Smallville, season 4

Clark falls to earth remade - briefly Kal-El, flying, obedient - until black kryptonite splits the programming out of him. The finder is Lois Lane, in town to investigate her cousin Chloe's death, which turns out to be staged: Chloe is alive, hidden ahead of testifying against Lionel, and the season's first movement is keeping her that way.

The spine of the year is the three stones of power - Kryptonian artifacts scattered worldwide that assemble into knowledge itself, hunted by Lex, Lionel (piously reformed in prison, or performing it), Jason Teague and his mother Genevieve, and a seventeenth-century witch, Isobel, who borrows Lana's body whenever the plot needs her. It is the show's most crowded conspiracy, and it works because everyone's motive is character: Lex collects, Lionel repents strategically, Lana wants her own history back.

Around it: football season for Clark, a doomed romance for Lana in Paris and after, and Chloe finally seeing the secret with her own eyes - a car crushed, a boy unhurt - and choosing, quietly, to protect it rather than print it.

It ends with the stones united in the caves, a second meteor shower announcing itself over the county, Chloe pulled into the light alongside Clark - and a black ship coming down in the fire.