LuthorCorp-sponsored halfway house tangled up in Oliver’s story, and Lex, citing concern for her safety, shuts the idea down without much explanation. It’s a small scene, but it’s doing the same thing every Lex and Lana scene has been doing all season: showing us a relationship built on Lex managing what Lana is allowed to know.

The bigger moment happens almost sideways. Lana meets Chloe for lunch and starts to articulate something she’s clearly been circling for weeks, wondering out loud whether Lex’s early honesty with her was ever real or just a performance designed to win her trust. Before she can finish the thought, she faints. She recovers almost instantly and begs Chloe not to make a thing of it, then goes to see a doctor on her own.

The show holds the reveal until the very end of the hour, when Lana shows up at Chloe’s, admits she regrets pretty much every decision she’s made over the past few months, and tells Chloe she’s pregnant. Chloe’s reaction, stunned silence followed by a tight hug, says more than dialogue could have. This is a woman who’s spent the whole episode watching her friend get slowly boxed in by a man neither of them fully trusts, and now that friend is having his child.

The episode closes on Lana and Lex at a formal, nearly silent Thanksgiving dinner, and it’s a genuinely well-constructed final image. Lana looks miserable. Lex looks like he hasn’t noticed, or doesn’t want to. The show doesn’t need to spell out what a baby is going to mean for a relationship already this hollow. It just shows you the empty dining room and trusts you to fill in the rest.

Martha and Lionel Get an Actual Moment

Tucked between the Oliver crisis and the Lana reveal is a smaller subplot that ends up mattering more than its screen time suggests. Lionel goes to tell Martha he won’t be at Thanksgiving dinner, and in the middle of that conversation, he leans in and kisses her. He’s immediately mortified and leaves before she can respond.

Martha doesn’t let it sit. She goes to his office afterward and tells him plainly that she knows there’s something between them, that she isn’t ready to define what it is, but that she values their relationship enough to still want him at dinner. He accepts.

It’s a short scene, but it’s the rare moment this season where two characters actually say the true thing out loud instead of dancing around it for six more episodes. Martha’s directness here is refreshing precisely because so much of this episode is about people hiding things from each other. She’s the one person who just says what she means.

A Thanksgiving Table With A Lot Left Unsaid

By the closing act, Oliver shows up uninvited at the Kent farm to ask Lois for forgiveness, and they get back together with barely a word of explanation for everything that happened the night before. Chloe dodges Clark’s questions about Lana. Clark dodges Chloe’s questions about the Green Arrow. Everyone at that table is carrying something they’re choosing not to say, which feels like the entire thesis of the episode compressed into one dinner scene.

Clark takes over his father’s job of carving the turkey, and the show lets that beat breathe without turning it into a speech. Jonathan’s absence hangs over the whole episode, mentioned early when Clark tells Martha how much his dad loved this holiday, and it resurfaces here without anyone needing to say his name again. The Kents keep their tradition of going around the table and naming what they’re thankful for, and it works as a genuine emotional anchor rather than a sitcom device, mostly because the show has spent five and a half seasons earning our investment in this family specifically.

A Few Continuity Wrinkles Worth Flagging

A couple of things nagged at me on this rewatch, the kind of details you only really notice once you’re moving through a series episode by episode instead of letting the seasons blur together.

The first is Chloe’s seat at that Thanksgiving table. She’s sitting comfortably next to Lionel Luthor, sharing a pleasant family dinner with a man who tried to have her killed and later sent an actual assassin after her. The show never addresses this shift in their relationship onscreen. There’s an argument that Lionel’s protection of Chloe during the Dark Thursday storyline and their more recent cooperation to help Clark softened things between them, but that’s a viewer doing the show’s work for it. As written, it’s a plot hole the series never bothers to acknowledge.

The second is Oliver’s equipment, or the total lack of it. He’s established as one of the wealthiest men in Metropolis, someone who can apparently fund an entire secret drug research program on a whim, and yet his Green Arrow suit offers him no meaningful protection when he’s out fighting armed criminals at night. It’s the kind of gap that only becomes glaring once a character actually gets shot doing his job, which is exactly what happens in this episode’s opening minutes. You’d think a billionaire vigilante would prioritize body armor before wonder drugs, but the show needs him vulnerable enough for the RL65 story to work, so logic takes a back seat.

Neither wrinkle ruins the episode. If anything, they’re the kind of imperfections that come with a show juggling this many moving parts on a network TV budget and schedule. But once you notice them, they’re hard to unsee.

A Few Small Details Worth Noticing

This episode also carries the distinction of being Smallville‘s first Thanksgiving episode, which is a little surprising given how long the show had been on the air by this point. It also marks Justin Hartley’s only appearance in the season’s opening credits as a full series regular, billed separately as “Justin Hartley as Oliver Queen” rather than tucked into a guest-starring block, which tracks with how central his storyline is to this particular hour.

The song playing under that closing Thanksgiving dinner is “Cain and Able” by Josh Kelley, and the title alone feels like it was chosen on purpose. An episode about a man losing control of his better instincts, closing on a song built around the oldest sibling conflict in scripture, isn’t subtle, but it’s the kind of soundtrack choice that rewards a second watch once you know to listen for it.

There’s also a nice bit of continuity buried in the Martha and Lionel scene. This marks the first time Lionel and Lois have shared any real scene together since the Season Four premiere, aside from brief, wordless overlaps at Jonathan’s funeral and a fundraiser earlier this season. It’s a small reminder of how carefully this show tracks its ensemble even when it isn’t drawing attention to it.

Where the Episode Actually Lands

“Rage” is one of those mid-season episodes that doesn’t try to resolve anything so much as it tries to show you exactly where everyone stands right before the holidays force them all into the same room. Oliver survives his own recklessness but doesn’t fix what caused it. Lana gets news that will reshape the rest of her arc but has nowhere safe to put it. Martha and Lionel take one honest step toward whatever they are to each other. And Clark, in the middle of all of it, gets to be the one person at that table who’s actually holding the family together, even while he’s keeping his biggest secret from every person seated around it.

It’s not the flashiest episode of the season, but it’s one of the more emotionally honest ones, and it sets up a lot of what Season Six still has to pay off.

Next week we’re on to “Static,” and after watching this episode use a holiday dinner to paper over three separate personal crises, I’m curious how long the show can keep that particular trick working before something finally breaks out into the open.

What did you make of Oliver’s fall this week? Did the addiction storyline land for you, or did it feel like a detour from the season’s bigger Lex and Lana story? Share your thoughts in the comments below!