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!
“Static,” the eighth episode of Season Six and the 118th episode overall, aired on November 16, 2006. It was written by James Morris and Shintaro Shimosawa and directed by James Conway, and it splits its runtime almost exactly down the middle between two stories that have nothing to do with each other. Clark chases a bone-crushing alien through the docks of Seattle. Lex gets trapped on a frequency nobody else can see or hear while Lana and Chloe try to find him. One half of this episode is trying too hard. The other half is quietly doing some of the more interesting work Smallville had done with Lex in a while.
Clark’s Half of the Episode Doesn’t Earn Its Ambition
The Seattle plot opens strong. Clark learns that a Phantom Zone escapee, one of the criminals he accidentally let loose earlier in the season, has landed on a shipping barge and killed the entire crew. He heads north, poses as a coroner’s assistant to get access to the crime scene, and eventually comes face to face with Aldar, a hulking alien who rips the bones out of his victims and, we’re told more than once, finds them delicious.
The problem isn’t the concept. A Phantom Zone criminal terrorizing a city is exactly the kind of stakes-raiser Smallville needed as it pushed further into its own mythology. The problem is that Aldar barely functions as a character. He shows up, kills a police officer in a way the show clearly wants us to find upsetting, taunts Clark with a line about tasting his blood, and then spends most of his remaining screen time either chasing Clark or getting thrown by him. There’s no real sense of what Aldar wants beyond food and freedom, and the fight choreography, while physical in a way the show doesn’t always manage, can’t carry a story that has nothing else going on underneath it.
Casting Dave Bautista, credited here under his wrestling name Batista, gives the character an undeniable physical presence. This was Bautista’s first credited acting role, years before Drax the Destroyer made him a household name in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and you can see why Smallville’s producers wanted him. He’s genuinely intimidating in a way a lot of the show’s monster-of-the-week villains aren’t. But intimidating isn’t the same as interesting, and Aldar exits the episode almost as thinly drawn as he entered it.
Season Six had already leaned on this formula more than once by this point in the year, dropping a newly escaped Phantom Zone criminal into Clark’s path for an episode before moving on to the next one. It’s a reasonable structural device for a show that needed a steady supply of threats big enough to challenge a character who was quickly outgrowing meteor-infected classmates, but “Static” is a reminder that the device only works when the writers give the Zoner of the week something resembling a personality. He’s a wrestler in alien makeup with a taste for marrow, not a character with an interior life, and the episode never really pretends otherwise.
There’s also a small, uncomfortable moment worth pausing on. When Aldar kills the responding police officer on the docks, the show frames it as a genuine tragedy, a reminder that this Zoner isn’t a schoolyard bully with a grudge but something that kills without hesitation or reason. It’s an effective beat on its own. It just underlines how much heavier the stakes are here than the writing around Aldar can support. A villain this lethal deserves more screen time spent on who he is and why he’s still hungry after whatever time he spent in the Phantom Zone, not just what he’s capable of doing to the people unlucky enough to cross his path.
Clark’s approach to tracking Aldar down is also worth a mention, if only because it’s a rare case of the show letting him improvise rather than lean entirely on his abilities. Bluffing his way into a crime scene by posing as a coroner’s assistant is a small, human kind of resourcefulness, and it’s a nice contrast to the super-speed and strength he falls back on once the fighting actually starts. The episode doesn’t do much with that contrast, but it’s there if you’re watching for it.
That exit is where the episode’s biggest swing happens, and it’s the one thing that keeps this half of the hour from being a total wash. Just as Aldar is about to finish Clark off, a mysterious figure kills the Zoner from a distance and super-speeds away, leaving nothing behind but a scorched handprint and an Oreo cookie. Clark chases the figure to the docks, catches a glimpse of glowing red eyes, and watches someone take flight in a streak of red light. Whoever this is, they’re clearly stronger and faster than Clark, and the show is smart enough not to explain the moment away. Clark himself doesn’t know what he saw, and neither do we. As a mystery to sit with, it works. As the resolution to an underwritten monster story, it’s still a bit of a shortcut. The episode needed a better villain, not just a better ending.
Lex’s Half of the Episode Is Stronger Than It Has Any Right to Be
Where the Seattle plot struggles to justify its own premise, the mansion plot builds something genuinely tense out of a fairly small idea. Lex is at home talking to Lana when his security system goes off. In the chaos of getting him to a panic room, Lana watches him vanish into static right in front of her. He’s still there, still able to see and hear everyone around him, but nobody can see or hear him back.
The man responsible is Bronson, a former Level 33.1 test subject with the ability to shift himself and others between frequencies, and he’s got a straightforward motive: revenge for what was done to him in Lex’s lab. It’s a clean premise, and the show gets real mileage out of it. Lex spends most of the episode as a helpless observer in his own home, watching Lana fall apart without being able to comfort her, which is a genuinely uncomfortable position for a character who’s spent five and a half seasons controlling every room he walks into.
Lana and Chloe’s search for him is where the episode’s most purely enjoyable material lives. Chloe brings in Jimmy Olsen, whose late father was a ham radio hobbyist, and the two of them dig up decades-old antique equipment to try to isolate the exact frequency Lex has been shifted to. It’s a low-tech solution to a high-concept problem, and there’s something charming about watching Chloe, usually the one hacking into government servers, get outmaneuvered by a stack of vacuum-tube radios instead. It’s also the first time Lana and Jimmy share any real scene together on the show, even though the episode treats them as though they already know each other.
Some corners of the fan wiki lean hard into a reading of Lana’s arc here as evidence of ongoing manipulation and brainwashing on Lex’s part, treating her devotion to him as something closer to conditioning than real feeling. That’s one way to read it, and the show has certainly given viewers plenty of reasons to distrust Lex’s motives by this point in the series. But I’d stop short of treating it as the only defensible interpretation. Lana’s panic when Lex disappears plays, at least on screen, like straightforward fear for someone she believes she loves, and when she finally tracks him to the library and tells him through the static that she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to raise their child alone, it reads as sincere rather than programmed. The show leaves plenty of room to be suspicious of Lex. It doesn’t necessarily require us to read every one of Lana’s feelings as manufactured.
What actually happens with Bronson complicates things further. He takes Lana into the frequency world to try to prove Lex’s guilt, but the Level 33.1 facility he shows her turns out to be an empty warehouse, its contents already cleared out. Lana wants to believe Lex over a man she calls a “homicidal maniac,” and by the end of the episode, we learn Lionel is the one who emptied the lab, which means Lex may genuinely not have known where the evidence went. It’s messier and more ambiguous than a clean villain reveal, and that ambiguity is more interesting than a tidy conclusion would have been.
Bronson himself doesn’t survive the episode. He knocks Lana out during a confrontation with Lex, and Lex kills him in the fight that follows before reviving her. The two of them kiss, Chloe and Jimmy finally tune in the right frequency, and Lex and Lana reappear in front of them, alive and together. It’s a resolution that leans a little too neatly into everyone getting exactly what they wanted, but the hour that led up to it earns more goodwill than it probably should for a plot this contained.
Lionel Gets to Be the Most Honest Person in the Episode
The smallest but sharpest scene in “Static” belongs to Lionel. When Chloe hacks into LuthorCorp’s system looking for information on Level 33.1, she finds her files wiped and Lionel waiting for her, unbothered by her questions. Later, he confronts Lex directly about clearing out the lab and demands a cut of whatever his son is investigating. There’s no pretense here, no manipulation dressed up as concern. Lionel wants in, and he says so.
It’s a small moment in an episode with bigger things going on, but it’s a reminder of how differently the show writes Lionel when he isn’t performing sincerity for Clark or Martha. With Lex, he doesn’t bother pretending to be anything other than what he is.
A Continuity Wrinkle Worth Flagging
The biggest structural oddity in “Static” is how thin Aldar’s story is compared to the Lex plot running alongside it. A Phantom Zone criminal capable of tearing a full ship’s crew apart should feel like a genuine threat to the show’s mythology, and for about ten minutes, he does. But the moment the story needs to resolve, the episode reaches for its mystery-rescuer tease instead of giving Clark a real victory. It’s a satisfying image on its own. It’s a less satisfying way to end a story that spent an entire episode building Aldar up as a serious threat, only to have someone else finish the job off screen.
A Few Small Details Worth Noticing
This episode marks Dave Bautista’s first credited acting role, billed as Batista in the closing credits, years before his run as Drax made him a recognizable name well outside wrestling circles. Watching “Static” now, it’s hard not to wonder what the show could have done with Aldar if it had trusted him with a real arc instead of a single-episode cameo. The physical performance was clearly there from the start. The material around it just wasn’t.
Elias Toufexis, who plays Bronson here, had already made a brief appearance on the show back in Season Three’s “Asylum” in a minor role. It’s the kind of small-world casting choice long-running genre shows tend to accumulate, and worth flagging for anyone doing a full rewatch alongside me.
The title itself does double duty. It refers to the literal radio interference at the center of Lex’s story, and it’s also the superhero code name of Virgil Hawkins, a character from DC and Milestone Comics who has no connection to this particular episode but whose name the writers were clearly aware of when they picked it.
Level 33.1 itself keeps resurfacing throughout this stretch of Season Six as a running thread rather than a one-episode plot device, which is part of why Bronson’s storyline lands with more weight than a typical guest villain’s. It’s the kind of connective tissue the show doesn’t always bother to build, and it’s a small credit to the writers that Lex’s secret lab has consequences that outlast the episode where it’s introduced.
Where the Episode Actually Lands
“Static” is a strange split of an hour. Clark’s half wants to be a monster story and a mythology-building tease at the same time, and it doesn’t have enough material to do both well. Lex’s half wants to be a small, contained thriller about helplessness and trust, and it mostly succeeds, ambiguity and all. Put together, the episode is a reminder that Smallville worked best when it let its characters carry the weight of a story instead of leaning on a guest monster to do it for them.
Next week we’re on to “Subterranean,” and after watching this episode hand its most interesting reveal to a character who barely gets a name, I’m curious whether the show follows through on that tease anytime soon, or lets it sit for a while.
What did you think of Aldar as a villain? Did the Lex and Lana storyline work for you, or does the brainwashing read feel closer to the mark than mine? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
