Smallville
Harsher in Hindsight in this series.- In "Kinetic", Clark tries to console Whitney by telling him that he'll "probably go farther than anyone else in this town." Next season, Whitney gets blown up by a landmine. The episode has another moment when Whitney tells Clark that "no matter what you do, your father is always going to be there". Flash forward to Season 5...
- In Season 1's "Crush", Lex meets his childhood nanny, who says that he was like her own child. The heartwarming moment is diminished much later in Season 10, when it's revealed that she did have a child of her own - Tess, who ended up in an Orphanage of Fear on Lionel's say-so.
- In Season 2's "Visage", mighty-morphing shapeshifter Tina Greer exposits her reasons for wanting to take over Clark's identity: "You have the perfect life, Clark. Great parents, good friends, and the girl of your dreams just waiting for you to make a move." Fast forward just a couple years later and it becomes clear that this exact same line could describe in a nutshell why Lex becomes insanely jealous of Clark and, in part, why he turned against him.
- In "Velocity", Pete Ross gets involved in illegal street racing. His actor Sam Jones III would find himself in legal trouble of his own when he was arrested for illegal drug possession with intent to distribute in 2009.
- In "Bound", Lex tells Clark that he has to choose between trusting him and trusting Lionel, because they're enemies. Clark later ends up trusting Lionel, because Lionel actually starts to become a better person...while Lex goes in the opposite direction until he becomes worse than his father ever was.
- In "Justice", Cyborg mentions that Oliver kept him from committing suicide after the breakup with his girlfriend, and that he gave him a new purpose in life with the League. Tragically, Lee Thompson Young, Cyborg's actor, took his own life in 2013.
- In Season 3's "Talisman" Lex tells Lionel that despite all their differences, he will always care about his well-being. Fast forward to "Descent"...
- All of the references to the Warrior Angel throughout the show are harder to hear when we learn the character's creator originally intended for him to be a Plutonian type character.
- Speaking of the Plutonian, it feels eerie that Irredeemable was pretty much almost a real comic in universe.
- While it was probably for the best in universe, the references to Warrior Angel can also be harder to hear considering the character was stolen from his original creator and and said creator never got proper credit. Especially when one remembers how DC acquired Shazam! and how long it took Bill Finger to get proper credit for Batman.
- A lot of stuff regarding Chloe Sullivan became much harder to watch after Allison Mack was discovered to have been involved in a sex-trafficking cult and was later arrested
and sentenced to prison.- In Season 1's "Hothead", Chloe makes a mocking comment about Clark's decision to join the football team, prompting the latter to point out that he hasn't joined a cult. For extra creepiness, "Hothead" deals with a coach who runs his football team very similarly to a cult.
- In Season 3, Chloe and Clark's friendship takes a hit when he learns she was secretly working for Lionel Luthor behind his back. The shock and anger of this perceived betrayal seems darkly predictive of the same feelings fans had after hearing of Mack's involvement in sex trafficking.
- At the end of Season 7, Chloe is arrested by a group posing as the FBI; Mack was arrested by the FBI for real.
- "Unsafe" featured a PSA message from Allison Mack encouraging teenagers to educate themselves about sex.
- "Scare" reveals that Chloe's greatest fear is that she will end up going insane. Her actress absolutely did in real life.
- The pilot episode has Lex accidentally hitting Clark with his car. In light of KJ Apa's car accident while filming Riverdale, Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum revealed that the long hours of shooting they had to endure during the series' run made driving home difficult as they risked falling asleep behind the wheel due to being overworked and had to assign the cast personal drivers.
- The show often zips through the process of locating lost people by handwaving it with a mention of government databases. In Real Life this may actually be worse by now.Chloe: Thanks to homeland security, being on a college campus is akin to wearing an electronic bracelet.
