Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! Y’all, I’m really straining here to find positives to talk about. It’s not that the season is bad i.e. an assault on the senses where every moment is an exercise in patience and torture, but I cannot in good faith call it well constructed.
It’s overburdened with plots, with character interactions that are rushed out and poorly considered, and has a bad penchant of telling us how a character is feeling rather than showing the damn thing. All this came to a head in “Confidence Women,” an episode that failed at holding to, or interrogating, its own title. I want to like this season but they’re making it difficult at almost every turn.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
1. Titles in Action
I wanted to examine the title of the episode, something I don’t always do, because it struck me as odd when I first saw it. There are numerous ways to read it. One is to take it at face value, that this is an episode about confident women, be it the making of them, the deconstruction of that confidence, or the celebration of the trait. It can also be read, as I did, as being the full version of con women, and thus an episode about duplicity, about the role certainty plays in that and about how, in order to betray effectively, one must be well acquainted with secrets and masks; to wit, you must be confident or the lie falls apart.
At first, it seems that the former is the true reading, as Lena starts as this shy, nervous child, unsure of herself and entirely stuck in the shadow of her brother before growing into the current Lena, ruthless and inscrutable, while Rojas has the opposite trajectory. We see her grow far less confident in herself as trial after trial wears away at her and the losses pile up. However, and this is where the theme falters, we never actually get any examination of these changes nor are they all that well established.
We rush from flashback to flashback, concerned more with establishing Rojas’s connection to Leviathan than with really creating a meaningful exploration of her friendship with Lena and how it breaks. There is no time to slow down or get to know them as younger people so we just kind of have to trust that the connection is there. In fact, without that first flashback scene, the first admission of the season that Rojas and Lena go back further than. . .well, the vague, unspecified but company connected amount implied in episode one, this theme falls apart.
If we take the latter, then we have the same issues in that the con part of con women isn’t firmly established, despite there being secrets, betrayals and grifts between the two. Much of why I say that comes down to the other work these flashbacks serve to do: retcon Lena and do the work of complicating Rojas by presenting an entirely contrary person to whom we’ve seen so far.
2. Someone Just Call This Episode Geoff Johns, Because It’s One Big Retcon
I have so many issues with this episode, so many issues of how Lena’s heel turn has been handled, and “Confidence Women’s” attempt to shore up her mental change by rooting it in her past somehow made it 100x worse. Her conversation with Kara about not being here to make friends felt deeply antithetical to where Lena was at that point in the series. She was not bitter or angry or pushing others away. She was ashamed of her legacy, frustrated that she could not escape the Luthor name, and trying to prove that she could do good rather than evil to a populace that was distrustful.
The same is true of her being directly under Lex at the time of Superman’s arrival, which I guess is now just being established, and her whole thing with her mom. I had forgotten that she was adopted, which you’d think would have come up more, but when was she ever, EVER hung up on her dead mom? Was this supposed to be firmly in her past? Or was it just an excuse so that she’d have a connection to the locket to excuse her betting super petty at the end of the episode.
Continued belowMoreover, her fixation on saving Lex in those flashbacks, where did that come from? Prior to now, the most we’ve gotten was that in her childhood — childhood — Lex used to torment her with puzzles and chess and shit and that he always thought she was the smarter sibling. Yet she clearly harbored nothing but disdain for him and his ways. Clearly this episode is trying to establish that inbetween, she had not discovered just how much he was harming her mentally. This is an interesting angle to explore for her! It still positions Lex as being far more important than I think he should be but it’d be a way to show us how Lena moved from being that quiet child to the confident woman we saw when first introduced to her (see what I did there.)
Instead, we breeze right past it so she can hunt for a mystical amulet that is probably kryptonian in origin to save Lex from himself by doing. . .something. I think I missed one line of dialog and never learned again how this stupid amulet was supposed to save Lex’s soul or something.
And I can hear you saying, “But Elias, showing small snippets lets the audience make the logical leaps themselves, thus showing and trusting them.” To which I say, it’s lazy, bad writing that forces the audience to make up reasons in the gaps rather than the show constructing a framework from which to operate upon. It reeks of them trying to solve a problem they introduced by having Lena change so suddenly and so harshly rather than reckoning with it in-universe.
The rushed nature of it all harms the emotional impact and we are given no reason to care about any of it. The only reason Ollie & Slade’s relationship is as tragic as it is is because we spent two whole seasons watching them alongside each other. Here, it’s a few flashbacks that overstay their welcome and focus on all the wrong things.
3. This is My Company and I Need It Now
The same is true for Rojas. For five episodes now, she’s been stock-baddie #24 and once we get some complexity to her we learn. . .that the entire presentation of her character, motivations, and even actions thus far has been not only untrue but that we are supposed to be sympathetic towards Rojas. I don’t want to spend another 600 words talking about why this was stupid but I should at least touch on it.
Rojas was set up as, and acted both in private and in public, as a figure who wanted CatCo, had been asking for it and was only sold it because of Lena’s anger at Kara. That she had plans for the company, was very good at monetizing but had no respect for or understanding of journalism as a field unto itself, and that she was a stand-in for other CEOs who are unscrupulous and uncaring in how their products harm the people they sell it to. Now, the latter was point was looking like it was going to be complicated thanks to her relationship with Russell, and it’s the only one that I don’t think was a huge shift to make, especially after last week raised all those questions as to what she would gain from killing all those people.
That said, the rest doesn’t work because it’s never shown to be a put on nor is it presented at all in this week’s episode. We are given a totally different Rojas and zero, ZERO glimpses of the other one is made. If you’re going to do this kind of thing, you have to establish it! You have to build up to it, in the cracks AND THEN when you complicate the character, they have to be complicated, rather than redefined. How do the many sides interplay? How is this Rojas not just as fake as the other? It’s not the same character and thus I don’t buy that this is who she “really” “is.” The sympathy they want is not born out and so when Russell dies in her arms, the emotional beat fails to land.
Continued belowHell, the same is true of Lena, who’s life prior to Supergirl has been mostly defined in relation to Lex, Lex, and her evil step-mother. It’s annoying and frustrating and these characters deserve so much fucking more. They needed far more than one rushed episode to show their past and the impact Rojas’s “betrayal” had on Lena, a moment that would have been far enhanced by us having seen for more than 6 minutes Lena’s missing of her mom.
4. Up Next, The Ziz and the Behemoth
Whew. Sorry about that. This season is just trying my patience. Speaking of, Leviathan finally appears in full and they’re. . .kind of underwhelming. They just kinda pop in and out to mess with Rojas, showing just how much clout they have and their super disappearing powers. Does magic exist in this universe? Or just when Constantine is around? Is it some alien tech? Is Rojas secretly channeling Betty from Riverdale’s darkness because if so, at least it would be marginally less stupid.
We’ve been waiting for them to arrive on the scene in full for a bit and now that they’re being forced into the open, it looks like things will be heating up soon. How Eve got involved with them is anyone’s guess since Supergirl is REALLY BAD AT BACKGROUND ESTABLISHMENT Y’ALL. There are two modes: zilch, zero, nothing and episode long exploration of most of the relevant info that amounts to a huge info dump. It’s a pacing problem the show seems to have and I’m really fed up with it. Next week will either be another flashback one, which is, unfortunately, sorely needed, or a smash cut to Lena knowing lots of things and Supergirl & Co. floundering around.
*siiiiiigh* Let’s hope it’s less silly than this week.
5. What Lurks in the Hearts of the DEO? The Green Door, Apparently
Oh, right, and then there was the whole thing with Rojas having shadow powers and breaking into the DEO to kill/steal Russell. It’s just like every other monster of the week, short, pointless, and ultimately only there so the TV stingers have something to latch onto. Seriously, it’s the final, like, 8 minutes of the episode along with a quick opening scene so we can get the “““BIG REVEAL””” that the shadow person we literally just met is Rojas. What was the point?! What was gained by having it be played up? WHY WASN’T THIS SHOWN EARLIER? Why does the show keep wasting these characters yet keeps the alien tattoos around only to be defeated in, like, 10 seconds and. . .
That about does it for now! What did y’all think of the episode? Did you like it? Am I missing something with Lena and being to harsh on the show’s handling of these characters? Is there some bias I’m unconsciously unloading and not unpacking? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you again next week for, uh, well, I can’t remember but I’m sure it’ll be Lena related. Until then, stay super y’all.
Best Line of the Night:
Rojas: “I’m asking as a friend.”
Lena: “We’re not friends.”
