Smallville, season 2

The tornado's aftermath leaves Lex having seen too much and choosing loyalty anyway, and the ship in the cellar no longer inert: it heals, it burns a symbol into the barn, and it starts the season's real subject - where Clark is from and what was intended for him. The answer arrives in fragments: a language of glyphs, Kryptonian symbols in the Kawatche caves, and finally a name - Kal-El - spoken by the disembodied will of a father, Jor-El, whose idea of destiny sounds like conquest.

Red kryptonite is the year's best invention: it strips Clark's restraint rather than his powers, and the show uses it to let its hero be selfish, cruel and free - most spectacularly when he puts on the class ring and torches his own decency for an episode at a time.

Lana inches closer to the truth and dates around the edge of it; Chloe's unrequited loyalty starts calcifying into something Lionel Luthor can use; and Lex marries a woman who tries to kill him, annulled by helicopter and revelation.

It ends with a bargain refused: Jor-El's summons, the ship destroyed with a kryptonite key, a blast that costs the Kents a pregnancy - and Clark, on red rock and self-loathing, riding for Metropolis in the night.