Clark’s attempts to keep stress away from Lois backfire. Sarah, Kyle and Lana try to find a way forward. Jonathan has a rather intense confrontation with Candice’s father. John Henry is forced to make some tough choices.

You might be forgiven for thinking that with Lois’ cancer and the pursuit of Bruno Mannheim, the show’s writers might consider there’s enough going on. You’d be wrong though, because this is a show whose creatives scoff at the challenge of juggling multiple narrative threads.

Lois does rather take centre stage, having had her first chemo treatment and with Clark trying to keep the stresses of the world away from her. But she’s Lois Lane, and even on a bad day there isn’t much that you can get past her. So when Jonathan comes home with a black eye, she isn’t taking any excuses and her probing only results in more trouble for both Jonathan and his brother as she gets filed in on the whole story of Jonathan’s truck and how it was retrieved having been stolen.

She’s also pissed at Clark for daring to tell the boys not to bring her their dramas – well-meant as Clark’s intentions were, as she says she doesn’t stop being Lois Lane because she’s ill, and even the physical comedown from a charged confrontation with Candice’s father doesn’t lessen her determination to carry on as normally as she’s able.

Of course, the other problem is the DOD having a stockpile of Clark’s blood, and how that might have made its way into Mannheim’s hands. Supes has a fairly straightforward solution to the security issues this raises, and to his credit, Sam backs him.

Elsewhere, Sam perhaps slightly ham-fistedly tries to get Jordan to do something he isn’t keen on in order to keep his identity secret. For his part, Jordan reacts poorly, and though he might think he’s got away with it, Lois’ eagle eye never rests. A good opportunity for nice interaction between the ‘weird’ son and his military grandfather, and one the show uses to showcase the subtly shifting dynamics between them.

It isn’t all about the Kents though. Sarah tearfully tells her father what went down between her and her mother, though she leaves a key detail out. Speaking personally, this was a great handling of what is a tricky subject matter. Violence from parents to kids is unacceptable, and kids can also really turn the emotional screws on their parents. There are no winners here, Lana did an awful thing that will require trust to be rebuilt, and Sarah pushed her mother (and to a certain extent her father) in ways that she is old enough to recognise are wrong. It’s nice to see this addressed with balance and clarity, and for the show to make no excuses for anyone involved.

There’s also John Henry, who accidentally finds out Lois has been in touch with this world’s version of his sister, and doesn’t take the news too well. When he finally seeks out the woman to try to track down clues as to what this world’s version of him was like, he stumbles into a bigger and more dangerous situation than he had anticipated, but this is John Henry, and he doesn’t give in just because the odds are against him.

There’s other stuff too – we see a side of Clark we rarely do, and we see it tempered with that iron will of his. We see the intrinsic kindness of the Kent family and their capacity to offer out a hand to those in need, as well as their flaws as human beings who fight and get things wrong. We see the steel in Lois Lane, as she squares up to anyone who threatens her loved ones. And, we finally see just exactly what kind of man Bruno Mannheim is.

Verdict: Week by week, this is proving to be consistently the best season of the show to date. 10/10

Greg D. Smith