25 Things Only OG Smallville Fans Will Remember

Smallville

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Now that we’re officially at Smallville’s 25-year anniversary, we know there are some fans out there that might not have been there in the early days, where KryptonSite was the place to go and we all got hyper-focused on the latest spoilers and rumors about the show.

If you weren’t there for this, this is for you. And if you were there… perhaps this will jog some memories, in no particular order: 25 Things Only OG Smallville Fans Will Remember.

1- Shipping Wars and the ratings reactions. Forget Jacob vs. Edward or Stefan vs. Damon. If you were a fan of Smallville in those early years, the most bitter fight of all was if you “shipped” (ie, preferred to see in a romantic relationship) Clark with Lana (“Clana”) or Clark with Chloe (“Chlark”). There may have been some “Clex” fans out there, and one must not discount “Clalicia.” Of course, most fans knew that in canon, Superman ends up with Lois Lane, which inspired the “Chlois theory” (Chloe – Lois). Eventually the real Lois Lane (Erica Durance) showed up in Season 4, but that fight just continued to the end, and got even more volatile as some fans started to realize they might not get the ending that they wanted. Similarly, the ratings threads on KryptonSite would usually claim the ratings would depend on if Character X or Character Y got the spotlight in a given week. Hey, it kept the audience interested and invested, so it can’t have been all bad!

2- Only 4 months between seasons. Forget this whole “2 years between seasons of a good show” deal. Like clockwork, Smallville seasons would almost always run from the end of September/early October on through the middle of May. For ten years. They even produced 20 episodes in the year of the writers’ strike! It surely wore a lot of people out, but we were happy… 218 episodes to watch to this day. (Yes, 218. “Absolute Justice” was produced as 2 episodes, dang it!)

3- The Smallville Ledger and Torch. One thing Smallville did in those earlier days spearheaded by “Skinwalker,” “Jinx” and “Chloe Chronicles” writer Mark Warshaw was having tie-in websites for the Smallville Ledger town newspaper as well as the Smallville Torch high school paper. Now it can be told: KryptonSite’s Craig Byrne (that’s me!) wrote for some of those sites, and the “Get Out Of The Driver’s Seat” article by “Pete Ross” as seen on Lex’s screen in “Craving” was one of those contributions! These immersive experiences made the Smallville experience even better.

4- Ezra Small. The “Ezra Small Prophecies” in the Smallville Ledger website would offer clues about upcoming episodes for fans to decipher. Fun fact: The writer of the Ezra Small Prophecies also wrote under the pseudonym “Chris Beppo” — a name adopted by Superman & Lois for their character of Chrissy Beppo!

5- Comic-Con appearances! Hard to believe, but back in the day, shows didn’t make it to Comic-Con every year. We remember at least Seasons 1, 2, 4, and 7-10, though occasionally there would be some folks on-site like Justin Hartley prior to Season 6. We even interviewed him there!

6- The secret “costume leak” – and wrapping with a Metropolis movie? Speaking of Comic-Con, in 2009 prior to SDCC, there was an online report that people in the San Diego convention center were given a top-secret preview of a costume that Clark Kent would be wearing in Season 9. There was also a rumor around that time that Smallville would wrap up with a two-hour Metropolis movie in the end. Neither of those things happened. At KryptonSite, we were usually good at weeding out the fake rumors.. but those? Yeah, we were tricked.

7- The Chlois Theory. Perhaps to find a way that Clark would end up with Chloe in the end, it was rumored by some fans from very early on that Allison Mack’s character of Chloe Sullivan actually was Lois Lane. Eventually that rumor morphed to suggest that Erica Durance’s character would die and Chloe would take her name because… reasons? The dangling carrot in “Delete” only fueled the speculation. Nope, not true… though Chloe was kind of created to be a Lois-esque character at a time the producers thought they’d never be allowed to get Lois.

8- The Oak Tree. Who could forget “Operation: Picnic Under The Oak Tree,” where Sweet fans of Clark & Lana raised money as a result of one of their favorite scenes with Clark (Tom Welling) and Lana (Kristin Kreuk) under, well… an oak tree. It was a moment of peace for the couple, and a moment those fans had been waiting for.

9- The arrival of the true Lois Lane. “Lois…. Lois Lane.” When Erica Durance burst on the scene in the Smallville Season 4 premiere “Crusade,” could we have known the show would go on for another seven seasons from that point? While Smallville didn’t really need a “shot in the arm,” the infusion of Lois added a new layer to the show, and a new meaning to the name “Smallville.”

10- Lionel in peril. How many times did Lionel almost die on Smallville? Starting with the Season 1 finale. That magnificent you-know-what survived almost all of it.

11- Seeing stars before they were famous. Remember when Adam Brody was a guest star in Season 1? Or when Evangeline Lilly was just a Smallville extra? How about when folks like Alan Ritchson or Dave Bautista did some of the earliest acting of their careers? And why wasn’t Bautista Lobo, anyway? Or seeing Amy Adams over a decade before she became Lois Lane? In any event, part of the fun of revisiting Smallville now is seeing some future stars, whether it’s Glee’s Cory Monteith as a “Frat Cowboy” or one of the biggest stars of Supernatural as a high school football coach named Jason Teague. 

12- Dr. Swann. Smallville is full of great moments, but Christopher Reeve’s first turn as Dr. Virgil Swann in “Rosetta” is one of those moments that will stick with the audience forever. It felt like a passing of the torch from Reeve to Tom Welling, who appeared to be very fond of each other even when recording public service announcements… and it was only fitting that the actor who played the greatest Superman of all time was the one to finally tell Clark the name of his home planet and more about his alien heritage.

13- The KryptonSite Countdown/LIVE Discussion Threads! On show nights in a time before social media, everyone would flock to the KryptonSite Countdown/LIVE Discussion Threads to share their thoughts as the episodes were airing. A visit to the forum archive will surely come up with some great flashbacks.

14- “Doomtender.” Did you know Davis Bloome was originally going to be a bartender? Smallville eventually made him an EMT instead. On that same note, a makeup trailer photo leaked prior to the Season 8 finale “Doomsday” where a drawing of Sam Witwer with a goatee could be seen in the background, revealing the original plan that Witwer was going to play Zod in Season 9 originally. There’s a great episode of Rosenbaum & Welling’s TalkVille podcast where Sam tells the whole story about not playing Zod.

15- Bittleman. Now we’re getting obscure. “Bittleman” was the name of Pauline Kahn (Carrie Fisher)’s assistant in “Thirst,” but when the spoilers came out beforehand, fandom all thought this was the fellow intern that Chloe had a situationship with one summer. Spoiler: He wasn’t, but Jimmy Henry James Olsen was that intern!

16- The AoS (Arc of Suck). Imagine you’re a big “Clois” shipper watching Season 8, and “Bride” is on…. probably one of the best mid-season finales of the whole run. Clark and Lois look like they’re about to kiss, and… Lana shows up. There were certainly folks happy to see Lana again, but the Clois fans certainly were not amused, especially since it would be a few more episodes before Erica Durance’s Lois would return.

17- Smallville’s Evolution. We didn’t know it at the time, but a big part of what kept Smallville fresh for ten seasons was the notion that it wasn’t afraid to evolve. They weathered the high school years to the transitional phase of early adulthood. Then in Season 8, without original series stars Kristin Kreuk and Michael Rosenbaum and without show creators Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, the show reinvented itself again. The addition of such great characters as Tess Mercer surely didn’t hurt.

18- A time before DC guest stars would pop up. Yes, there was such a time! While Queen Industries was mentoned in the Smallville pilot, that fast kid in that newspaper article was not Barry Allen. That all would change in Season 4 when “Run” aired, and by Season 10, we’d see DC characters such as Cyborg, Black Canary, Hawkman, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Dr. Fate, Zatanna and more.

19- “The Seer.” Casting sides for Smallville Season 4’s premiere went out for a character called “The Seer.” All we had on the KryptonSite spoilers page was this cryptic tidbit: “There are eight men in red velvet coats, in a chamber illuminated by candles. Their leader, ‘The Seer,’ says ‘It has begun.'” What was The Seer? Darned if we know… maybe an early version of Veritas? Somebody ask Al & Miles about this at the anniversary convention!

20- Is Adam Knight Bruce Wayne? His color scheme and the number “27,” as in Detective Comics #27, made many think that Adam Knight was going to end up being revealed as Bruce Wayne. A KryptonSite April Fool earlier that same year revealing Ian Somerhalder as Bruce Wayne might not have helped matters. But, no… this was not the case… though there have been rumblings that “Adam Knight” was at one point supposed to be a clone of Lionel Luthor.

21- Devoted to Smallville and TWoP. Okay, we admit it: KryptonSite wasn’t the only place you could get your Smallville news back in the day. The Devoted to Smallville crew was generally younger than the K-Site crowd and it was surely a safe haven for “Clana” shippers. On TWoP, if you didn’t think Chloe was Lois, they would cut you, but at least Omar’s recaps were funny for a few seasons before they became bitter and joyless.

22- Geoff Johns’ Blue Beetle presentation. Before “Booster” was a thing, DC’s Geoff Johns made a short VFX presentation of a young man playing Jaime Reyes, the Blue Beetle. The character eventually appeared in a different form in Smallville’s “Booster” and was played by Xolo Mariduena in the criminally underrated Blue Beetle film. (Watch that movie!)

23- The coming of Heroes. Smallville never really had a worthy rival, though in 2006, one show came pretty darn close. Heroes was a phenomenon that year, what with saving the cheerleader and saving the world, but while it was at the top of the ratings in the beginning, fans bolted over time, and Smallville ultimately outlasted it. It’s still a shame that Heroes isn’t still fondly remembered, because especially that first season was very good, with some Smallville alums like Jeph Loeb, Mark Verheiden, and Greg Beeman all being involved.

24- Big spoilers. How did we ch mget away with some of what we posted? “Chloe Finds Out in ‘Pariah’?” It’s a wonder Al Gough and Miles Millar didn’t send snipers to our neighborhoods. But, they really did see the appeal of a wide community and at the time, if the Internet knew, it didn’t mean the whole world did. Spoilers would become a much more sensitive thing as the show got to the end of its run, with folks like Michael Ausiello (later founder of TVLine) being one of the best spoiler sources.

25- The show itself spoils one of the finale’s biggest surprises. And finally, on the subject of spoilers, eventually, every guest star for the Smallville series finale was pretty much spoiled… except one. Then, after “Save Me,” we get a list of guest stars, and there’s that name: Aaron Ashmore, finally playing the actual Jimmy Olsen. Surely it’s a contractual thing but it would have been great to have been surprised by that one thing.

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