Cassandra’s vision in Smallville’s “Hourglass” foreshadows Lex Luthor becoming president and causing suffering on a vast scale. Lex touches a sunflower with his gloved hand, and the field soon becomes a mass of human bones.

Then blood falls from the sky. He lifts his arms into it with an expression that makes the whole thing worse, as though this is a future he would gladly accept.

Lex remains seated opposite Cassandra while she witnesses that future. He has taken her hand and is waiting to hear what she sees, which makes the ending particularly cruel. Cassandra dies before she can tell him anything.

“Hourglass” is season 1, episode 6, first broadcast on November 20, 2001. The final section below includes a brief spoiler for the series finale.

The White House Shows How Far Lex’s Ambition Reaches

The vision begins with Lex in the Oval Office. For someone introduced as Lionel Luthor’s son, being placed behind that desk suggests a future in which his influence extends well beyond the family business. A decision he makes from that desk could hurt people who will never meet him.

Lex reaches for a sunflower with a black glove on his right hand, still wearing the white suit from the Oval Office. The bloom shrivels under his touch. Soon the flowers around him have died too, leaving him standing among human bones.

It’s a vicious image to attach to Clark’s new friend. The flowers initially give him something beautiful to enjoy, but his contact ruins it. By the time the bones appear, the image has connected his authority with harm to other people. Reading the flowers as lives destroyed by his influence makes more sense than taking the scene as a prediction that Lex will develop a plant-killing superpower.

The glove helps isolate the hand responsible for that first touch. “Hourglass” leaves its practical explanation aside and uses it to make the gesture easy to follow.

The Blood Rain Makes Lex’s Response Disturbing

The skeletons already make the vision horrible. What bothers me more is Lex standing among them with his arms open as the blood comes down. Michael Rosenbaum’s face is lifted toward the sky, with the pale suit becoming soaked in red. He appears willing to remain exactly where he is.

There is a useful difference between showing a powerful man surrounded by death and showing how he responds to it. Lex could look horrified by what has happened around him. Instead, the open arms suggest welcome, giving the scene a confidence that is much harder to dismiss as an accident.

The blood stains clothing that had looked immaculate moments earlier. Whatever dignity the suit carried in the White House, the damage around him has become impossible to separate from his own appearance. The human remains give that damage a scale far beyond the personal arguments we have seen him have so far.

Cassandra Dies Before She Can Tell Lex What She Saw

Cassandra’s hand goes limp after the vision, and Lex calls for help. Her death comes as the reading ends, with the implication that the shock of seeing his future has killed her. Present-day Lex is left with a dead woman in front of him and an unanswered question about his future.

He never shares the vision the way Clark shares his own earlier in the episode. That matters when judging his response. The Lex waiting in her room has no opportunity to react to the field of bones or decide what to do about it. We have been shown something he still has to learn about himself.

Her death also resolves the prediction that frightened Clark at the beginning of the story. She warned him that someone close to him would die soon. After the danger to his family has passed, Clark discovers that Cassandra herself was the person he was going to lose.

Jackie Burroughs gives the story its reassuring presence as Cassandra. Losing her removes the person who might have helped either young man understand what these images mean.

Clark’s Vision Concerns The People He Could Lose

Tom Welling’s Clark sees himself surrounded by the graves of people he loves. His fear is that he will survive them all and spend his future alone. The cemetery turns his unusual abilities into the prospect of having to say goodbye to everyone who makes his life feel ordinary.

Set beside Lex’s reading, that fear tells us a great deal about what matters to Clark. The people around him have names and relationships he wants to preserve. Lex stands among anonymous remains, with the authority of the Oval Office still fresh in our memory.

Still, Cassandra gives Clark more than a frightening picture. She describes the visions as signposts and leaves him responsible for what he does with them. She also tells him that she has seen his presence relieve other people’s suffering.

That is the part of her advice worth keeping when thinking about Lex. The episode asks its characters to respond to what they learn. Treating his future as an excuse for every cruel choice would make Cassandra’s emphasis on personal responsibility rather pointless.

Lex Is Already Looking Too Closely At Clark

Before asking about his own destiny, Lex approaches Cassandra for information about Clark. He offers to pay her, hoping she can explain the friend whose rescue has left him with so many questions. That is a fairly intrusive use to make of someone else’s gift.

The wrecked Porsche gives those questions a physical presence in the episode. Lex has kept the car and had its damage examined. Clark arrives to find that the event which began their friendship has become an investigation, with the torn roof offering evidence his explanation cannot satisfy.

I can understand Lex wanting an answer. He survived a crash that should have killed him, and Clark keeps brushing aside details that seem impossible. But approaching Cassandra about him brings another person into an inquiry Clark has every reason to find threatening.

When Lex finally returns for his own reading, he speaks about wanting to do “great things.” Coming just before the vision, his choice of words invites some scrutiny. He wants his survival to mean that he has an exceptional future ahead of him. Cassandra then sees how much other people may suffer as he pursues it.

The friendship can still be sincere at this point. Knowing what Cassandra saw makes Lex’s growing curiosity uncomfortable to watch, but his later conduct will give us plenty of grounds to judge him without rewriting every early kindness as a trick.

The Presidency Gets A Payoff In The Series Finale

The finale’s flash-forward to 2018 reports that Lex Luthor has been elected president. That gives the Oval Office image a clear payoff years after “Hourglass” first planted it. The election belongs to the show’s fictional future, rather than the finale’s original 2011 broadcast date.

The field of skeletons and the blood rain remain symbolic imagery. The finale’s election news confirms the political destination without turning the entire vision into a literal scene from Lex’s life.

Lex leaves Cassandra’s room without hearing what she saw. He still has his questions about surviving the crash, and Clark still has a friend who wants answers he can never safely give him. The presidency may be years away, but the argument over that wrecked Porsche is already happening.