Mandy continues her noble quest to become the kind of nerd who can say “Smallville” without immediately being asked which season she started with, and she brings in returning guest John Mundy to guide her through this corn-fed, meteor-soaked origin story of Clark Kent. What starts as “Is this just Superman: The Homeschool Years?” turns into a surprisingly thoughtful tour of what the show is really selling: not invulnerability, but adolescence—awkwardness, secrecy, and the exhausting burden of being good while everyone around you is making being normal look like a competitive sport. Along the way, Mandy clocks the show’s high-school cruelty, its very committed primary-color costuming, and the deeply specific tonal overlap with the early-2000s “monster of the week” ecosystem.John makes the case for Smallville as a long-form character experiment: what happens when Clark and Lex are allowed to be almost-friends for years, close enough to save each other, never close enough to trust each other. It’s basically an extended tragedy with great cheekbones, where the real villain is not kryptonite so much as the inability to just say the thing out loud. Mandy watches the show jump from pilot-era stiffness to later-season operatic intrigue (hello: Lana married to Lex), and the conversation gets into why “pre-Superman” is the point—because teenage Clark doesn’t always know the right thing, and that uncertainty is the actual engine.Yes, they talk about Alison Mack—because you can’t not talk about Alison Mack—and it’s handled with the weird double-vision that comes from rewatching a performance that used to read as “spunky, driven friend” and now carries a much darker cultural footnote. There’s also a genuinely moving detour into Christopher Reeve’s appearance and what it meant to have him show up as the show’s mythic, anchoring presence. Plus: romance-novel rules, gay hockey smut, and the kind of warm nerd argument that makes you want to pull up a chair, even if you’ve never once been within five miles of Kansas.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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