Supergirl s4 ep7 - Featured Television 

Five Thoughts on Supergirl‘s “Rather the Fallen Angel”

By | November 26th, 2018
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! Turns out, I have to eat my own words as it seems the upwards spiral of this season has decided to take a noticeable turn. I’m not saying this week’s episode was bad, just that it’s the weakest of the season so far. There are moments that work exceptionally well but on the whole, the term “filler” fits this week’s adventures pretty well. As always, spoilers ahead.

1. James & The Giant Bomb

I was afraid of where this story was going to go. Would it have James slowly be subsumed into the Children of Liberty despite being diametrically opposed to their ideas? Would James successfully convince large numbers of them to abandon the group? Turns out, the answer is, it’s all wrapped up pretty neatly this week as James has a crisis of conscience on whether or not to be the inadvertent face of legitimacy or let someone die but ultimately rejects the group and the one person he talked to was “redeemed.”

I don’t like it one bit.

As much as I was wary, this was the show’s opportunity to give James a complex narrative to follow, exploring the compromises someone might make as they try to do good and the consequences of those compromises. By the end of the episode though, there are no consequences! Sure, James has to do some damage control of his reputation but beyond that, nothing mattered with his guardian plotline. It’s frustrating. I’m not even sure I understood why he has to do this damage control. Was the camera broadcasting live? To whom? Was the footage on the camera moved and leaked because he failed to destroy the camera? I dunno and the show makes no effort to show us.

This episode’s plot line eschews the more carefully constructed metaphors & set-ups of previous episodes for a bog-standard villain plot complete with talking bomb (who makes their bomb talk, anyway?) Additionally, it all felt very out of character. James is a hero but he for sure as hell knows what kind of legitimacy he would be giving them by blowing up the symbol. It’s not just his reputation on the line! He just glosses over the fact that if he goes through with it, he is feeding something deeply and truly terrifying. He realizes it by the end, thank goodness, but the way the show framed that whole conversation had me riled up.

James’ dilemma is still difficult: Do you save the man who is taking the first step towards redemption or do you reject the people who want to use your actions to justify the death of others? However, they treat it like a simple matter and then don’t even let the consequences of that decision ring out through James’ storyline. Instead, we return to status quo. It’s shallow, poorly written and glosses over all the parts that would have made James’ plot feel thought out. That’s what gets me the most.

2. Top 10 Superhero Betrayals

Equally as painful to watch was Manchester Black’s plot. He betrays Supergirl so that he can meet with a leader he knew is the fake leader so he can beat the information out of him to find out who really IS Agent Liberty. None of it is set-up very well either. His presence throughout the episode is off: knowing things he shouldn’t, having convenient information, obviously and suspiciously not wanting to involve DEO, etc. While it can be argued that, well, he’s betraying Supergirl so of course things seem off, that doesn’t mean the lack of subtlety is indicative of good writing.

Manchester Black is a scary character that represents the hero embracing a path that believes in death over redemption and violence as a first resort instead of a last. While this is not the time for a conversation about modern superhero violence & its ubiquity & how the history of comic books has shaped that representation & how our own changing morals and attempts to redefine characters that operated under different assumptions using modern lenses has led to characters being cynically misinterpreted because the elements that don’t gel are simply recontextualized instead of being removed, changed or reworked into something that is indicative of the underlying philosophy and not the surface level action/events. . .where was I going with this?

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OH, right. Manchester Black and his stupid, stupid betrayal plan that makes no sense and only serves to let Supergirl feel right that she didn’t trust him. It reduces Manchester to a thug instead of someone who feels that death is the only way to truly stop hate and evil. It cheapens his character journey and the ultimate shift in the team’s view of him, feels disingenuous, is unsatisfying to watch and wasn’t even that good a betrayal. It wouldn’t even make it to the top 100 DCW betrayals, and I think we only have 20 or so. J’onn’s breakdown at the end is earned, as he truly feels he could get to Manchester and help him through his pain, but the way they get to that point is atrocious. I’m angry that they wasted such a good, small scene on such a rushed set-up. It was a bad decision all around.

3. Adam Noname and the Kidney of Sadness

I know what they were going for with Lena’s C-plot this week. I know they wanted to demonstrate the uncertainties Lena was having and to connect us to River Phoenix, I mean, Adam, so his death would have an impact on us and, therefore, we would feel the same sadness Lena feels. The problem is, I could not care less about Adam at all or Lena this week.

There is nothing endearing about this character when we first meet him and his entire purpose is to be a sad boy all episode without giving us anything substantial to care about. Every scene he was in, I found myself asking, “Why is this here? What does it tell me about him or Lena that doesn’t feel forced?” It’s a tragedy what happened to him, both in the present and in the past, but, to borrow a classic trope, this character only had two weeks until retirement. It was heavily telegraphed that he wasn’t going to make it and there was NOTHING substantial to the conversations Lena and he had.

They’re all overly melodramatic, feel so very artificial and accompanied by a score that sucks out any drama or emotional weight and replaces it with a heavy handed “this is how you need to be feeling.” It’s insulting and turns Adam into nothing more than a plot device, which, fine, but the show shouldn’t spend the entire episode on him. I still don’t understand why Lena opens up to him in the ways she does. Her whole experiment with the Haron-El has been confusing from the start. Not the experiment part itself but the underlying reason why. You want to see this kind of thing handled well? Watch Black Lightning. It’s not a perfect 1-to-1 but it is close enough.

Ostensibly, Lena is doing this to do good but her acting and her dialogue has left us with nothing to grasp onto in order to get into her head. I can speculate all I want but the speed with which she changes her mind throughout the episode and the strange coldness about the trials at the start reveal an underlying lack of understanding from the writers as to what they want Lena’s motives and personality to be. People change the minds all the time. They get cold feet. They realize that their potentially deadly experiment could kill a real person which will mess them up, which is the only aspect of this whole thing they got right. But the audience needs to understand the catalyst for these realizations as well as the original feelings.

If you want us to empathize with a character, especially a new character that’s slated to die, you have to do a much better job than you did with Adam.

4. All According to Keikaku*

Let’s briefly talk about Lockwood’s plan this week because, as I’ve ranted about earlier, it feels wildly different in tone & execution than anything that has come before. Gone are the real-world parallels. Gone is the subtlety (well, semi-subtlety.) Gone is anything resembling a clever direction for the show. The basic plan, destroy a symbol of acceptance to galvanize supporters, is a good one. The second part of the plan, to blow-up someone from the “opposition,” someone who is a symbol themselves, on its own, is another good plan. Were the show to have gone through with the former, they could have explored the implications of what had happened and were they to have actually gotten James to take the fall, that would have been REALLY interesting to see.

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Instead, none of that happened because they needed some way to take Supergirl off the board but also to give an excuse for James to get out of hot water. By combining the two, and by relying on a very large set of coincidences that had to align perfectly in order to work, both failed miserably and it ended up being a, say it with me, standard villain plot.

How many times have we seen this kind of thing in Supergirl? So many times. It’s too much and didn’t gel with the rest of this season’s set-up. It was too fast, foiled too easily, and, again, felt like an unearned win.

*Translator’s note: Keikaku means stupid ass plan

5. Romance at the Speed of Stupid

The final thing I’ll gripe about this week is the fact that the Jimmy/Lena story is frustrating in its manufactured drama. Jimmy returns to Lena at the end of the episode and she sends him away because she sad about Adam’s death which, fair enough. It’s possible that it was this that was weighing on her mind during the trials but the fact that it is being “resolved” one (1!) episode after the “break-up” is maddening. The impetus for the break-up was stupid and neither of them are willing to communicate in any meaningful way. It’s all platitudes and canned lines and they’re simultaneously stretching it out and rushing the whole thing. I have zero patience for whatever this is going forwards so whatever they do with it next had better be good.

That about does it for now! Were you as disappointed in this week’s episode as I was? Let me know in the comments and I will see you again next week for a larger presence from Nia Nal and Brainy (!) and maybe, hopefully, a more cohesive episode. Until then, stay super y’all.

Best Line of the Night:

Kara (after Alex quips about the 4-times cooked turkey): “It’s accumulating flavor.”


//TAGS | Supergirl

Elias Rosner

Elias is a lover of stories who, when he isn't writing reviews for Mulitversity, is hiding in the stacks of his library. Co-host of Make Mine Multiversity, a Marvel podcast, after winning the no-prize from the former hosts, co-editor of The Webcomics Weekly, and writer of the Worthy column, he can be found on Twitter (for mostly comics stuff) here and has finally updated his profile photo again.

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