Smallville, season 5

22 episodes · 8 kept in The Essentials

Jump to an episode

Titles and episode images are visible below. A watch path hides future details by default. An episode left out of a path is not necessarily filler.

Season 5 recap Spoilers — open after watching

This recap reveals the events of season 5.

The Fortress rises, two vessels walk out of the black ship, and the show pays its first permanent price.

The stones build the Fortress of Solitude at the pole, and Jor-El's education begins in earnest - interrupted immediately, because the black ship's passengers are loose: two Kryptonian disciples of a name the season teaches everyone to fear, Zod. Clark, briefly stripped mortal by his father's judgment, dies in a hospital bed and is returned with a debt: the life of someone he loves, on ledger.

The season pays it honestly. Jonathan Kent wins a state senate seat against Lex, shakes his son's hand at the celebration, and dies of the heart the show has been pricing for years - the series' first unfixable loss, and the one that makes Clark's adulthood real.

Elsewhere the future assembles: Brainiac arrives as a courteous professor, James Marsters playing a Kryptonian computer with a preacher's patience, working all season to open the Phantom Zone; Lex and Lana converge in the vacuum Clark's secrecy leaves; and Milton Fine's fingerprints end up on a Honduran plague, a senate campaign and a dagger meant for Lex.

It ends on Dark Thursday: the vessel plan complete, Zod poured into Lex's body, Clark hurled into the Zone he was warned about, and the world's lights going out.