Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! It’s been a bit but I think we’ve gotten our first pretty solid episode of the season. The character dynamics are starting to shift in interesting ways, one-note characters are getting complicated, and the scripts still don’t trust the audience.
Hmm, well, two out of three ain’t bad. And as always, spoilers ahead.
1. My Long Con is Longer than Your Long Con
I may be wasting this title but the shifting relationship of Rojas and Day to us, and to Kara, is astonishing. It’s a roller coaster of expectations that I wish I could track better so that this thought would be more than me reeling and speculating. At the outset, it seems like Rojas is shaping up to be exactly who she’s been portrayed as throughout the season thus far and Day is looking more and more like an undercover but perhaps in-too-deep journalist, with his performance at CatCo seeming far more false than it did before.
By the end, the latter is reinforced while Rojas may actually not be as involved as we thought? Or at the very least, she may be in a Lena pre-season 5 situation where her family has ties to Leviathan but she doesn’t want anything to do with them. This is a point I’m not so clear on yet and while I think there is potential here to make Rojas less of stock baddie, I hope they don’t try to make her “misunderstood.”
Complex, multi-faceted, yes. A “hero” who’s doing bad because it’s for “the greater good?” Fuck that noise. The damage she will cause is either going to be swept under the rug because this is a TV show or it will remain but never be reckoned with and that hurts the dramatic potential of the character.
I want to know why this is the way she approaches running her company and what her end goal is. Why does she feel the need to poo-poo journalism and the values it represents? Why is she so obsessed with growth at any cost? Dig into that and don’t let it be a cheap way of evoking pathos later on. You can do it.
2. Evil is Just Live Spelled Backwards
Kara had a line this week that baffled me, and it is connected to the above.
She said that she hadn’t ever considered Rojas to be anything more than a bad boss and that Day was actually, secretly evil to which I say two things. One, where is your solidarity Kara? Day may have been (acting as a) giant suck-up and a total asshat but he’s still a reporter with the same worries of firing at the whims of their new boss. Two, refer to my comment about him being an asshat and Rojas literally coming in, demoting Jimmy, using CatCo as an Obsidian marketing tool thus undermining its integrity and reputability and, need I remind you, changing everyone’s contracts without their consent.
As with many poor scripts, the show is using Kara as the writer’s mouthpieces to tell us how we should feel about others in the show, despite all the evidence to Kara pointing to a different conclusion. We, the audience, have a greater sense of the backdoor dealings and thus a different understanding of the characters but even so, that conclusion doesn’t feel earned nor does it make much sense for Kara. She’s seen evil. It’s a hyperbole that feels sloppy for the character and a poor bit of scripting, as minor a statement as it was.
3. My Name is The Ock. You Have Failed This City
We’re introduced to discount Doc Ock X Robocop this week and I almost had to pause the episode because I was laughing so hard. The portrayals of the villains of the week have been laughably bad, and not in a fun, silver age, campy kind of way. They all take themselves super seriously and so does the show, as if they’re real threats or something. Fine, maybe. They’ve jobbed pretty hard by taking out Supergirl at least once in the episode they premiere in but there’s no real tension and they always feel like a distraction.
Continued belowCue Riproar. He’s the perfect campy silly assassin with half as many arms as ol’ Ock and an even shittier voice changer than Ollie circa Arrowseason one. Batwoman’s is great, y’all! Use that one! Also, did the episode really have to string out the, what happened to Russel? We know from the minute we see the photo, and maybe even before that. HE LITERALLY HAS THE SAME BEARD!
It’s been two years and he has the same beard. I know the character’s wouldn’t figure it out because they weren’t looking but come on y’all, you can do better than that. Either make it more of an actual reveal or give us the dramatic irony so when the reveal comes to William, it has more of an effect. Or don’t because we got my favorite delivery of a line this week from Russel. It was perfect. *Mwah*
4. The Vwoo Vwoo Vwoo SFX
What’s Leviathan planning? I thought it was going to be Riproar taking a potshot at Rojas so that she could be taken off the suspect list. You know, that old chestnut? But instead he wants to flood the entire world’s coastlines and so I wrote, “She’s going to use the launch and the disaster to do. . .something?” Clearly a master detective am I.
But nope. Not her plan at all. In fact, she seemed surprised at the end, though totally unfazed by the fact that millions could have died while vacantly staring into the middle distance at her launch party in the more corporate of dreamlands ever. So, if she wasn’t behind it, why the hell did Leviathan want to do it at that point? What’s their deal here? I’m pretty excited to find out and it’s been a while since any of these plotlines excited me.
Before I get to the other plotline this week that excited me, I gotta mention how baffled I am at Dreamer’s role this week. She shows up to push back the tidal wave with. . .mind. . .beams? Is she Mera now? The one time we don’t get a long, techno-babble explanation of a plan is the one time we needed it! Oh well. At least we got to see her in action again. Oh, and Jesse Rath finally got to break out some great mugging for the camera. That was great to see.
5. Look at Me. I am the Martian Now.
No, it’s not Alex & Kelly’s plot. That one is still being dull thanks to poor set up and Kelly’s lack of definition outside of Alex, which is slowly being rectified but I have no investment outside of please don’t break them up for stupid reasons or kill one of them CW. PLEASE. It’s also not them finally ditching the CGI and letting Phil Lamarr act, which was very much appreciated. Instead, I wanted to do a quick check in with Lena and Ma’alefa’ak because I did not see this one coming and it’s doing a lot to allay my fears.
I was worried and annoyed for a bit about Ma’alefa’ak’s sudden introduction and his seeming pointlessness. I was also very annoyed at Lena’s heel turn and the way the show failed to justify it well. Now, the pieces are starting to slot together and while I’m still not super down with Lena’s change, they’ve done a bit of course correcting and we can see Lena’s moral compass point north before the magnet of her feelings of betrayal pulls it right back off course.
Lena, in the eyes of the writers I believe, is a tragic hero rather than a villain. This is her fall from grace, the course of action she believes is best to fix the world and she takes no pleasure in the difficult decisions she has to make in order to see her goal through. Until this week, with her going back on her deal to let Ma’alefa’ak free of his inability to fuck up J’onn, that wasn’t really on display. Rather, it was more personal vendetta and grudge and the whole thing with Kara. What she did to Eve felt malicious rather than cold and calculating.
Or, perhaps, that is the point. For Lena, she knows what Luthors do and how awful they can be and so, she defaults to the way she was raised while holding onto some of her principals. Clearly the idea of consent to experiments is optional now, what with Eve being HOPE now and Ma’alefa’ak having his brain taken over by Lena. Gone are the moral qualms of last season! Why? Because she’s a villain now. . .or, if this episode’s handling continues, a tragic hero doing the wrong thing for twisted versions of the right reason. The work is tainted, if it was ever good to begin with.
Continued belowThat about does it for now! Did you all find this week’s episode better than the usual? Who’s excited to find out more about Leviathan? I am and maybe we’ll finally find out how Eve was tied in with them. You remember that 11th hour twist BS? Anyway, let me know what you thought in the comments and join me again in a week for the DEO under siege and a proof of concept for Lena. Until then, stay super y’all.
Best Line of the Night:
William: “Where’s Russel?”
Riproar (in the most dead-pan, robotic voice): “Dead.”
