Smallville S4 E10 – Scare

Welcome back to our look at the adventures of young Clark Kent! Grab your leather jackets and a coffee from the Talon, because we are diving deep into a beautifully spooky hour of television.

Preview

When a secret LuthorCorp lab experiment goes up in smoke, a highly toxic gas is released right into the atmosphere of our favorite accident-prone Kansas town. Before you can say “lawsuit,” the residents of Smallville begin slipping into deep comas. But there’s a catch: before the lights go out, they are forced to live through their ultimate, tailored-made nightmares in terrifyingly vivid detail.

As Clark, Lana, Chloe, Lex, and Jason face down their psychological demons, the clock is ticking for a real-world cure. Clark must find a way to synthetically engineer an antidote using his own un-infectable biology, but doing so means putting his deepest secrets directly into the hands of a very desperate Lex Luthor. Can the town wake up from this waking nightmare, or will their deepest fears consume them for good?

Episode Review

Starring: Tom Welling (Clark Kent), Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang), Michael Rosenbaum (Lex Luthor), Allison Mack (Chloe Sullivan), John Schneider (Jonathan Kent), Annette O’Toole (Martha Kent), and Jensen Ackles (Jason Teague).

Freak of the Week: This week breaks the mold because the villain isn’t a person with meteor powers—it’s a literal cloud of gas! Specifically, a weaponized fear toxin cooked up by LuthorCorp. Our proxy “Freaks” are the scientists running the show, notably Dr. Otis Ford (played by veteran character actor Malcolm Stewart), who clearly skipped the LuthorCorp ethics seminar.

Special Effects: This episode relies heavily on atmospheric visual tricks to sell the nightmare sequences, and for a mid-2000s TV budget, it holds up decently well. The standout is Lex’s post-apocalyptic vision, which cleverly mixes freshly shot footage with the iconic, blood-raining, white-suit imagery recycled straight out of Season 1’s “Hourglass”. The bad effects? Some of the green-screen work during Lana’s graveyard chase feels a little flat, and the CGI “glowing gas” lacks some punch. But the practical set designs for the nightmare mental asylum and the crumbling world more than make up for it.

Music:

• Falling – Mindy Smith (Plays during the emotional wrap-up where Clark chats with his parents in the loft and Lana talks with Jason).

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4 out of 5 stars)

An excellent, suspenseful psychological thriller that gives the actors a chance to stretch their legs outside of the usual high school drama. It’s cheesy TV horror at times, but for the time it was well done.

Episode Synopsis

The episode kicks off like a cheesy romantic soap opera—literally. Lana walks up to Clark’s loft in high heels, passionately telling him how much she loves him, only for the scene to turn on a dime. She spots his spaceship, realizes he arrived during the meteor shower, blames him for killing her parents, and stabs him with a piece of meteor rock. Clark wakes up gasping. It was a dream… or was it?

Down at LuthorCorp, a container of an experimental, meteor-laced decontamination gas ruptures. A worker panics and triggers the bio-hazard lockdown, trapping themselves inside, but the gas seeps out anyway. Soon, everyone who came into contact with it is living out their worst fears.

Chloe’s nightmare is a visceral punch to the gut: she’s forcibly dragged away to a mental institution, screaming that she isn’t crazy, reflecting her real-life fear of inheriting her mother’s mental illness. Lana finds herself chased through a cemetery by the ghosts of her dead parents, screaming about abandonment. Jason hallucinates a brutal attack where Lana stabs him.

The absolute crown jewel of the episode is Lex Luthor’s nightmare. He finds himself standing in a barren, burnt-to-a-crisp wasteland outside the White House, wearing his iconic white suit. A ghostly future version of himself watches as a rain of blood falls from the sky and nuclear missiles launch, making it explicitly clear that Lex’s biggest hidden fear is the monster he knows he might become.

Clark realizes the toxin is laced with kryptonite, which is why it bypasses his immune system. To save his friends, who are rapidly dying in the hospital, Clark tries to let Dr. Scanlan extract a sample of his blood to synthesize an antidote. Because it needs to be heated to a precise temperature to activate, Clark uses his heat vision on the vial when the doctors aren’t looking. Lex takes the unproven, highly experimental cure and boldly injects himself first to prove it works, ultimately saving the town.

The hour ends with a beautifully poignant scene between Clark and Chloe. Chloe, still rattled from her nightmare, gently presses Clark about the burden of carrying heavy secrets, dropping massive hints that she’s ready to be the friend he can confide in.

Superman in the Making

This episode provides a massive psychological blueprint for the hero Clark Kent is destined to become. A major theme of the Superman mythos is isolation; Superman is a god living among mortals, constantly afraid that if people knew what he truly was, they would alienate, fear, or destroy him.

Clark’s nightmare highlights his massive survivor’s guilt. He doesn’t just fear Lana rejecting him; he fears that his very existence makes him responsible for the tragedies of the people he loves. Overcoming this “Scare” requires Clark to realize that hiding his identity isn’t just about protecting his own skin—it’s about managing the emotional weight of his destiny. Furthermore, we see his classic selflessness on display when he willingly hands over his blood to a Luthor Corp lab, risking his secret being exposed to the world’s most curious billionaire just to save a hospital room full of people. He values human life over his own safety, which is the definition of a hero.

Photos

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