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!
“Subterranean,” the ninth episode of Season Six and the 119th episode overall, aired on December 7, 2006. It was written by Caroline Dries and directed by Rick Rosenthal, and this was originally slotted to air fifth in the season’s order, which explains a few small continuity wrinkles I’ll flag later. On the surface, this is a Clark-and-a-troubled-kid episode, a formula the show returns to often enough that longtime viewers know the beats before the cold open ends. Underneath that formula, though, “Subterranean” is doing something a little more ambitious, both with its guest plot and with the ongoing story of what exactly Lex Luthor has built underneath his mansion.
A Familiar Formula, Told With More Weight Than Usual
The episode opens with Javier Ramirez and his friend Francisco, two laborers trapped on Jed McNally’s farm, planning an escape through the cornfield. Francisco doesn’t make it. He vanishes into the ground mid-run, and Javier is left alone on the road with no idea what happened to him. It’s a striking opening image, and it sets up the episode’s real antagonist well before Clark ever appears on screen.
Javier eventually turns up hiding in Clark’s barn, cut up from his run through the corn, and the show does something it’s done many times before with its guest characters: gives Clark someone younger and more vulnerable to protect. What makes this version land better than some of the show’s other troubled-youth episodes is the specificity of Javier’s situation. He’s not running from a single bad guy. He’s undocumented, separated from his mother, and terrified of the police as much as he is of whatever took Francisco. Tyler Posey, in the role, gives Javier a kind of exhausted wariness that sells the stakes even before the audience knows what’s actually happening on McNally’s land.
Clark’s decision to help him plays out the way you’d expect if you’ve watched this show for any length of time. He hides Javier from Deputy Morales, uses his X-ray vision to find him tucked in a cabinet, and eventually has to go around his own mother to keep him safe. What’s more interesting is how directly the episode has Clark frame his own identity in the conversation. When Martha pushes back and reminds him that as a state senator she has an obligation to follow the law, Clark doesn’t argue the abstract case for compassion. He points at himself. He tells her flatly that he’s an illegal immigrant too, and that she’s been harboring him for seventeen years. It’s a blunt line, and it’s the kind of moment that could easily tip into the show being heavy-handed with its metaphor. I won’t pretend the immigration storyline here is subtle. It isn’t. But Clark’s insistence on drawing a straight line between his own hidden origin and Javier’s situation is at least an honest use of the show’s core premise, rather than a metaphor bolted on for the week and forgotten by the credits.
I don’t want to spend the whole review picking apart the real-world politics of a seventeen-year-old genre show’s handling of immigration, because that’s a conversation that could fill its own post and probably has, somewhere on a fan forum. What I’ll say is that the episode uses the material mostly as a vehicle to deepen Clark’s empathy and to set up the actual monster of the week, which is where the story gets more interesting anyway.
Jed McNally Earns His Reveal
Jed McNally spends the first act of the episode playing the part of the friendly, slightly too cheerful neighbor, the kind of guy who talks about how the second meteor shower turned out to be good for his farm. It’s a nice piece of misdirection. By the time Clark uses his X-ray vision on the cornfield and sees a field full of skeletons underneath the surface, McNally has fully shifted from harmless local color to genuine threat, and the show earns that shift by letting him be pleasant just long enough for it to feel wrong in hindsight.
McNally’s power, the ability to displace minerals and move through solid earth, is a fairly simple ability as far as Smallville‘s meteor-infected go, but the episode gets good mileage out of it visually. The image of him disappearing into the ground mid-arrest, right as police are closing in, is one of the better small special-effects beats the show pulls off this season. And the final fight, with Clark pulled underground and the two of them battling somewhere beneath Javier’s feet, gives the hour a genuinely tense final stretch even though we never actually see the fight itself. Javier standing at the edge of the field, watching the earth rumble with no idea whether Clark is winning or losing, is a better piece of tension than a lot of the show’s more visible fight scenes.
Where the episode falters slightly is in how quickly McNally’s motivations get explained away. He’s revealed to be one of Lex’s Level 33.1 test subjects, which retroactively makes him less a standalone villain and more a piece of the season’s larger Lex mythology. That’s not necessarily a bad choice, but it does mean McNally himself never really gets to exist as a character with his own interior life. He’s a delivery mechanism for both the week’s plot and the ongoing Lex story, and the episode is more interested in the latter.
Lex’s Moral Complexity Is the Real Engine of This Episode
This is where “Subterranean” earns its place in the season, and it’s worth talking about the Lex material on its own terms rather than as a footnote to the McNally story.
The episode opens with Lex and Lana in a much softer place than we’ve seen them recently. Both have been losing sleep over his marriage proposal, and Lex, in a rare moment of self-awareness, admits the proposal itself was impulsive. He tells her to take whatever time she needs and sends her off to Amsterdam for an art show, which reads on its face as a genuinely generous gesture. It’s a small scene, but it’s doing real work. The show has spent a long stretch of its run establishing Lex as controlling, and this scene deliberately complicates that read by giving him room to be patient and even a little vulnerable.
That complexity gets tested hard once Dr. Bauer shows up and it becomes clear that McNally is one of Lex’s own experiments, and that Lex genuinely didn’t know his test subject had been killing people. His anger at Bauer plays as sincere, not performative, which matters. This is a Lex who wants results from his research, not casualties, and the distinction the show draws between those two things is more nuanced than “Subterranean” gets credit for. He’s not framed as innocent. He’s framed as someone whose ambition has outrun his ability to control what it produces, which is a more interesting flaw than simple villainy.
Then there’s the ending, and it’s genuinely one of the more unsettling images the show has produced by this point in its run. Lana comes home from her trip newly convinced that Lex’s fortune could be a force for good, starting with the immigrant laborers whose situation she’s just witnessed firsthand. It’s an earnest, well-meaning turn for her character. And then the episode cuts to Lex walking alone through the corridor of Level 33.1, past cell after cell of the people he’s holding and experimenting on, while “Prelude 12/21” by AFI plays underneath. It’s quiet. There’s no dialogue. It doesn’t need any. The contrast between what Lana believes she’s about to help build and what Lex is actually walking through in that same moment is the episode’s real thesis, and it’s a sharper piece of writing than the McNally plot ever quite manages on its own.
I’ve seen some fans read this scene, and Lex’s whole arc this season, as proof that he’s simply irredeemable at this point, a man performing generosity while quietly running a prison underneath his own house. I don’t think that reading is wrong exactly, but I’d push back a little on treating it as the only way to see him here. The show keeps giving Lex genuine moments of restraint and care, this episode included, right alongside the darker material. That tension is clearly intentional. Lex isn’t written as a cartoon villain twirling a mustache behind Lana’s back. He’s written as someone capable of real tenderness who has also built something monstrous, and refusing to hold both of those things at once flattens what the show is actually going for.
A Brief Word on Chloe and Jimmy
The Chloe and Jimmy subplot gets less real estate this week, mostly functioning as a lighter counterbalance to the heavier material happening on the McNally farm and in the mansion. Jimmy shows up ready for a date, gets bumped for Javier’s crisis, and spends the episode being a good sport about it while helping track down Javier’s mother. It’s charming in small doses, and Javier’s blunt question about whether Jimmy is Chloe’s boyfriend gets one of the episode’s better laugh lines out of her deflection. I won’t spend much more time on it here, but it’s a nice reminder that this show could still do easy chemistry between its supporting cast even in an episode this dense with plot.
A Continuity Wrinkle Worth Flagging
As I mentioned up top, “Subterranean” was originally intended to air fifth in Season Six’s order rather than ninth. You can feel that shift in a couple of small spots if you’re watching closely. Chloe seems reluctant to actually call Jimmy her boyfriend here, which reads oddly once you remember their relationship has already progressed further in episodes broadcast earlier in the year. And there’s no mention anywhere in this episode of Lana’s pregnancy, even though the show acknowledged both the pregnancy and Lex’s proposal in “Static” just one episode prior in broadcast order. It’s a minor thing, and not something that derails the hour, but it’s the kind of detail that rewards watching a show like this closely rather than passively.
A Few Small Details Worth Noticing
Tyler Posey, who plays Javier here, would go on to headline MTV’s Teen Wolf a few years later, and it’s a little strange watching this performance now knowing how much further his career would go. This is also, notably, the second time the show has used its bus station set, the first being back in the Season One finale, “Tempest.”
The title itself is doing triple duty, which I appreciate. It refers most literally to McNally’s ability to travel underground. It also gestures at the illegal activity happening beneath the surface of small-town Kansas life, both McNally’s killings and the human smuggling Javier and the other workers were caught up in. And it works as a description of Level 33.1 itself, buried beneath the mansion Lex has spent the whole series trying to convince everyone is just a home.
This episode also marks the first mid-season finale in the show’s run where neither Jonathan Kent nor Lionel Luthor appears, which feels worth noting given how central both characters had been to the show’s structure up to this point.
Where the Episode Actually Lands
“Subterranean” is a stronger hour than its reputation among some fans suggests. The Javier and McNally plot leans on a formula the show has used before, and it doesn’t entirely escape the trap of using a real-world issue as set dressing for a superhero’s origin metaphor. But it’s sincere in its intentions, and Tyler Posey’s performance gives it more emotional weight than a lot of the show’s other guest-of-the-week stories manage. The real reason to watch this one, though, is Lex. The quiet horror of that final walk through Level 33.1, set against Lana’s newfound faith in what his money could accomplish, is one of the better character beats Smallville had produced in a while, and it’s a reminder that this show was often at its best when it let its central relationships carry the weight instead of leaning entirely on a guest villain to do it.
Next week we’re on to “Hydro,” and after watching Lex walk past a hallway full of his own secrets, I’m curious how much longer the show can keep Lana in the dark about what she’s actually agreeing to be a part of.
What did you think of the immigration storyline, did it work for you as a mirror for Clark’s own story, or did it feel like it was reaching? And where do you land on Lex after that final scene? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
