Smallville S4 E20 – Ageless

Preview

Clark Kent and Lana Lang get an unexpected, crash-course lesson in parenting this week when they discover an abandoned newborn in the middle of a cratered cornfield. Dubbed “Evan,” this isn’t your average infant—thanks to a heavy dose of kryptonite meteor radiation, the little guy begins aging at an alarming rate, transforming from baby to moody pre-teen in a matter of hours.

While Clark and Lana play domestic house on the Kent farm, Evan’s biological father and an unscrupulous scientist from LuthorCorp are hot on his trail. With the boy growing older by the minute and on the verge of a catastrophic thermal meltdown, Clark faces a ticking clock to save the kid before he literally burns out. Tune in to see why Smallville’s version of daycare is the most dangerous gig in Kansas.

Episode Review

“Ageless” is one of those classic late-Season 4 entries where the writers clearly threw their hands up and said, “What if Clark and Lana had a baby together, but we wrapped it in a weird sci-fi countdown?” It’s campy, overly sentimental, and heavily reminiscent of classic Star Trek tropes where someone ages twenty years every commercial break. Yet, despite being widely regarded by fans as one of the sillier fillers of the season—sandwiched right between high-stakes witch arcs and the impending cataclysmic graduation finale—it actually possesses a lot of heart.

Tom Welling and Kristin Kreuk have to sell sudden surrogate parenthood in roughly 42 minutes, and while the dialogue leans heavily into soap opera melodrama, their chemistry carries the emotional beats better than the script probably deserves. Michael Rosenbaum brings his usual cynical brilliance to Lex, giving us just enough corporate menace to keep the Luthor subplot interesting. The pacing is breathless out of sheer necessity: Evan has to be born, walk, hit puberty, learn morality, and face his own mortality before the credits roll. If you can suspend your disbelief past the absurdity of two high school seniors playing house while juggling a child aging at lightspeed, “Ageless” is a fun, nostalgic, albeit goofy slice of peak 2000s teen drama.

Cast & Freak of the Week

Main Cast:

• Tom Welling as Clark Kent
• Kristin Kreuk as Lana Lang
• Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor
• Allison Mack as Chloe Sullivan
• John Glover as Lionel Luthor
• Annette O’Toole as Martha Kent
• John Schneider as Jonathan Kent

Freak of the Week / Guest Stars:

• Evan Gallagher (Baby / Toddler / Child / Teen): Evan is played by a whole daisy chain of actors across his rapid lifecycle, most notably Jeffrey Ballard as the brooding, explosion-prone teenage Evan, and Colin Ford as the younger version. Ballard had a run of mid-2000s guest spots on CW/WB shows (including Supernatural), and he does a respectable job portraying a terrified kid whose cells are literally combusting.
• Patrick Galligan plays Evan’s desperate biological father, Jack Gallagher, who has spent years grieving his missing, abducted wife.
• Alisen Down guest stars as Lillian Luthor, appearing in Lex’s haunting repressed memories. Down would later return to the Smallville universe in Season 8 as Tess Mercer’s tragic ally, Eva Greer.

Special Effects

Late-era Season 4 effects are a wildly mixed bag, and “Ageless” shows the seams. Evan’s rapid physical transformation relies heavily on quick cuts, varying hairstyles, and dramatic morphing cross-fades that feel straight out of an early-2000s screensaver.

The real visual centerpiece—and biggest offender—is Evan’s energetic thermal discharge. When he gets agitated or approaches his biological ceiling, his body glows with a bright, pulsating yellow-orange CGI aura that looks less like deadly cellular radiation and more like a budget microwave oven light. The final explosion in the windmill looks distinctly flat against the practical Kansas dust, though credit is due to the practical set dressing in the field craters, which always looks solid when the budget isn’t funneled into digital fireballs.

Music & Track Listing

The music in “Ageless” leans into mid-2000s acoustic pop and emotional indie rock to undersell the tragedy of Evan’s vanishing life:

• “All the Money or the Simple Life Honey” by The Dandy Warhols (plays during background transitions)
• “Notice of Eviction” by The Weakerthans (sets the mood for the teenage angst and drifting timeline)
• “Beyond the Sun” by Colin James (plays toward the bittersweet, lingering resolution)

Rating

1.5 out of 5 Stars

A goofy, soap-heavy detour that doesn’t advance the main mythology much, but earns a bonus point for Welling and Kreuk genuinely committing to the ridiculous premise.

Plot Synopsis & Breakdown

The episode kicks off when Clark and Lana stumble upon a bizarre scene: an abandoned baby boy resting calmly inside an impact crater in a remote field. With no immediate sign of the mother, Clark uses his superhuman reflexes to rescue the child and brings him back to the Kent Farm. Jonathan and Martha are astonished when, within mere hours, the baby exhibits developmental milestones that usually take months, eventually growing into a walking, talking toddler overnight.

Lana instantly bonds with the child, whom they name Evan, projecting her own deep-rooted childhood trauma of abandonment and orphanhood onto his care. However, Evan’s body isn’t just maturing; it’s absorbing ambient radiation and emitting extreme bursts of heat when he experiences emotional distress.

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor is conducting his own investigation into the infant. It turns out Evan is the offspring of a woman held captive by a secretive LuthorCorp facility experimenting on meteor-infected human genes. When Evan’s biological father, Jack Gallagher, tracks the boy down, a brief confrontation reveals that Jack only wants to save his son, not exploit him.

By the afternoon, Evan has accelerated into an awkward teenager. The tragic truth emerges: Evan’s hyper-accelerated metabolism is unstable, and his organs are breaking down. In his final hours, Evan flees toward an isolated windmill, terrified of hurting anyone as his body reaches critical mass. Clark pursues him, attempting to comfort the dying teen. Despite Clark’s efforts to shield and calm him, Evan’s cellular energy erupts, and he dissipates in a burst of light, leaving Clark and Lana to mourn a child they knew for only a single day.

Lessons & The Road to Superman

While “Ageless” is often dismissed as a classic “filler” concept, it holds an important psychological mirror up to Clark Kent’s journey toward becoming Superman:

• Accepting the Limits of Power: Clark can outrun bullets, move tractors, and withstand explosions, but he cannot cure cellular degeneration or stop the relentless march of time. A foundational step in Superman’s maturity is learning that being a hero doesn’t mean being a god; even with all his powers, he will encounter innocent people he simply cannot save.
• The Weight of Foster Parenting: Clark’s sudden role as a protector forces him to appreciate what Jonathan and Martha went through when they pulled an alien toddler out of a spaceship. It reframes his parents’ sacrifices, showing Clark just how terrifying and vulnerable it is to guide an extraordinary child through a dangerous world.
• Lana and Clark’s Incompatibility: The domestic illusion of Clark and Lana raising a child together exposes the emotional cracks in their bond. Lana wants a normal life, a family, and emotional transparency—things Clark constantly feels he must withhold to protect his secret. Watching Evan burn out reinforces the tragic reality that Clark’s life will never fit into a standard white-picket-fence fantasy.

Photos

Notes

This has to be the worst Smallville episode of all time, no way we are going to get anything worse than this.

The writing in this is horrendous.

Clark and Lana taking on these parent roles and saying things like “he’s just a boy!” And “we’re just trying to do what’s best for you.” Delivering these lines so seriously and not ironically…. it’s so bad.

My God, they just put a red blanket as a cape on top of Clark on the watertower out of nowhere. WTF is that.

This thing is SO bad that if you watch the talk ville episode they actually apologize for it.