10 Memes That Perfectly Sum Up The Series
It has been 20 years since Smallville first aired on screens everywhere, but the show continues to draw the love and adoration of fans everywhere. With the show’s version of Clark Kent having appeared in the Arrowverse, there are now more fans discovering the series than ever.
Yet, with 10 seasons under the belt, it can be somewhat intimidating for new viewers to get into the show, which has kept some people from diving in. Thankfully, fans have spent years making some incredible memes that sum up the show and all of its characters brilliantly.
10/10 Not Fair To Lex
While Smallville featured some amazing comic book-accurate villains, none were as engaging as Lex Luthor. The show added a massive amount of depth to Lex’s character by giving him a cruel and unloving father. It made Lex much more sympathetic and made audiences actually care for Clark’s archrival.
Lionel often tried to convince Lex that he was having mental breakdowns by manipulating people and situations against Lex. It was absolutely atrocious parenting, and it made Lex’s later decline into villainy tragic but also entirely understandable.
9/10 Honesty Never Works
A constant struggle for Clark was figuring out who to share his secret with. After all, being an alien was a big deal and could easily convince people to turn against him. While he often tried to keep up a normal life, he did eventually have to tell people like Chloe about his identity.
Of course, it came about because of a ridiculous situation. Chloe initially assumed that Clark’s powers came about because he was irradiated by the meteors in Smallville. Given how shocked she was when Clark connected the two threads, she proved that she clearly wasn’t the smartest Superman character.
8/10 Lex Was Always Offering Medical Help
Because Lex was always trying to befriend those around him, he often offered help at the slightest inconvenience. If Clark fell two feet down a set of stairs, Lex would be on hand to offer better medical help than Smallville could ever offer its citizens.
Lex Luthor can be summed up as an opportunistic businessman, and he viewed his relationship with everyone in Smallville in that same light. He was always trying to buy his way into affection, and it never really worked the way that he hoped.
7/10 Horrible Lies
Clark often had to make excuses to explain away the fact that he had superpowers. He even needed to excuse the fact that kryptonite was always more than enough to knock him out of a fight. Yet Clark was also a great man. So, whenever he had to lie to his friends, he did an atrocious job of it.
It really wasn’t difficult to see through Clark’s most blatant lies. After all, Lex crashed a car into him in the first episode, and he emerged from the wreck and fall perfectly fine. It was incredibly suspicious, and it was clear that Lex didn’t believe him from the start.
6/10 The Best Justice League
Smallville was one of the best Justice League shows, because fans never expected it to be a Justice League show. Yet with Superman, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Zatanna, Cyborg, and Aquaman on the team, it featured an amazing roster that thrilled fans everywhere.
Their costumes may not have been the most impressive, but their characterization was perfect, and the roster was interesting enough. Still, it was unfortunate that Batman didn’t feature until the show was already at an end. All the same, it was a great team.
5/10 Convenient Weapons
There are very few ways to actually take down an experienced and powerful superhero like Superman. The most powerful supervillains Superman faces tend to either match his strengths or use their wits to take him down. Yet not every villain of the week can rely on being as strong as Clark.
In order to keep each villain of the week interesting, the show relied on filling their pockets with kryptonite. It helped keep Clark from destroying every villain, and it also added some tension to the show. Besides, seeing Clark fall over because he looked at a rock is pretty funny.
4/10 An Amazing Protagonist
Clark was a great protagonist for the show, and his constant lies were always a source of entertainment. Given that he wasn’t the brightest character around, he never did a great job at convincing the people around him that he was entirely normal.
Given that Clark was always meant to evolve into Superman, the show also had a habit of dressing him in red and blue — the colors of the Man of Steel. It was a great homage early on, but it eventually started to feel like Clark really didn’t have anything else in his closet.
3/10 No One Is Aged Right
A common teen drama trope that everyone is tired of is horrifically bad casting that leaves grown men pretending to be high school freshmen. It’s impossible to look at some Smallville characters without immediately realizing that they are all adults trying and failing to appear young enough to have mandatory gym classes.
Looking at Clark Kent and trying to see a teenager who can be picked on for being a freshman calls for a lot of suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, audiences can only suspend it so far. By the time Clark was older, it was more believable. Early on, it was absurd.
2/10 Kryptonite Everywhere
When Clark fell to Earth, he was introduced to a few small green rocks that always made him feel weak. Fans of the character immediately recognized it as kryptonite — Clark Kent’s biggest weakness and one of the few things that can kill Superman.
It’s always a bit ridiculous to see a largely invulnerable character struggling to cope with being next to a rock, but it helped to add tension to the show. Unfortunately, given that the show needed tension, it desperately needed to include a weakness like kryptonite, so it had to be all over Smallville.
1/10 Clark Reckoning With His Past
A major point of tension in Smallville was the fact that Clark was secretly an alien. It meant that he needed to constantly lie to most of his friends and loved ones, which was incredibly alienating. After all, it even caused tension early on when he couldn’t join the school football team.
Being an alien also meant that he brought meteors with him to Earth. They absolutely destroyed Smallville, orphaned characters, irradiated Lex, and changed the lives of many people in the town. Clark crashing to Earth was the inciting incident of the show, and it was always at the core of his character.
