Smallville's 100th Episode 'Reckoning' Still Hurts - the Death That Made Clark Kent Superman

More than twenty years ago, Smallville asked its hero to do the impossible - and made him pay for it. The show's 100th episode, "Reckoning," aired on January 26, 2006, and it remains the single most important hour the series ever produced: the night Clark Kent learned that even Superman cannot have everything.

The episode begins at the peak of Clark's happiness. He finally reveals his Kryptonian secret to Lana Lang, takes her to his Fortress of Solitude, and proposes with a diamond he forges himself using super-strength and heat vision. She says yes. Meanwhile, Jonathan Kent wins his Senate race against Lex Luthor. For a few shining minutes, everything in Clark's world is right.

Then a bus hits Lana's car on Highway 40, and she dies before Clark can reach her. Distraught, Clark races to the Fortress and begs Jor-El to send him back in time. The Kryptonian intelligence warns him of the price - a life for a life, the universe finding its balance - but grants the wish anyway. Clark replays the day, saves Lana, and believes he has beaten fate.

The price of cheating time

He has not. With Lana saved, the timeline reshuffles, and Jonathan - who had stopped to console his grieving son in the original timeline - instead drives home, where he confronts a scheming Lionel Luthor at the Kent farm. Lionel shows Jonathan a photograph of Clark using his powers. The confrontation sends Jonathan's weakened heart into cardiac arrest. Clark and Martha pull into the driveway to find him collapsing, and Jonathan Kent dies in their arms, his family holding him as his heart stops.

What makes the scene land is a change its own star demanded. In the original script, Clark and Martha arrived to find Jonathan already dead in the driveway. John Schneider, who played the Kent patriarch for five seasons, fought the producers on it the night before filming - he refused to let Jonathan go out flat on his back, and insisted the character die standing, in his family's arms, John Wayne-style. The producers relented, and the result is one of the most devastating scenes in the show's ten-season run.

"Reckoning" drew around 6.28 million viewers and split the fandom - a vocal faction would have preferred Lana dying instead - but its purpose was never in doubt. Jonathan's death forced Clark to accept the consequences of his choices, the lesson his father had spent five seasons trying to teach him. It was the true beginning of his road to becoming Superman. Schneider would later return as Jonathan in the tenth-season premiere "Lazarus," but the show never again hit the emotional peak of the night it said goodbye to him.