Jordan struggles to manage his abilities, just as a crucial game looms for the football team. Lois has to put her trust in a stranger to try to get closer to figuring out what Morgan Edge is up to.

Picking up immediately where we left off with Tag confronting Jordan and demanding to know what exactly he did, the episode barely pauses for breath as it gets stuck into a lot over the course of its runtime.

The opening confrontation is fairly quickly dealt with (and has a genuinely cool set piece use of Superman’s abilities) before we get to what the show does best – character work. In the wake of the confrontation with Tag, Jordan is starting to find his powers causing him issues – noises causing distress, major headaches and the uncontrollable urge to let loose with some laser eye action. But he doesn’t want to tell his father because there’s a big game coming up and he doesn’t want to risk being benched.

That game is against Metropolis, meaning there’s scores to settle, and this leads beautifully into a core message of the Superman ethos without it feeling forced or shoehorned – the responsibility which accompanies great power, to paraphrase the uncle of another superhero character from a different franchise. Jordan remembers all too well the pain and humiliation he endured at the jocks on the Metropolis football team and now he has the strength and ability to dish out some payback. But just because he can doesn’t mean he should – a lesson that he’s forced to learn here directly and painfully.

Once again the show works hard to examine the relationship between brothers Jordan and Jonathan, which is now in the very weird dynamic of Jonathan still being deeply concerned to look out for his brother, but mostly because of what his brother might do to others rather than the other way around. The realism of their interactions is something I’ve mentioned before but make no apology for repeating – Jordan Elsass and Alexander Garfin knock this out of the park week after week, with interactions which cross the full teenaged sibling range from detached disinterest to quiet snark to heated argument, all underpinned by the quiet truth of brotherly love, which gets tested here more directly than ever.

For Supes’ part, he himself is faced with a very direct real world example of the lessons he’s trying to impart to his son when a serious betrayal catches him off guard. Tyler Hoechlin has been nailing the exact mix of strength, compassion and earnestness of both Clark and Superman but here he gets to also display the darker side that Snyder perhaps always leaned a little too heavily on. There’s a moment here when you think he’s going to lose it (and you wouldn’t blame him either) and seeing him restrain all the power and ability he has to instantly get his own back reminds you that the character’s greatest strength isn’t and has never been physical. Amazing stuff.

Back in Smallville, Lois is still intently pursuing any angle she can find on Edge. Having come up blank when she asks an old friend for a favour, she ends up having to put her trust in a stranger and that not only goes against her every instinct but also proves to lead to some interesting places. It’s mainly worth it though for the scene which makes the episode, as Clark and Lois sit around the dining table reassuring one another that the kids will eventually be fine, and then she casually drops in that it’s probably not a good time to mention what happened to her today. Who said that a show about Lois and Clark in domestic bliss with two teenaged sons couldn’t be funny, warm, suspenseful and dramatic? Nobody? Good, because they’d look very daft otherwise.

Verdict: Back with a bang and doing it better than it’s ever been done while still making it look effortless. 9/10

Greg D. Smith