The world of Supergirl continues to expand in its second season as we see Mon-El adjust to life on Earth, Alex struggling to accept her feelings for Maggie, James dealing with his feelings of helplessness and some of the most disappointing villains this show has had so far.
Still, this was a pretty enjoyable episode, so let’s dive into our Five Thoughts on Supergirl‘s “Crossfire”! As always, this review is going to discuss spoilers for the episode, so watch it before reading forward.
1. Welcome To Earth, Mon-El
Christ, this whole plotline was insufferable.
I don’t know if it was how Kara was written to be blindly overbearing and having to learn the lesson that maybe forcing someone to live exactly how you live isn’t the best option or if it was how Mon-El’s male model looking ass is the walking embodiment of white male privilege, but I hated every second of this storyline. Every moment in which the show had to deal with “Mike”‘s exploits in CatCo, I almost gave up on the episode.
I know I’ve jokingly made reference to how Supergirl already felt like a CW show even on CBS, but this was too much for me. I enjoyed the opening montage and the fun callback to the moments in the pilot when Kara was choosing her Supergirl costume, but every scene after that has just made me hate Mon-El more and more. If this show is seriously wanting me to believe that he and Kara are going to date, I will be mightily displeased.
2. James Olsen: Redesign, Rebuild, Reclaim
This, on the other hand, was a plotline I was into. Ever since taking over Cat’s position, James has had pretty much nothing to do in this season. He’s no longer in the field as a photographer and is strapped behind a desk where he can’t directly help Kara or Supergirl. Nor is he the one to give Kara her uplifting moral speech of the episode because, let’s face it, that only worked because of Cat and Kara’s mother/daughter angle.
So: how do you solve a problem like Jimmy Olsen? You make him want to go out and punch crime in the face in his spare time. It sucks that CW’s marketing for this season has already ruined the reveal and the name and the costume James will be sporting from now on because this episode did a great job of making it feel like a surprising but well thought out transition for the character.
Everything here made sense as to why James would take up the mantle of fighting crime and I wish it had been left to play out that way instead of being trampled over by marketing.
3. Alex and Maggie, Sitting In A Tree
I’m only slightly peeved that this episode ended on a note of Alex essentially admitting that she’s not straight, but not being able to vocalise it. Mostly because I want Alex and Maggie to be happy and gay together, but also because I’m wary of TV using it’s tragic lesbians trope to full effect here.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, lesbians in media generally suffer from homophobic and misogynistic thinking to unbelievable degrees. While gay men are allowed to exist and be happy (and generally stereotyped as the flamboyant best friend character who sleeps around a lot), lesbians must suffer emotional and relationship crises, one after the other, before they’re usually killed off.
I know this is probably a case of having to ease Alex into coming out, or whatever, and that there’s a longer game at play here, but I’ve been burned so much before. I just want a lesbian couple on TV that is allowed to be open, happy and unmurdered.
4. A Seedier Side To National City
While the actual villains of the episode might have been nothing to write home about – they were, essentially, a bunch of generic criminals armed with powerful alien weapons that existed just to drive the plot forward more than posing an actual threat – they did showcase a side of National City that we haven’t seen much of. Their meetings with the head of CADMUS (more on her in a second) showed us the more rundown side of National City with creaky subway cars passing under overpasses and a population willing to arm themselves with weapons from beyond the star to wrest power from those above them.
Continued belowThese dudes may not have meant much in the long term, and we clearly won’t be seeing them again, but they symbolised a facet of the world of Supergirl that this season is uncovering: the seedy underbelly that is being armed and provoked by CADMUS to sow fear in the population against aliens. That is something I’m interested in seeing.
5. The Lena Luthor Long Game
I think at this point in the first season, I was already over Max Lord. His preening, Silicon Valley-bred Lex Luthor stand-in plots felt more like a placeholder of a character than an actual person. It took a whole season to get him to a point where he felt interesting and that was the revelation that he isn’t even a villainous character, but just a dude with an inferiority complex and enough money to do something about it.
With Lena Luthor, though, I am incredibly in on the journey this show is taking with her. This pseudo-secret identity thing she has going on where she’s playing up her brother’s past to garner sympathy from Kara and Supergirl only to turn around and have the woman who is actively plotting the death of Supergirl to be her mother? That’s some layered storytelling and the fact that we still have no idea how genuine Lena is about anything she has said or done so far makes her one of the most fascinating characters on the show.
Supergirl has taken the legacy of Lex Luthor to forge a character with more depth than the majority of incarnations of Lex himself, and that is impressive.
