This episode am bad! Me Bizarro hate this episode! This show am worst thing ever!
Okay, that’s just slowly turning into a Grimlock impression. Still, it’s pretty fitting that Bizarro’s backwards speech perfectly describes one of the Supergirl‘s most inconsistent episodes yet. Some aspects were fantastic, some were abysmal.
This isn’t the place to get into it, though. You where we should get into it? Down below! Spoilers will follow.
1. It’s Pronounced Fronkensteen
Maxwell Lord. Throughout the season he’s become more and more of the show’s Lex Luthor archetype. He’s the human business man who feels threatened in the face of a Kryptonian setting up shop in his city and devises increasingly elaborate schemes to either discredit or outright kill them.
This episode tips that over the edge with him becoming a fully fledged arch nemesis for Kara with the revelation that he’s been creating doppelgangers of Kara to kill and replace her. This… would be fine, but there’s something about Peter Facinelli’s Lord that feels off. At first, Facinelli felt perfect for the smarmy and weaselly businessman archetype they were going for, but now he’s keeping it up even as he gets more invested in taking down Supergirl. His smarmy aloofness has meant that it’s hard to take him seriously when he’s talking about how much he hates Supergirl.
I’ve seen more conviction from thinkpieces that talk about how much they hate millenials. If you want me to take him seriously, you need to change his tune.
2. Bizarro Done Right
As much as I was unimpressed by Maxwell Lord this episode, I was seriously impressed with how the show handled Bizarro. Through and through, this episode got the character spot on and her conflict with character was pitch perfect. I had no idea this show had the guts to go this far this early, but they did and it paid off perfectly.
Showing Bizarro not as a villainous character, but as a tragic pawn in Lord’s gambit against Kara who gets more and more desperate as the episode goes on because of Lord’s manipulations made for a great antagonist and linking the chalk white and cracked skin look to that desperation was a great touch. Even the little touches like the darker, purple-hued costume with the backwards ‘S’ and her fire breath/freeze vision powers were greatly appreciated.
I was honestly a little sad that as Bizarro degraded she turned back into Hope Lauren’s Jane Doe as opposed to Melissa Benoist, but I guess it was hard to have her acting for two throughout the whole episode.
3. This Relationship Shit Is Getting Worse
Oh my god, will it never stop?
Look, I get it. This is the girly superhero show and it needs to have relationship drama, but this is the worst kind of Dawson’s Creek-lite shit I’ve ever seen and I am so sick of it. In this episode: everyone is lovesick over one another, but no one will actually talk about their feelings like adults so they just either half explain how they feel or they just lie to the person’s face and everyone goes on feeling unfulfilled in life.
Christ, The Flash just got over a storyline where Barry acted like a self-destructive nihilist for no reason other than for the writers to drive the best aspect of the show away. Here, we have almost every character acting like they’re high schoolers and somehow everything will work out fine if they just never express their feelings and pine for their friend from afar and it’s killing all of the joy I had seeing Kara interact with Winn and Jimmy.
Speaking of which…
4. Winn & Olsen, United In DudeBroNess
I can’t believe that in the year of our lord, 2016, a superhero TV had a scene where two guys bonded over whiskey because they can’t bang the superhero they’re friends with. For a TV show that’s tried it’s best so far to actually be pretty progressive in gender politics as one of the few live action superhero properties with a female lead, this scene was entirely tactless and brought out the worst in both characters.
This show got ten seconds away from admitting that the only reason Winn or Jimmy even interact with Kara is because of how much they want to have sex with her, despite Jimmy already being in a relationship, and that they need to drink in order to cope with the crushing realisation that they can’t bang Supergirl.
Continued belowFor everything this episode got right about Bizarro, it got so much wrong with this scene.
5. The DEO Blacksite
So… are the DEO like seconds away from waterboarding people now or is that just me? Like, am I supposed to still root for these guys when one is secretly a Martian disguised as the director of a top secret organisation that’s built around capturing and imprisoning other aliens on Earth and the other is someone who uses the organisation’s non-existence to bring in one of the richest men on the planet with a black bag over his head because he threatened her sister?
I was always a little skeptical about having Supergirl working with an organisation like the DEO, but the show managed to keep it’s whole top secret military shadiness as something that Supergirl was able to counteract. Here, we’ve seen just how shady the place can be when their personal agendas can come into place with zero accountability and I’m genuinely wondering who the good guys are supposed to be.
