After one of the most weirdly inconsistent episodes of the show last week, Supergirl returns with another story lifted straight out of the comics. This week’s episode takes it’s inspiration from the story ‘For The Man Who Has Everything’ from “Superman Annual” #11 by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
It’s perhaps one of the best Superman stories ever told, so how did Supergirl do in adapting it? Let’s find out below. As always, be aware of spoilers below. I always advise watching the episode before reading these things.
1. But Does She Have Everything?
This is one of the things that surprised me when it was announced that Supergirl would be doing this story. ‘For The Man Who Has Everything’ came out in 1985, when Superman’s post-“Crisis On Infinite Earth” stories were becoming more and more like the Silver Age stories that had preceded the event. Despite the focus of John Byrne’s “Man Of Steel” being on a more emotionally complicated Superman than before, life was pretty damn good for the Big Blue Boyscout. That’s why, when confronted with Mongul’s Black Mercy, his deepest fantasy is a life on Krypton with his family. The tragic irony of the story is that his life with Batman and Wonder Woman on Earth is much nicer.
So when we look at Kara’s life on Earth in the show so far, it’s nowhere near as peachy keen as Clark’s was. She’s been through the ringer more times in this season than I can count. At every turn, it feels like more and more of Kara’s life has been taken from her. That’s why I think it’s interesting that the show has completely flipped the meaning of this story by having the Black Mercy show her Krypton as an escape from the pain of her life on Earth. It made for a really great episode that explored just why Kara is who she is.
2. Changing The Rules
Like I said, this episode really changed the rules as to how this story operated in order to expand into a full episode of the show. For one, we see Kara wake up on Krypton with memories from Earth and slowly, as the episode progress, forget them and become swept up in the fantasy before Alex has to try and break her out of it. This is a major departure from the story as it appears in the comic where it felt like Kal-El had been dropped into the family as if he’d lived his entire life there and broke free of the fantasy by realising that a life on Krypton wouldn’t have made him happier than his life on Earth.
This is actually a change that really suited the format and made Kara’s conflict a lot less insular and once again focused on her relationship with her family and friends. I appreciated that a lot and made for one of the best episodes of the show so far.
3. Alex’s Desperation
I don’t think I’ve really talked about how important Alex Danvers has been in the show so far. At first, I thought the idea of her was a little silly, but as the show goes on we’ve seen that Alex exists to do the things that Kara can’t in order for her to still be the hero. Kara has been established as a pure-of-heart hero who sees the best in people and, even if she was going up against her worst enemy, would still try to save them.
Alex isn’t that and this episode really drove home just how far she would go for her sister. It’s an interesting dynamic because Alex’s protective feelings for her sister somewhat overlap with her need to keep the idea of Supergirl alive and what we saw at the end of this episode has, I think, created an interesting wrinkle in the sisters’ relationship.
4. Astra’s Redemption Arc
You know, I was all ready to talk about how I thought the show was leading up to a face turn for Astra and it would reveal that Non is actually the driving villainous force behind the Fort Rozz prisoners and… then the end of the episode happened.
I mean, in a lot of ways, I was right. Astra’s connection to Kara, her family, kept her from going too far down the villainous path (see how that theming keeps cropping up?) while Non kept pushing her to go further. What I didn’t expect was for the show to straight up just kill Astra off this far from the season finale. We’ve still got a good seven episodes to go, I was really expecting them to draw this out a bit more. And then for Alex to be the one who kills her? And for Hank to take the fall?
Continued belowI’m very interested in see where this goes and how Kara will handle it.
5. J’onn’s Disguise
This was, legitimately, the best idea the episode had.
This ended up being one of the more emotionally heavy episodes of the show so far, so it was almost necessary to bring in this moment of levity to even it out. Thankfully, it wasn’t too much and it felt like it fit naturally into the story of the episode and it gave us one of Melissa Benoist’s best moments. Having Benoist pretend to be J’onn J’onnz pretending to be Kara Danvers is easily one of my favourite things I’ve seen since watching this show.
This was a bit where, if it had fallen flat, could have made the episode feel incredibly uneven and it’s a testament to Benoist’s abilities that she was able to make it one of the best moments of the episode.
