Smallville’s First Halloween Story Had a Direct Buffy The Vampire Slayer Connection, But The Show’s Creators Still Think It’s Their Worst Episode

During Smallville’s fifth season, the creative team for the hit television series received orders from the CW network for holiday themed episodes. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the Smallville showrunners at that time, answered with an episode for Christmas called “Lexmas” and an episode for Halloween called “Thirst”. 

Looking back at the series, “Lexmas” is remembered more fondly. The episode dove into Lex Luthor’s psyche and presented an optimistic future where he was married to Lana Lang, had a son, and was welcomed by the Kent family. The episode gave Lex Luthor everything he ever wanted with the sole price of turning his back on his biological father Lionel and effectively being shut out of the family business Luthorcorp. The episode is able to both give a glimpse to an alternate future while effectively showing why it couldn’t be. Lana dies because Lex no longer has access to resources, and it convinces Lex that he needs power in order to secure love, cementing the dangerous path he’d been set on for seasons. 

“Thirst” in comparison doesn’t have the compelling emotional beats or near flawless execution. Given the order for a holiday episode, writer Stephen S. DeKnight decided to take Smallville down a genre fiction route and tackle vampires. As with most Smallville genre excursions, the true culprit in the end was green meteor rocks, but for the majority of the episode’s run time, audiences are allowed to believe that Clark Kent and his friends are dealing with the mythical creatures from folklore. 

DeKnight made several nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer within “Thirst”. The most obvious was the naming of the main vampire Buffy Sanders, a clear allusion to Buffy Summers, the protagonist of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The episode also has special guest star James Marsters who played Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and plays a similarly villainous role in Smallville. Yet, even the nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer couldn’t make the episode good. Gough and Millar thought it was the show’s worst episode and cast member Kristin Kreuk who played Lana Lang detested it while filming. 

The Nods to Buffy

Believing that the episode wasn’t working, the Smallville creative team decided to add a framing narration for the story through additional scenes with Chloe, Clark’s best friend. The episode opens with Chloe getting rejected from an internship with the Daily Planet and told to bring them a story if she wants a chance as a reporter. The rest of the episode is framed by her narration, which is snarky and witty in a way reminiscent of Buffy Summers. Chloe admits that the vampire’s name isn’t actually Buffy Sanders, but that she’s “changed the names to protect the vapid”. It’s a funny and direct nod, even if the more fitting reference would call the vampire Harmony Kendall. 

Harmony Kendall was a side character in Buffy, a mean girl who was friends with Cordelia before Cordelia properly joined the Scoobies. Harmony later becomes a vampire but still approaches life similarly as she did when she was a mere high school student. Like Buffy Sanders, she’s blonde, vapid, and concerned with reputation. Unlike Buffy Sanders, she didn’t turn the lead female of the series into a vampire and try to kill said girl’s boyfriend. 

The episode is reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire season four when the Scoobies were in college. Chloe quips about going to the library to research a way to kill her roommate — Buffy’s roommate ended up being a demon — and the evil Tri Psi sorority is described as being about bimbos, bikinis, and beer, bringing the infamous “Beer Bad” episode to mind. The entire Tri Psi initiation is framed around being “the chosen” and how every year there can only be one, just like in each generation, there is only the one slayer. 

Criticisms of the Episode

While DeKnight struggled with the direction of the episode given how it devolved into a bunch of hissing between the female vampires, Kristin Kreuk struggled with it for a different reason. The vampirism plot and the Halloween setting felt like more excuses to needlessly sexualize Lana — after all, she’s in a skin-tight leather catsuit for half the episode. On the Talk Ville podcast with Michael Rosenbaum (Lex Luthor) and Tom Welling (Clark Kent) back in 2025, she talked about how she tried pushing back against the episode to little avail. She admitted there had been things in the script she refused to do, but she didn’t name what the things were. Kreuk chalked the episode up to a learning experience on setting boundaries on set and how important it was for moving forward both with the show and as an actress. 

In a commentary for the episode, DeKnight, Gough, and Millar admitted the episode didn’t translate well to the screen. Unlike season four’s “Spell” which dealt with witches and was considered a good episode, “Thirst” didn’t land as they wanted it to. The commentary revealed that the first cut of the episode depressed co-showrunner Gough and led him to come up with the Chloe narration where she explained several bits in the episode. While this made the episode better in his opinion, he still felt like the episode could’ve been better. 

“Thirst” is definitely nowhere near the best episode of Smallville and is only one example of the oversexualization of Lana that pervaded the show, but it can be a fun time if viewers are in the mood for a less serious episode.

We want to hear from you in the comments! What did you think of the episode and were the criticisms warranted?