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!
“Hydro,” the tenth episode of Season Six and the 120th episode overall, aired on January 11, 2007. It was written by Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson and directed by Tom Welling himself, marking only the second time the show’s leading man stepped behind the camera after his debut with “Fragile.” That’s a fun bit of trivia to sit with going in, because “Hydro” ends up being one of those episodes where nearly every major relationship on the show gets nudged forward at once. Lana and Lex. Clark and Lana. Lois and Oliver. Clark and Lois. It’s a lot of romantic real estate to cover in forty-two minutes, and the show wisely ties it all together with a single antagonist whose entire power set is built around overhearing what people don’t want overheard.
A Villain Built for a Gossip Column
Linda Lake, played by Tori Spelling, is one of the more thematically appropriate one-episode villains the show has produced. She’s the Daily Planet‘s gossip columnist, and her meteor-infected ability lets her dissolve into water and reform elsewhere, which means she can slip into any room, any bathroom, any office cooler, and hear exactly what she isn’t supposed to. It’s a power that maps directly onto what she already does for a living, and the episode gets a lot of mileage out of that overlap before it ever gets around to explaining the mechanics.
The opening kill sets the tone. Linda has just destroyed baseball player Mike Dawson’s career by exposing his steroid use, and when he corners her in a plaza to confront her, she disappears into a fountain and drowns him from underneath. It plays as a straightforward murder disguised as an accident, and Jimmy Olsen is the one who smells something wrong with it, which is a nice small touch. He’s not a series regular yet in any official capacity, but he’s already doing the instinctive reporter thing of not accepting the easy explanation.
Where the episode gets more interesting is in how directly it uses Linda as a mirror for Chloe. Both women work in and around journalism. Both trade in other people’s secrets, at least a little, in the name of getting the story. Chloe spends the whole episode indignant that Linda would print something as private as Lana’s doubts about marrying Lex, and there’s an unspoken tension underneath that indignation, because Chloe has been sitting on Clark’s entire identity for years. The show doesn’t spell this parallel out loud, but it doesn’t really need to. When Chloe finally confronts Linda and gets accused of hypocrisy for having her own secret about her “farm boy friend,” it lands harder because of everything we already know Chloe is carrying.
Linda’s death, hit by Lana’s car and reduced to a puddle in the street, is a fittingly unceremonious end for a character whose whole identity was about controlling the narrative around other people. She doesn’t even get the dignity of a dramatic final confrontation. She just gets run over mid-chase, which is oddly fitting for someone whose entire arc was about consequences catching up with her from an angle she didn’t expect.
Lana Says Yes, and the Pregnancy Finally Lands
The Lana and Lex material carries most of the episode’s emotional weight, and it’s worth talking through in order because the show is doing something fairly patient with it.
Lana opens the hour still unable to say yes to Lex’s proposal, and she admits to Chloe that if Clark had been the one asking, she wouldn’t have hesitated at all. It’s a blunt admission, and Chloe’s read on it, that Lana can’t move forward until she actually talks to Clark, feels correct even before Linda Lake blows the whole conversation open in print.
Lex’s response to reading that article is worth paying attention to, because it continues the more textured version of his character the show has been building recently. He doesn’t confront Lana with anger. He brings her breakfast in bed and tells her, calmly, that he’s relieved to finally understand why she’s been hesitating. It’s a version of Lex who is trying, genuinely, to be patient with someone he loves, and it makes what comes next land with more complexity than it would otherwise.
When Clark shows up at the mansion to talk to Lana, Lex is the one who tells him she’s pregnant, and Clark’s reaction, the stunned silence, the inability to respond, is one of the better beats Tom Welling plays in the episode as an actor rather than as a director. It’s a moment that could easily tip into melodrama, and instead it plays quiet and a little devastating.
I’ll flag the timeline wrinkle here without spending too long on it, since I know some of you have been tracking these threads as closely as I have. Lana’s insistence that she would have said yes to Clark instantly, no hesitation, sits a little oddly next to how “Reckoning” actually played out, where Clark asked her to take time before answering because of everything he’d just unloaded on her. It’s a small inconsistency in how the show remembers its own history, and I don’t think it’s worth losing sleep over. Soap opera storytelling revises its own past all the time when the emotional beat of the week needs it to.
By the episode’s end, Lana accepts Lex’s proposal, and the scene is genuinely tender. Lex tells her he’ll wait forever for someone who might eventually learn to love him the way he loves her, which is either romantic or faintly tragic depending on how much you trust Lex Luthor’s read on his own future, and given everything we already know about where this character is headed, I’d lean toward tragic. But in the moment, watching it play out without that outside knowledge, it’s a genuinely earned piece of character work.
Lois, Clark, and a Kiss Nobody Saw Coming
The Lois and Oliver material is the lighter half of the episode, and it gives Erica Durance some of her best comedic material of the season. Lois has started to suspect that Oliver Queen is secretly the Green Arrow, and rather than confront him directly, she recruits Clark to help her find proof, which puts Clark in the deeply uncomfortable position of protecting one secret identity while investigating another.
Clark’s solution, having Jimmy stage a fake mugging so that “Green Arrow” can swoop in and be unmasked in front of Lois, is exactly the kind of scheme this show loves, and it goes about as well as you’d expect a scheme like that to go. Clark suits up as Green Arrow himself to keep Oliver’s identity protected, and Lois, thinking she’s confirmed her suspicion, kisses him. Passionately. In costume. Right before Oliver walks up behind her and she realizes, at least on the surface, that she’s got the wrong guy standing in front of her.
It’s a genuinely fun sequence, and it works because both Erica Durance and Tom Welling sell the aftermath so well. Clark’s expression once the hood comes off and he’s alone again, that mix of guilt and something closer to delight, does a lot of quiet work toward setting up where this show eventually wants Lois and Clark to end up. The show is still years away from getting there in any serious way, but “Hydro” is one of the earlier moments where you can feel the writers testing the chemistry on purpose rather than by accident.
I’ll admit my bias here. I’ve always found the Lois and Clark dynamic more compelling than the Lana and Clark dynamic, mostly because Lois never treats Clark like a fragile secret to be managed. She needles him, she doesn’t buy his excuses, and there’s an ease to their scenes that the show’s central romance with Lana has rarely managed even at its best. Watching this kiss land, even under false pretenses, even with Lois convinced she’s kissing someone else entirely, is one of the more purely enjoyable scenes in an episode otherwise built around people lying to each other for less charming reasons.
Chloe Caught in the Middle
It’s worth pausing on Chloe’s position in this episode, because she’s doing more structural work than almost anyone else on screen. She’s keeping Clark’s secret. She’s trying to figure out how Linda got Lana’s private conversation. She’s fielding Lana’s suspicion that she’s the one who leaked it. And she’s the one who ultimately puts together that Oliver is the Green Arrow just from listening to Jimmy and Lois talk, which is a nice payoff for a character whose entire skill set is connecting information other people miss.
Her breakdown in front of Clark, the moment where she finally snaps about having to take “a two-second breather from hiding the fact that you are an alien from another planet to protect someone else for a change,” is the episode’s most honest piece of writing. Allison Mack plays it with real exhaustion rather than melodrama, and Clark’s apology afterward, hugging her instead of arguing back, is a good reminder of why their friendship has remained one of the show’s steadiest relationships even as everything around them gets more complicated.
A Few Small Details Worth Noticing
Tori Spelling filmed this episode roughly five months pregnant with her first child, and there’s a fun bit of behind-the-scenes trivia connected to it. On a 2025 episode of the Talk Ville podcast, Tom Welling recalled filming the scene where Linda is chased through the plaza and remembered Spelling’s then-husband, Dean McDermott, panicking on set when he saw “her” trip and fall during the chase, not realizing it was a stunt double standing in. Welling said he had to calm McDermott down and explain that Spelling herself hadn’t been anywhere near the stunt.
This is also the first time Lois and Jimmy meet on screen, even though the show treats them as already familiar with each other, which suggests some offscreen history the writers never bothered to dramatize. And keep an eye on the title itself. “Hydro” refers most directly to Linda’s water-based ability, but there’s a case to be made that it also describes the episode’s structure, since almost every plot this week involves something bubbling under the surface before it finally breaks through, whether that’s Lana’s feelings, Chloe’s frustration, or Linda’s murders.
Where the Episode Actually Lands
“Hydro” isn’t one of Season Six’s most celebrated hours, and I understand why some fans file it under filler. But I think that undersells what it’s doing quietly well. It moves three separate relationships forward in a single episode without any of them feeling rushed, and it gives its guest villain a power set that’s more thematically pointed than most one-episode threats manage. Linda Lake isn’t a particularly deep character, but she doesn’t need to be. She exists to force everyone else’s secrets into the open, and by the time she’s gone, Lana has said yes to Lex, Clark has kissed Lois without either of them fully understanding what just happened, and Chloe has confirmed Oliver’s identity almost by accident. That’s a lot of forward motion dressed up as a filler episode about a gossip columnist who can turn into water.
Next week we’re on to “Justice,” and after an episode this focused on secrets slipping out from under people, I’m curious how much longer this show can keep juggling all of them before something finally breaks for good.
Where do you land on that Lois and Clark kiss? Was it just an accident of the Green Arrow scheme, or did you feel the show planting a flag for where these two were eventually headed, Lana proposal or not? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
