Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! It’s mid-season finale time, to which I hear you all say, “Aren’t we on episode seven? Of a twenty episode season?” Yes, yes we are. Ain’t The CW fun?
I’m sure there are good, CW reasons for this, as there always are with their strange choices around show hiatuses, but I don’t know them so I can snipe and snark about them until the cows come home. Don’t be afraid, CW, I don’t bite…much.
As always, spoilers ahead.
1. Dialog vs. Trust
“Fear Knot,” more than any other episode this season, does not trust its audience to understand what is going on, which is a feat in a season where I, pre-empted the entire preview to complain about this very fact. If I have to hear a character vocalize their entire thought process, arc, and resolution one more time, I might jump out an airlock. This was particularly egregious at the end when they were snapping people out of their fear comas and Lena just says “mother” at the water. Like, NO SHIT it’s her mom. Way to undercut the effectiveness of that scene.
Now, the one upside to this was that despite my TV signal being utter garbage for the first five minutes of the episode and looking more pixelated than an Atari game and sounding like Optimus Prime fed through that stupid Arrow voice changer, I got the gist of the conceit of the episode, though even through all of that I did not need any of the dull, dull exposition about the ship and what not. Thankfully, the episode as a whole is well done otherwise…mostly. It’s better than literally every other episode with a phantom in it so that automatically gets it a B- minimum.
2. Dream Diers
This. THIS. This is what I wanted from the Phantom Zone from day one. Give me that good, good psychological horror. Give me that vampire schlock horror. Give me monsters and aliens and utter bonkers shit that our heroes have to overcome, be that with gusto, like Kelly, with acceptance, like Lena, with resignation and sacrifice, like Alex, or with tragedy, like Nia. I love the way the episode also utilized the constraints of being on broadcast TV by having the end of each fear lead into a commercial break. Clever clever.
I will admit that I had no idea what was going on at first. My notes are a mess of frustration and confusion at all the sudden coincidences and Alex’s horrible, horrible, horrible decision making process and then her sudden realization that she literally did everything wrong for 5 minutes straight. I’m going to give the episode the benefit of the doubt that my confusion with Alex’s initial trip into terror land was caused by my local connection issues and not by the writing or framing, and I missed the proper clues to prime me to view this as a manifestation of Alex’s fear of letting everyone around her down with actions she thinks are helpful but instead cause more harm. That said, I still think they could’ve handled it all a bit cleaner so that I wasn’t yelling at my TV about how stupid Alex is being. Ah well. At least I picked up on the weird stopped clock. Nice touch on using that to key us into what was real and what was fear.
3. Kelly Olson’s New Nightmare
Oh Kelly. You’ve been given so little to do this season and now you’re being fast tracked to become Guardian before the show goes off air.
*sigh*. Why couldn’t they have started this earlier in, say, the previous season? Or anywhere in the last six episodes? (Or, well, the first four since we had nice past adventures in the last two.) There just feels like there’s been a disconnect between the Kelly that is set to become Guardian and the Kelly that we’ve seen since they shoved her and Alex together and turned her into Alex’s plus one rather than a person in her own right.
It’s maddening that I had to look up whether or not she was a soldier in order to understand how she was able to have the wherewithal to be so badass in the last scene of her fear dream. That should have been an important piece of who she was and integrated into the conversations that Alex and everyone else was having about her doubts about being part of the team. She keeps saying that she’s not super but literally half the team are just like her! Lena has no powers, she’s just smart. Alex has no powers, she’s just got some fancy tech from J’onn.
Continued belowI get that the dream exacerbates each character’s inner fears and self-doubts but when you contrast the way Kelly’s manifests and the way Nia’s manifests, it becomes clear that there is a tension in Kelly’s that isn’t there in Nia’s. It’s frustrating to watch because Kelly deserves to come into her own as Guardian but all this hemming and hawing about not “feeling like a hero” despite having similar qualifications to everyone else and no one acknowledging that part makes it come across as forced and cheap, like they’re fitting the explanation to the outcome rather than the other way around. It’s just sloppy writing.
I also was disappointed the show didn’t double down on the fears in Kelly’s mind when she clearly didn’t know it was a fear dream. It’s a sweet and touching moment to have fake Alex break out of the thrall of the phantom so they can have a heart to heart, sure, but it breaks the conceit and reduces the power of these hallucinations. Go for the jugular like you do with Nia and Lena!
4. Not Today Phantom
Is it weird and kinda misogynistic that the two male characters on the ship are the only ones not affected by the fear dreams AND being the ones who have to save the day? Yes. Does Supergirl justify it well? Ehhhhhh mostly. J’onn’s psychic martian BS shield is fine while Brainy’s explanation that his compartmentalization allows him to remain cognizant of reality while freaking about a hilarious metaphor for the way that very trait is affecting him is perfect and worth it but I’m split on the decision to have Nia taken out. On the one hand, this was literally the perfect place for her to be the hero and save the day. Dreams are literally her thing! On the other hand, this was also the perfect place to have her fail. Nia has been struggling with deep seated insecurities about being a hero and using her powers. She started to work through it last week in “Prom Again!” with the help of Brainy but anxiety does not resolve that easily and the phantom’s fear powers know how to exploit that.
It’s a great bit of drama that looks like it’s going to seed some character growth and tension once the show returns. She has the compound knowledge of her failure in the real world to break free of the dream world and the loss of Brainy by her own actions within the fearscape. That’s gonna leave a mark and I can’t wait for them to explore that.
But yeah, J’onn stopping the phantom by just kinda shooting mindbeams at it was pretty silly and his “YOU all did it” rang very hollow afterwards. Like, no they didn’t. They didn’t do bunk. They only broke free cause the phantom went out like a chump and continued to prove that this season would’ve been far better without the phantoms. Oy.
5. Kara’s Dead: The Final Supergirl
So I don’t know what kind of scheduling nonsense happened but this felt like there was an excellent episode bookended by what should have been moments in the follow-up episode. And I know I’ve spent most of these thoughts complaining but this really was a great episode for Supergirl. Maybe not as good as the last two but certainly the kind of thing I hoped I’d see from this final season. Kara’s final adventure in the phantom zone, however, felt tacked onto this rescue episode rather than as an important part of it.
It’s like the writers wanted to be done with the phantom zone because they had no idea what to do with it so they said fuck it, we’ll save her now rather than prolonge it, to which I say…I can get behind that. I had no desire to stay in the phantom zone as it had been set up and so I’m glad we are done with it, though it seems like we’re not done with Nyx just yet. Woooo?
That about does it for now! Thank you all for joining me (and Chris) for the first half of this final season. I’m off to take a nice long break as Superman & Lois returns to close out its inaugural season. Say hi to August for me and I’ll see you all again in the month of August for the eighth episode of Supergirl! Until then, stay super y’all.
Best Line of the Night:
Brainy: “Balloons. Thin sheets of rubber holding in all that pressure. Balloons J’onn! Balloons!”
