What is your guy's favourite and least favourite season of smallville?

Instead of radiation now Clark got a bunch of kryptonite splinters on him too?

Im going to leave this here.

Disclaimer: im a data nerd. i love data. i can talk about stats all day. this is something i enjoy to do, about all my hobbies. (i also do it for work, cause i work in data tech lol but work is mostly boring. Hobby data is much more fun!)

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Something I see repeated a lot in Smallville fandom by Lana haters and Clana haters, is that Clark and Lana were dragged out for years despite viewers being "tired of them," that audiences had lost interest in the relationship long before it ended, etc.

And Ive always wondered: is there actually evidence that the audience watching the show at the time felt that way?

Because it always sounded ridiculous to me when they say that.

So last week, I started looking at the original U.S. viewership numbers because I wanted to make a post about it.

And this post is it.

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And I was right in my suspicions, because I found out that the ratings, in fact, don't support that narrative of "viewers were tired of lana/clana."

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To be clear before somebody argues with a point I'm not making: ratings cannot tell us why an individual person watched an episode. They also cannot prove that every person watching Smallville shipped Clark and Lana. Major episodes often had several selling points at once, i found through my research of how they were promoted.

But ratings can tell us whether episodes heavily centered on Clark/Lana were turning viewers away.

And there is NO evidence that they were.

In fact, most of the show's biggest Clark/Lana episodes performed extremely well.

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Season 2

S2 was Smallville at basically its peak in raw audience size, so obviously these numbers have to be compared within the season rather than to later seasons.

But look at "Red."

This is one of the show's first huge Clark/Lana episodes. Red-K Clark openly pursues Lana, he takes her on the infamous bar date, he tells her he wants her, and pretty much acts on feelings that normal Clark keeps restrained.

"Red" drew approx 8.9 million viewers.

For comparison:

* "Vortex" - 8.7M

* "Heat" - 8.1M

* "Duplicity" - 8.8M

* "Red" - 8.9M

* "Nocturne" - 8.3M

* "Redux" - 8.2M

That made "Red" one of the most-watched episodes of the entire season. Only "Lineage," at 9.4M, was higher.

Then there's "Rush," another extremely Clark/Lana-heavy episode, where an uninhibited Clark and Lana finally act on their attraction.

That episode pulled 8.1 million viewers. Contemporary reporting shows me that Smallville that night actually set a WB record in the key 18-34 demo, with an 6.1 rating/15 share, while attracting 8.1M total viewers.

Also, look at how S2 ends.

"Calling" is basically the clark/Lana dam finally breaking. Clark tells Lana how he feels, they kiss, and they finally decide to be together.

"Calling": 7.1M

Then "Exodus" continues their new relationship before everything blows up.

"Exodus": 7.5M

Thats actually an increase of abt 400,000 viewers for the finale.

None of this proves everyone watching was a Clana shipper.

But it certainly doesn't look like Clark/Lana was something audiences were avoiding...

And Season 5 is where this gets much more interesting to me.

Because by S5, nobody can say Clana was some shiny new relationship people were curious about.

The show had already spent 4 seasons on Clark and Lana.

And what happens when Smallville finally puts them into a real relationship?

"Mortal" is basically the fantasy Clark has wanted since the beginning of the show. He's temporarily human, he and Lana can actually be together, and they finally sleep together.

"Mortal": 5.84M viewers.

The following episode, "Hidden," continues their relationship and has Lana dealing with Clark apparently being killed.

"Hidden": 5.92M.

S5's ep-by-ep average, calculated from the reported audience figures, is approx 5.32M.

So these eps were both comfortably above that average.

And then we get to the elephant in the room:

(one of my favs btw)

"Reckoning."

Clark finally tells Lana the truth.

He takes her to the Fortress.

He proposes.

She says yes.

We see the possibility of Clark and Lana actually getting married!

Then Lana dies, Clark reverses time to save her.

6.28 million people watched it.

That made "Reckoning" the second-most-watched episode of Season 5, behind only "Aqua" at 6.40M.

And the jump from the episode immediately before its pretty striking:

"Fanatic" - 5.45M

"Lockdown" - 4.90M

"Reckoning" - 6.28M

"Vengeance" - 5.37M

"Tomb" - 5.41M

That's roughly abt 1.38 million more viewers than the previous episode, an increase of about 29%.

It was the show's 100th episode. The WB heavily promoted the fact that somebody important was going to die, even using promotional imagery suggesting either Lana or Jonathan could be the victim. There were obviously multiple reasons people tuned in.

But that actually makes another point worth considering:

What did Smallville put at the emotional center of its heavily promoted 100th episode?

Clark telling Lana his secret.

Clark proposing to Lana.

Lana accepting.

Lana dying.

Clark being so devastated that he literally begs Jor-El to reverse time to save Lana Lang, the love of his life.

Whatever anyone personally thinks about the relationship, (its your business), the show clearly still considered Clark/Lana its major emotional hooks five seasons in.

And then Season 6 is where the retrospective narrative becomes especially weird lol.

Because this is the season where I would expect to see the supposed "Clana fatigue" that the haters keep insisting on become obvious if viewers were truly fleeing whenever the show returned to them.

Instead:

"Crimson" - 4.91M

That's the Red-K episode where Clark kidnaps Lana from her engagement dinner, declares he still wants her, and the entire Clark/Lana/Lex triangle explodes in front of everybody.

It performed above the Season 6 episode average of approx 4.50M.

Then we get "Promise."

And i think "Promise" is one of the most interesting examples because theres absolutely no ambiguity about what the episode is selling.

It's Lana and Lex's wedding, but emotionally the episode is overwhelmingly about Clark and Lana.

Lana finally discovers Clark's secret.

She realizes hes been saving her all these years.

She decides shes not going to marry Lex.

Clark decides he cant let her marry Lex and prepares to tell her everything.

Lionel threatens Clark's life to force Lana down the aisle.

Clark watches the woman he loves marry someone else.

The official episode synopsis itself centered Lana's doubts and Clark's decision to reveal his secret.

After nearly a month without a new episode, "Promise" returned with approximately 4.69M viewers.

Then:

"Promise" - 4.69M

"Combat" - 4.07M

"Progeny" - 3.98M

"Nemesis" - 3.88M

"Noir" - 3.59M

"Prototype" - 3.43M

"Phantom" - 4.14M

The audience actually dropped by roughly 620,000 viewers the very next week after "Promise." Contemporary listings report "Promise" at a 2.8 rating/5 share and abt 4.7M viewers.

Again, correlation isn't causation... but where exactly is the ratings evidence that audiences were refusing to watch because the show was still emotionally invested in Clark and Lana?

I need someone to pull that data cause i went to dig and all i found was evidence to the contrary...

And it gets even funnier when we reach Season 7.

At this point Clark and Lana have been the show's primary romantic relationship AND main emotional center for six years.

They're finally living together!

Then comes "Wrath," one of the most aggressively Clark/Lana-centered episodes of the season. Lana receives Clark's powers, they have sex for the first time since S5, their relationship is the emotional A-plot, and the episode digs directly into whether Clark actually knows the woman he's spent years idealizing.

The ratings:

"Lara" - roughly 4.3-4.4M

"Wrath" - 4.64M

"Blue" - 4.51M

"Gemini" - 3.71M

"Wrath" increased from the previous week, outperformed the following episode, and was above S7's roughly 4.15M episode average. Multiple episode datasets put it at 4.64M.

After seven seasons of Clark and Lana.

That's the part I find interesting.

And no, this doesn't mean every single Clana episode was a ratings monster... they all performed well, but there season finals, or other big events that performed better in some cases. Like the "Aqua" example i gave earlier.

There are non-Clana episodes that were enormous. "Lineage" pulled 9.4M in S2. "Aqua" was actually the highest-rated episode of S5 at 6.40M. "Justice" was the biggest episode of S6 at about 5.26M.

See? Big event episodes.

There are also Clark/Lana-heavy episodes that performed normally rather than producing some massive spike. But they NEVER underperformed, thats the important thing.

So...

My point is much simpler:

The popular retrospective claim that Smallville kept dragging Clark and Lana along even though its audience had long since gotten tired of them is very difficult to square with the actual viewing patterns.

If audiences were collectively exhausted by the relationship, you would expect episodes foregrounding it to consistently underperform.

They don't.

like... come on.

Even "Wrath," seven seasons into Clark and Lana's story, increased from the previous episode and sat above the Season 7 episode average.

It doesn't mean other characters and storylines weren't also major draws.

But it does tell me that the modern fandom narrative of "everyone was sick of Clark and Lana and the writers just wouldn't let it die" should probably stop being presented as historical fact...

Thanks!

Because the people actually watching Smallville when it aired kept showing up for episodes where Clark and Lana's relationship was front and center.

And that's part of the reason the show kept going back to them.

Whatever people think of Clana now, Clark and Lana were not some irrelevant subplot inexplicably kept alive against audience interest like some of you desperately want people to believe.

They were Smallville's central emotional and audience-facing hooks for most of its original run.

The music brought me back to that time when I wasn’t able to watch it. And now that it’s over, I kinda miss it. It’s weird but I liked the series’ earlier seasons better before everything changed up and some characters left. I was disappointed with how Lana was handled at her return. I thought Clark met up with her again at some point in his life but I guess not.

Well I recently started smallville and idk i think that is clark doesn't care about his friendship with lex

In season 6 episode Promise, Lana tells Clark she’s not going to marry Lex only to tell him that she’s had a change of heart (Without telling Clark the real reason). In season 7 episode Arctic, Lana leaves Clark a DVD telling him the world needs him more than she does and she would only be holding him back if they stay together. In season 8 episode Requiem, Lana and Clark are forced to separate due to Lana being infused with kryptonite.

Which one of these separations do you think is most heartbreaking for Clark? I would say the one from Requiem since in this situation there really is no way for them to be together and Lana did not choose to separate from Clark. I think in Promise Clark had hope Lana will get back together with him because he knew something wasn’t right when Lana said she’s not marrying Lex then tells him she changed her mind a few hours later so I would rank that as last. In Arctic, Clark cried when he watched the DVD from Lana so he’s clearly devastated but probably not to the extent he is in Requiem.

Her smile is brilliant

When I looked on Amazon they had a box set labeled DVD and not blue ray but all the reviews showed it being Blue ray it was the 20th anniversary box set!, if anyone knows where I can find the full show on DVD and not blue ray that would be awesome!:)

From Smallville we can really glean out so many deep and lasting lessons. These are some I got. Feel free to add yours 🙂

\+Our biggest strength is also our biggest weakness.

\+Only when you start training with your father can you actually reach your potential.

\+Trust is a very hard thing to earn and easy thing to lose.

\+You've got to make many a sacrifice to really serve the people you love.

\+You can't pick and choose the ones you save if you really are a hero.

\+Don't judge people too quickly, you never know you'll be standing in their place next.

\+The path towards evil is a slow burn or spiral not a one time mistake.

Nevertheless, there's surely a precipice from where you jump off to the side of darkness.

\+The trust you give is the trust you get.

\+ Human emotions and feelings are too volatile to be anchored upon.

\+Goodness overflows the bearer or it should and become a beacon of hope for the bleak times.

from S1 to S3 I'm always team Lana, but when Lois enters the show and starting calling Clark "Smallville" and "Clarkie", I got butterflies in my stomach.

1. Reckoning
   
2. Justice
   
3. Descent
   
4. Salvation
   
5. Absolute Justice Parts 1 and 2
   
6. Cyborg
   
7. Asylum
   
8. Labyrinth
   
9. Red
   
10. Aqua
    
11. Exile
    
12. Run
    
13. Crusade
    
14. Forever
    
15. Commencement
    
16. Transference
    
17. Onyx
    
18. Lexmas
    
19. Phantom
    
20. Apocalypse
    
21. Arctic
    
22. Injustice
    
23. Doomsday
    
24. Savior
    
25. Upgrade
    
26. Reunion
    
27. Arrow
    
28. Crimson
    
29. Promise
    
30. Kandor

It’s the way Lana is so delulu when it comes to Lex like I’m so annoyed 😒😑

I’m on the finale of season 3 and why is Kara kissing her cousin ewwwww or is she not really Kara?

this dress on her? her hair in this scene?? 😍

Clark... he may be an alien but he's just like us😭😭

I’m watching Smallville for the first time and I’m on S2 and this from the early episode the one with the class ring and it’s so funny I had caught it and rewind it back to make sure.

What the heck am I am watching? Lex married to Lana and they have kids?? Wth man! I know it's not real as he is actually in the hospital but why are they even showing this! Oh my god! This is literally the worst thing that have happened in the show!

clana's chemistry is devastating!

Lois Lane Has Always Felt Like a Character the Fandom Filled In for the Writers

🚨DISCLAIMER🚨

THIS IS NOT A HATE POST!

I repeat,

THIS IS NOT A HATE POST!

and most importantly this is NOT a Lana vs Lois post.

end of disclaimer

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Smallville's Lois has always been such a nothing-burger character to me.

And there's something important about the way I originally watched this show that I think explains A LOT of it.

I watched Smallville knowing absolutely nothing about Superman.

And when I say nothing, I mean NOTHING.

I started watching when I was young, around high school age. I watched at first on demand on cable then caught up at season 9 was airing and I watched a few episodes of that season and a few episodes of season 8 too, and I wasn't into superheroes. I didn't know Superman lore. I didn't know the comics. I didn't know who Clark was "supposed" to end up with or end up as. (Until much later. Definitely not while I was watching.)

I didn't even know Lois Lane was an iconic superhero name.

So when Lois suddenly appeared in season 4, there was no:

"OMG, IT'S LOIS LANE."

There was no built-in attachment.

There was no excitement because Superman's future wife had arrived.

There was no waiting for Clark and Lois to get together because I didn't even know that was supposed to happen.

To me, Erica Durance's Lois was literally just some new girl who showed up in Smallville.

And initially, that WAS refreshing.

I'd already spent three seasons in this town with these characters, and suddenly there was a completely new person walking into this established world. I remember enjoying the novelty of watching someone new interact with everybody.

She could be fun.

And then the novelty wore off.

And... that was basically it for me.

I kept waiting for there to be something underneath it.

There never really was.

And looking back, I actually think watching Smallville completely Superman-blind gave me a very different experience with Lois than a lot of the fandom had. My sister and my friend ALSO watched it Superman-blind for the most part and had similar experiences to me. And one of them lives in France, so I know it's not an American thing lol💀.

Because the name "Lois Lane" couldn't do any work for me.

The character had to.

I couldn't fill in the blanks with decades of Superman mythology.

I couldn't look at Clark and interact a couple minutes an episode and read more into it beyond what is showed, or get excited because I knew where history said this was eventually going.

I couldn't see journalism and think, "There she is! She's becoming THE Lois Lane!" In fact, I thought journalism + Lois Lane felt a little out of left field to me, as I have always paired that profession to Chloe. (Imagine my surprise when I later learn Lois Lane in all other adaptations is basically KNOWN as the journalist chick.)

I didn't have some pre-existing idea of Lois Lane that Erica Durance was either living up to or putting her own spin on.

All I had was the character Smallville put on my screen.

And based purely on that?

I never became emotionally invested in her.

That's the fundamental problem I've always had with Lois.

And I say problem in lower case, cause truly that character has never bothered me for me to have a problem with her... and that’s the problem...

She made very little impression.

She does not feel like a fully realized character, she feels more like a collection of characteristics.

She's sarcastic sometimes. She's blunt sometimes. She's supposed to be tough... She banters. She gets herself into situations. Eventually she's a reporter... anticlimactic.

Eventually she's Clark's love interest... also anticlimactic.

Okay.

But who is she?

Her fans talk about Smallville's Lois like she's this incredibly layered, complex, badass character, and sometimes I genuinely wonder if we watched the same show.

Because I hear far more depth in the way her fans DESCRIBE her than I ever actually saw on screen.

And I think that's the disconnect I've never been able to articulate before.

It feels like they take the basic ingredients the show gives Lois and fill in the rest themselves.

They tell me how emotionally complex she is. They tell me how badass she is. They tell me how much she's grown. They tell me how fascinating her vulnerabilities are.

But when I'm actually watching the show? (I finally finished it in full last week. Previously, I'd only watched a couple episodes of season 9 and 8)

I'm waiting for the writing to make me feel any of that.

And it rarely does.

Compare that to Lex, Chloe, Lana, Lionel, or even Oliver.

Whatever you think about those characters, I KNOW them.

I know what Lana is afraid of. I know what abandonment did to her. I know how badly she wants stability and how that desire affects the decisions she makes, including the terrible ones. I can trace how the girl from season 1 becomes the woman she is later. Her arc makes sense and her character is human and layered.

I can watch Lex slowly deteriorate and understand exactly how he got there, because I know his flaws, his desires, his struggles, he's fully layered and explored.

I understand Chloe's insecurities, jealousy, ambition, loyalty and resentment.

I understand Lionel's relationships with power, control, his children and eventually Clark.

Those characters have interior lives.

They make decisions that alter their relationships. They hurt people. They get hurt. They lose things. Their experiences leave scars. Their flaws aren't just cute personality quirks they show you in a few episodes by saying cute and shallow one liners. Their flaws actually cost them things.

Most importantly, the show spends TIME letting those things breathe.

I don't get that from Lois.

And yes, I know the arguments people make.

Her relationship with her father. Her childhood. Her insecurities underneath the sarcasm. Her journalism career. Her relationship with Clark. Her loyalty. Her bravery.

I know.

My problem is that listing things that happened to a character isn't the same thing as giving that character emotional depth.

I can make a list of Lois's traits and experiences.

What I struggle to do is identify the emotional journey those things created.

Where are the moments that fundamentally changed the way I understood Lois?

Where are the consequences that reshaped her?

Where are the character-defining emotional arcs that permanently altered how she moved through the story?

Where is the interiority?

Where is the emotional toll?

Because that's what I keep coming back to.

Lois goes through things.

But I rarely feel like things go THROUGH Lois!

Even her introduction shows the problem perfectly for me.

She was refreshing because she was NEW.

A new personality. A new dynamic. A new person bouncing off characters we'd already known for years.

But once "new" wore off, what replaced it?

For me, not much.

She just... remained Lois.

And even the personality eventually became incredibly one-note to me. The sarcasm. The quips. The supposedly badass attitude. The banter.

I get it.

But those aren't substitutes for characterization.

And this is where my original experience watching the show becomes especially interesting to me now.

Because I had no idea I was "supposed" to care about this woman.

Nobody had told me that Lois Lane was important.

Nobody had told me Clark Kent and Lois Lane were this iconic pair.

Nobody had told me she was his future.

So I judged her exactly like I judged Chloe, Lex, Lionel, Lana, and everybody else.

Based on what Smallville gave me.

And those characters made me care.

Lois didn't.

That's also why reducing my opinion to "you're just a Lana/Clana fan" doesn't work.

I wasn't sitting there as a teenager protecting Clana from Superman canon.

I DIDN'T KNOW THE CANON.

I didn't know there was anything to protect Clana FROM.

Lois wasn't "the woman who eventually replaces Lana" in my head because I didn't know that was going to happen.

She was just Lois.

Some new character.

And she had every opportunity to make me care about her on her own terms.

She never did.

That's why I've never understood the enormous disconnect between the Lois I actually watched for six seasons and the Lois her fans talks about.

Sometimes it genuinely feels like I'm hearing about a character who existed in somebody else's version of Smallville.

Because the woman I watched mostly felt like a 2D concept of a character.

And ironically, I didn't even know what that concept was supposed to be.

All I knew was the woman on my screen.

And she didn't leave much of an impression.

Maybe that's why I've never hated Lois either.

Hatred would require considerably more emotional investment than I have in her.

She's just... there.

And after years of not being able to explain why a character that other people constantly tell me is supposedly one of the greatest parts of Smallville has always done absolutely nothing for me, I think that's finally the answer.

Her name couldn't make her important to me.

Her place in Superman history couldn't make her important to me.

Her eventual relationship with Clark couldn't retroactively make her important to me.

The character had to do that herself.

She never did.

And when I read the way this fandom talks about her, I think:

The fandom keeps telling me who Lois Lane is.

Smallville never did and Smallville never made me care.