Clark's powers in Smallville

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elricsitolo This article contains a description of Clark Kent's powers according to the American drama action/adventure/sci-fi television series Smallville.

Clark is a human-looking alien who has great strength, enabling him to lift cars with ease; he once threw a farm tractor a distance of several miles. He is invulnerable to extreme heat, cold and electrical shock. He can move so quickly he is a blur to normal human perceptions; interestingly, he does not seem to create a sonic boom when traveling faster than the speed of sound. Clark has displayed the ability to see through objects and has at least a small level of telescopic vision, as well as the ability to emit highly concentrated infrared beams from his eyes, which may or may not be visible to human eyes. He can also fire pulses of concentrated energy from his eyes; these pulses, which travel much slower than the speed of light, may in fact be some sort of burst of plasma (giving them physical force, as they have been seen to have) created by superheating the air in front of his eyes with high-powered heat vision.

Clark is capable of making lightning fast calculations rivaling that of a computer and has an excellent memory. Clark has proven immune to certain types of telepathic mind reading, something that his comic book incarnation was not invulnerable to (along with psionic attacks and magic). (Notably, the instances of Clark's being immune to telepathy all came prior to the destruction of his spaceship; afterwards, he has been hypnotized and the like on several occasions. It is possible that his spaceship was extending a telepathic shield around him to guard his mind?) Clark has also displayed enhanced hearing, as of season three.

Clark's powers seem to be increasing with age, and it is possible he will discover other abilities as he grows up. Clark once dreamed he was flying and woke up floating over his bed, but he cannot consciously control that ability. A later episode demonstrated he is already physically capable of flight, but only as Kal-El, his Kryptonian alter ego induced by a sinister Jor-El. It is unlikely that Clark will gain conscious control of his flight powers before the age of 21 (at which point the show will conclude, according to current plans).

Clark is rapidly weakened by the presence of kryptonite, which is extremely common in Smallville; exposure to the substance causes his blood to "boil," reacting similarly to boiling water. Although he can be hurt when under its influence, he quickly heals from any damage when removed from the presence of fragments. The rarer Red Kryptonite does not affect him physically, but seems to cloud his judgment, making him wilder and less inhibited. Clark's powers were once transferred to someone else when the two were struck by lightning while in contact with Green Kryptonite, but eventually, another electrical jolt transferred the powers back to Clark. Black Kryptonite has the effect of causing alternate sides of Clark's personality to surface; it was used by his mother to "split" Clark into a hydra-like being momentarily with two upper bodies attached to the same set of legs; however, Clark was able to defeat his alter ego by punching through his dark side's chest with the Black Kryptonite, causing the evil Kal-El to vanish and leaving Clark unharmed. (It is possible that the entire event occurred in Clark's mind, and that due to the Black Kryptonite the mental image of what was happening inside his head was projected to Martha Kent.) In a later episode, it was revealed that Black Kryptonite physically splits human beings into their good and evil sides when it divided Lex Luthor; later exposure to it rejoined the two Lexes into one. The rare Silver Kryptonite was shown to give Clark paranoia delusions when he comes in direct contact with it. This is shown in a fifth season episode when Clark has delusions of everyone he trusts turning against him after touching a Silver Kryptonite sent to Lana. It's more likely, however, that this was a fraction of the Kryptionian computer, which was disguised as Clark's professor, Milton Fine.