This week on Supergirl, Brainiac 5 and Nia Nal went back to 2009 to obtain some of Kara’s DNA, which would make it easier to locate her present day self in the Phantom Zone. As is always the case when time travel is involved, things didn’t go as planned.
1. Misnomer
Brainy and Nia planned to go to Midvale during Kara’s prom, when she was injured stopping an Aquarid meteor shower from hitting the town; however, their ship crashes onto the football field days earlier, and Kara, Kenny Li, and Alex arrive to help them, when the couple’s plan had been to avoid them. I enjoyed that, instead of complicating things further by knocking the kids out, burying the ship and trying to hide etc., Nia came up with passing themselves off as Brandon and Brenda, the last of their psychic kind (the Psyconians!), because on what other TV show would this cover story work? Can’t wait to see everyone in the present realize the Psyconians weren’t real.
2. 2009, So Far, So Close
When I saw the prom dress Nia dressed herself in, I was astonished by how accurately flowy it was for 2009, and the laughs at high school culture from a mere 12 years ago didn’t stop coming, between “Whassup?!,” “chillax,” and “totes.” Yes, it’s very all basic and juvenile, but that’s the point, it was an intentionally cringe-inducing warning to today’s kids that everything you think sounds hip and natural now will inevitably become dated. Also, Brainy accidentally being pulled into the Glee Club: an intentional nod to Glee, the 2009-15 series that also starred Melissa Benoist, or an unintentional Obama era reference? You decide.
3. The Return of Kenny Li
Kenny Li — Kara’s love interest who died in Izabela Vidovic and Olivia Nikkanen’s first appearance as the younger Danvers sisters — is alive now thanks to ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths,’ and played by Peter Sudarso now instead of Ivan Mok. That’s an interesting change, and I can’t help but wonder if he’ll return later this season as the one Kara ultimately ends up with: it’s entirely possible he was just brought back to give someone Brainy to hang out with, but if so, why so much emphasis on his eventual break-up with Kara? We’ll see I guess: if nothing else, I hope we learn he became a astronaut, so we know that he did get to go to space.
4. The Cat Grant Prequel
The episode also introduces Eliza Helm as the young Cat Grant (or C.J. Grant here), and Chris William Martin and Matt Baram as campy alien zookeepers Maxim Tork and Mitch. Helm does a decent impression of Calista Flockhart, but it’s too early to tell if her version will feel like more than a caricature. Anyway, we’re told that Tork and Mitch were apprehended by the DEO before Brainy and Nia changed history, but it’s never answered: what exactly went down with the fuel truck they took control of in the original timeline? Did it blow up? Did Kara overhear it? Did Cat only wind up in its way because of the butterfly effect? I need a tie-in with the answers!
5. Stress Mitigation
Back to Brainy joining the Glee Club: I thought it was a missed opportunity not showing him joining the math league, drama club, and baseball team (which was funny, since baseball is why Elias missed this episode), but who knows, perhaps COVID-19 prevented casting scores of new extras for a montage scene. Besides, what was more important was Brainiac’s takeaway that there are other ways to mitigate stress than eating, and the surprisingly thought-provoking notion the arts, sports and so on, were created to help cope with surviving each day.
Of course, these don’t help with mitigating the stress of the whole “changing history” situation, so Brainy asks Nia what relaxes her. She reveals that since she was a child, singing Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” has always relieved any pressure she felt: her singing it to him was (like she admits) corny, but an incredibly cute moment. Can we have a spin-off for these two after the series finale? I hear Nicole Maines is writing comic books now, and there may be space on the Waverider…
Continued belowBonus Thoughts:
– College era Alex comes across as a better version of Jonathan Kent in Man of Steel; her need to instill cynicism and discretion in Kara feels a lot more reasonable since they’re in a world where Clark is Superman.
– Nia’s mom really has no chill if she made her kids write essays on why “whaaaassuuuuup” is dumb.
– You gotta admire how seamlessly our heroes hid the ship under the football field.
– It’s bitterly ironic that Brainy and Nia’s “dying planet” is Earth.
– OK, hear me out: what if the pink panther in Nia’s dreams is actually Cat Grant?
– I like that the nice alien herbalist also active on Earth in 2009 is very ugly (appearances being deceiving and all that.)
Well that’s all we (and the episode) had time for. This was a nice distraction from the plodding Phantom Zone story, and hopefully next week’s conclusion will be as much fun. Elias will be back to cover it then (unless baseball coverage preempts the broadcast in his area again.)
