The fact that Smallville ran for ten seasons across two networks, the WB and the CW, is a formidable accomplishment that a relatively small number of television shows can say they achieved. Creators Al Gough and Miles Millar chronicled a young Clark Kent’s (Tom Welling) journey from a teenager to Superman over the course of over 200 episodes. For the first half of the series, we’d typically tune into Smallville to watch Clark defeat the latest “freak of the week” — usually a fellow teen that developed powers from exposure to Kryptonite from the meteor shower that brought Clark to Earth. According to Smallville, Kryptonite doesn’t just weaken Clark Kent, it causes a whole host of mutations in regular humans too.
While there were some guest-star “meteor freaks” that shaped the course of the show and were so popular that they were brought back for more episodes, they all can’t be winners. Smallville was a traditional network series for the time with 22-episode seasons, and sometimes, the writers’ creative strain from the sheer volume of episodes showed. This was never more clear than a slew of “meteor freaks” that were one-dimensional, forgettable, or just plain weird. As Clark and the series evolved, Smallville transitioned away from meteor-infected teens and instead opted to incorporate more lore from the Superman mythology. Ultimately, it was the right move, but for old time’s sake, here are the five worst “meteor freaks” on Smallville:
Honorable Mention: Sasha Woodman
Appearing in the Season 1 episode “Drone”, Sasha Woodman (Shonda Farr) was a tightly wound, overachieving student at Smallville High. She miraculously survived over 1000 bee stings as a child, thanks to a hive of meteor-infected Africanized honey bees. As a result, Sasha gained the ability to control bees as if she were their hive’s queen. When her Student Body President campaign goes south, Sasha commanded the bees to attack her competitors, along with Martha Kent (Annette O’Toole) in an attempt to win the position. Yet when Clark confronted her, Sasha lost her control over the bees and they stung her so badly she ended up in a coma.
While we get we get what the writers were trying to do with making Sasha an unlikely “Queen Bee,” her character was thin and her bee-wielding ability lost its punch quickly. After Clark defeated Sasha, she was taken to recover at the fictional DC asylum Bell Reeve. However, unlike most mediocre “meteor freaks,” Smallville actually brought Sasha back in Season 7. In the episode “Cure”, Sasha returned to Smallville, claiming to be cured and discharged from the facility by Dr. Curtis Knox (Dean Cain). However, Knox only did so to murder her and harvest her organs in an attempt to revive his dead wife. Although Sasha was one of the few “meteor freaks” to be given meaningful narrative closure on Smallville, it sure was a real bummer.
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5) Seth Nelson
Smallville had many questionable brushes with consent over the course of the series, but the Season 3 episode “Magnetic” is one of its most egregious and laziest. Whereas the Season 2 episode “Heat” had a meteor freak who could manipulate people’s pheromones and facilitated Clark discovering his heat vision, in “Magnetic,” Seth Nelson (Kevin Zegers) gets the ability to control magnetic fields after someone clocked him in the head with a Kryptonite snow globe. Once Seth realized his newfound abilities, he used his powers to manipulate the electromagnetic field in Lana Lang’s (Kristin Kreuk) brain to make her like him and do crimes together. After a climatic confrontation with Clark, Seth fell into a coma and presumably remained as a vegetable at the Smallville Medical Center.
Not only does Seth fall into the problematic trope of “creepy Smallville characters obsessed with Lana,” he turns out to be a much more snotty, lame version of Marvel’s Magneto. Naturally, when creating a character with the ability to control magnetic fields Magneto’s proverbial shoes are near impossible to fill. While Smallville found fresh ways around other common superpowers with compelling characters like the shapeshifting Tina Greer, mind-reading Ryan James, and teleporting Alicia Baker, we the audience weren’t exactly devastated that we never heard from Seth again.
4) Jodi Melville
Largely considered to be one of Smallville‘s worst episodes, “Craving” in Season 1 stars a young Amy Adams before she skyrocketed to fame. Adams played Jodi Melville, a sweet, plus-size teen who puts Kryptonite-infected vegetables in her weight loss shakes. The result? Jodi slims down miraculously fast…and becomes a fat-eating vampire. She’s also not even the only Krypto-powered vampire on this list either.
It’s clear that Smallville was trying to do their own version of an after school special about eating disorders. And though we appreciate the attempt, “Craving” goes down in the show’s history as an uncomfortable reflection of early 00s diet culture. Though most “meteor freaks” found themselves in Bell Reeve or in a coma after Clark confronted them, Jodi seeing her own reflection and the monster she became causes her to stop herself from potentially killing Clark in a greenhouse full of Kryptonite. Points for that.
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3) Brendan Nash
File Brendan Nash (Steven Grayhm) from the episode “Forever” under the “just plain weird” sub-sect of “meteor freaks” on Smallville. While the writers neglected to inform us exactly how he got the ability to freeze people into wax statues with his touch, the fact his power backfires when Brendan tries to use it on Clark has us feeling safe to assume it’s Kryptonite-related. The photographer for the Smallville High paper, Brendan threatened his father with his bizarre ability and forced to build him a replica of Smallville High after Brendan didn’t get into any colleges.
Petrified of life after graduation, Brendan began kidnapping students — Lana and Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) included — to pretend high school would never end. Clark and Lois Lane (Erica Durance) track Brendan down and liberate their friends before he can cause them any significant harm. Their classmate Hayley Timmonds (Fiona Scott)? She wasn’t so lucky. Brendan froze her into a wax statue and then decapitated her.
Again, Brendan’s character felt like another ill begotten attempt by the Smallville writers to relate to their teenage viewers. Though the ability to turn people into wax figures a la Medusa is certainly imaginative, the low production value of the statues made the overall effect come off as odd and campy rather than chilling.
2) Evan
Another famously panned episode that preceded the waxy madness with Brendan in “Forever,” we met Evan (Jeffrey Ballard) in the Season 4 episode “Ageless.” He seems to be one of only second-generation “meteor freaks” on Smallville. Clark and Lana find an abandoned baby Evan alone in a field after his mother, Karen Gallagher (Pascale Hutton) died giving birth to him with bang. Literally. Clark and Lana discover baby Evan in a crater caused by the blast.
When Evan begins aging rapidly in a matter of days, Clark deduces that Karen must have been Kryptonite-infected and passed her uncontrollable energetic powers onto Evan. After being examined by Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) and his always on-call team of scientists, they deduce that Evan will soon die and much like his mother, will emit a deadly blast when he goes. Clark and Lana, who became Evan’s de facto parents in a matter of about 72 hours, do everything they can to comfort Evan before he ultimately perishes. Clark shields the town from the worst of the blast with his super invulnerability when the time comes.
There’s several problems with Evan, and “Ageless” in general. Firstly, given that Clark and Lana are supposed to be high school seniors in Season 4, therefore likely no older than 18, it’s strange to watch them play pseudo-teen parents. Karen and Evan’s fate also reeks of the Smallville writers not-so-subtly trying to warn its young audience about the hazards of teen pregnancy in the most wild and hyperbolic way possible. Next, like with other “meteor freaks” on this list, Smallville already did the “rapidly aging child” trope better in a previous episode, Season 2’s “Accelerate.” While “Accelerate” masterfully blended elements of horror into the action adventure series, the tone Smallville took with Evan and “Ageless” felt disjointed and bordered on super-powered melodrama.
1) Buffy Sanders
“Thirst”, which stars Buffy Sanders (Brooke Nevin), is Smallville‘s lowest-rated episode, so much so that creators later apologized for its entire existence on its DVD commentary. Buffy, whose name is an insult to her vampire slayer namesake, is the head of a sorority that Lana reluctantly pledges in Season 5 in a last-minute effort to find housing at Metropolis University. When she’s initiated into the sorority, it’s revealed that Tri-Psi is actually a coven of vampires led by Buffy.
When Lana becomes one of them, her entire personality, not to mention her diet, changes. Understandably freaked, Clark and Chloe do some digging to reveal that Buffy was bit by Kryptonite-infected bats, whose saliva endowed the co-ed with enhanced abilities as well as the stereotypical qualities of a vampire. Lana killed Buffy when she and the Tri-Psi sisters tried to feed on Clark with a blast of heat vision. You know, as you do. Thankfully, Lex helped develop an antidote to cure Lana and the other girls of their vampiric affliction.
Buffy wasn’t the first vapid, randy sorority girl (shoutout to the girls who tried to seduce Clark on his college tour in “Recruit”) on the show, but she’s definitely the most memorable. The entire episode plays like some Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Girls Gone Wild fever dream, taking the worst tropes from each and mashing them together, jumping the shark on a series about an alien with superpowers fueled by the sun. While Lana is nearly constantly objectified over the eight seasons she was on the show, it reaches a cringey peak here. Once Lana becomes a vampire, she dresses almost exclusively in low cut, skin tight leather and is way more forward than she’s ever been. Nevin does her best to play into the camp of Buffy’s character, but the suffocating male gaze and unimaginative writing didn’t give her much to work with. At least Smallville has recognized and at least tried to atone for their sins with this one.
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