Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! The titular hero takes a backseat this week to focus on a man of steel. No, not the one the title would have you think. No, not the other one the title might make you think of. It’s someone new. Someone contemporary. Someone that does not live up to the associations of the title. As always, spoilers ahead.
1. Kryptonite
I’ll talk about the ending first because it’s perhaps the easiest. Supergirl spends the entirety of the episode slowly dying of kryptonite poisoning and, by the end, is no closer to surviving than she was at the start. She is placed inside a suit that is eerily similar to the “Superman” suit from “52” and, euch, “New 52 Futures End,” by Lena. Doing this was a bold move, one I expect will not last for very long, and I wonder how long Supergirl will actually stay down. I would love to have it be at least one more episode, so we can see the other characters act without her presence.
What shocked me most, actually, was that she wasn’t the focus of the episode. In fact, a majority of the episode is flashback. Again, bold move and one that (mostly) pays off. I wonder what kinds of effects this will have on her and also, y’know, SUPERMAN! I hope they address that since it was the whole world that got poisoned and not just National City.
2. You Called Me Strong, You Called Me Weak
Moving to the bulk of the episode, we focus on Ben Lockwood, the man behind the mask of Agent Liberty. There’s a lot to unpack with him. For starters, the decision to spend 90% of the episode chronicling how he got to be Agent Liberty was a good one because he is not a sympathetic villain. By showing us how and why he is the way he is, he is humanized and his actions rendered in context but any sympathy we may have had for him early on is slowly worn away by his actions. Were the episode to have shown only his injury at the start, the closing of the factory and the subsequent destruction of his house, his fall might have been rendered tragic. As it stands, his fall is a tragedy but not one that earns or deserves our concern.
We also see how his father, and to some extent, his son, helped him along this path. His father’s views of the world helped color his perception of events as the nature of the world shifted around him. His son’s acceptance of hatred at his school, categorized by his statement “No, it’s fine. I hear it at school all the time,” too helps erode Ben’s worldview. His father characterized talking & compassion as weakness. Is it any surprise that Ben, when grasping for strength, would latch onto the worst parts of what his father instilled in him?
3. You Stumbled in and Bumped Your Head
I said before that aliens as stand-ins for real groups of people wouldn’t work perfectly and the cracks in the analogy show themselves this week. It’s nothing major, and the more I think on it, the more the multiple, planet-wide invasions & attacks do work as a stand in for the effects that a large scale terrorist attack can have, but it’s the little things that get you. I don’t have much to say on this point, mostly because the exact moments that failed to hit were overshadowed by ones that did.
4. Back on Solid Ground
I’ve truly been enjoying the ways in which this season has transitioned from episode to episode. They feel connected in more organic ways, with one episode affecting another, replacing the monster of the week formula with a more cohesive plot structure. I know it’s only three episodes in and, truthfully, we’ll be back to a monster of the week format soon, but these transitions give me hope that they’ve got a better idea of what they want to do with this season. That they’ll integrate the monsters of the week better and that the season as a whole will benefit.
5. Ease My Troubled Mind
Continued belowThere were many things I could’ve talked about this week. There were many notes I made, specifically so that I could address them. Most of them were plot points or follow-ups to comments I made last week. But when it came time to write these thoughts, I found myself stuck thinking about Ben & his descent into hatred. I became stuck because all I could think about was the attack on the Tree of Life Sanctuary in Pittsburgh on Saturday. These thoughts became much harder to write. As you can tell by the (relative) brevity of them, my heart wasn’t in writing this week.
Part of that was because we had to spend an episode watching the compassion slip out of a man and watching as that hole is filled with anger, hatred, and eventually, violence and murder. It is effective in showing how the goodness can be leached out of someone because of the ways in which they begin to construct the world. He is no longer a good man. He may have been one at the start of the episode but that was gone by the end. . .and he has no one to blame except for himself.
I had more words to put here, but I could not find them. I had more thoughts but I do not know how to make them into anything coherent. I had more ideas but they are nothing but more variations on the same theme. I do not want to leave you on a somber note, this is Supergirl after all, but I cannot think of a better episode to leave this as the ending note. I will see you all next week for, most likely, an easier episode and, I pray to G-d, an easier week.
