Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! This week, just like Arrow, we’re taking a bit of a detour away from our main character to focus on Supergirl’s equivalent of the flash-forwards. . .kinda. Sorta. I wish it was more like Arrow and I’m honestly ashamed of myself for saying that. But hey, season 7’s been pretty good so far. Except the whole, grrr, I’m the mayor and we just need an authority figure to rally against so she’s going to be inexplicably against everything Oliver and the future, might be the real thing? Might not? Who knows.
And I’m off track, aren’t I? Sorry Mike.
As always, spoilers ahead.
1. Hickman Is
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
(the real) 1. A Girl Named Eve
I’m still reeling from the bombshell that Eve has been secretly working for Lex this whole time and is actually evil(?)/a Lex groupie(?). Or, at least I would be, if, say it with me, any of this had been set up in any way prior to last week’s episode. Seriously! How hard is it to hint that Eve hasn’t been entirely forthcoming. That her disappearances have had something shady behind them. That she had even disappeared at different times over the last year in the first place!
The more and more the show moves away from the Agent Liberty stuff (and I can’t believe I’m saying this,) the less and less it coheres and the weaker it gets, thematically and narratively. It’s baffling and annoying and GAH, I want to like Eve’s character so much more than I do. She’s a million times more interesting than Otis and Lena (sorry Lena) and we have gotten so fucking little of her that both the betrayal and the character shift means almost nothing.
Supergirl really let down it’s side characters last season and we’re still feeling that. Additionally, since the first half of the season chose to focus on Agent Liberty, Lena became irrelevant and, as Eve was only a character insofar as she was attached to Lena, she also was shoved to the side. And now, with this Lex focused episode, Eve is once again relegated to the side, instead of this being her big episode. In spite of all of what I just said, we still have a better connection to Eve than Lex, and so it would have made sense to explore why she threw in with Lex and for how long and then follow HER but I guess we needed more focus on the Kaznian Supergirl.
Bah.
Also, I knew something about Otis graves being around felt off but what the FUCK?! How did he survive? Why isn’t Mercy back? Did Eve somehow replace her? Why wasn’t she in any of the flashbacks?! This felt stunningly odd.
2. House of the Rising Sun
The big reveal! Turns out Kaznian Supergirl is a copy made from the Haron-el at the end of the last season and that she’s lost all memories except for that of Alex’s name. Why? Beats me but that’s a pretty decent explanation. I thought, at first, that Alex was Alexander Luthor, you know, the good one from another Earth who helps in “Crisis of Infinite Earths” before becoming monumentally stupid in “Infinite Crisis?”
But Lexy Boy explained that away before it really had time to become a full fledged theory in my head and before I could commission a drawing of Jon Cryer with Mera’s super fake looking red wig. I still think that would’ve been a cool explanation and would’ve tied Supergirl into the upcoming Crisis a lot more but hey, what do I know?
My big question is, and it’s a very stupid one, how did she learn Kaznian/Russian? It looked like she was using a dictionary to translate words from English but then she doesn’t speak English until Lex teaches her? It bothered me for some reason and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. Woe is me.
3. Irradiation Feeling
Can we talk about that scene where Lex just. . .straight up irradiates himself in order to get Lena to help him? That was undeniably the strangest scene in the whole episode. Cryer plays it up like it’s the most logical thing in the world and I half expected them to play some classical piece over his decision like they did everywhere else in the episode. It was so ludicrous and yet, somehow, entirely within character. I don’t know what to make of that scene and I don’t think I want to.
Continued below4. It’s All Structure
I went into this episode ready to drag the structure of how they handled the Kaznian Supergirl plot up to this point. I was ready to lambast the decision of doing all this expository work here instead of across the season. But, after finishing the episode, I’m not really sure. It work rather well to create an arc for Kaznian Supergirl, even though it is just as truncated as every other character arc in this series, and set her up to play a bigger part in the latter part of the season.
That said, the ways they tried to keep her relevant throughout the rest of the season were poor. A few more peaks at her development, building her character up quietly so that we were following two parallel narratives, instead of a cutaway that infuriated more than intrigued, would have done a lot to develop the character and make the show feel more than a collection of disjointed plots that come and go. Which brings me to my last thought.
5. For Mr. Luthor
Why, in the ever loving hell, would they make Luthor the secret mastermind behind THE ENTIRE FUCKING SEASON?! I’m so pissed off at this development. It muddies all the messages about Ben Lockwood, reduces everything that’s gone on to some calculated chess move by Lex in order to put the US at war with Kaznia or some other bulllshit, and makes everything all about Lex, further diminishing Lena.
While they have captured the character of Lex perfectly, the ways that Lex is shown as being brilliant, manipulative, straight up evil, and untouchably rich is more of a detriment than a boon. How does Lena look compared to Lex? In all the season’s we’ve seen her, she’s been shown to be brilliant, yes, but in just one episode we see the scale and scope of Lex’s influence and intellect and it makes Lena look like an average schmuck. How many different ways did he cheat the system? How many different ways has he manipulated the world to bend towards what he wants? The writers have failed to correctly build Lena up over these past seasons and have done too good a job of building Lex up.
Lena may be the smarter one, as Lex says last week, and it’s clear he harbors a deep resentment for this, but there hasn’t been a single instance, save maybe the wire, that SHOWS Lena as smarter. Hell, even with the Haron-el, he had something planned and ideas about how to get it to the right stage. In that, though, we see Lena shine and do what Lex could not, but as this episode makes clear, we don’t know if that was because he didn’t have any kryptonite to mess with or if he actually couldn’t figure it out himself.
And it begs the questions, again and again and again, why wasn’t Lex mentioned in connection to any of this, or anything really, prior to last week? Yes, he was brought up as being Lex Luthor who did bad things™ but beyond that, nothing. Nada. Zip. It’s shoddy planning and makes Lex’s purpose here, and his connection to the Kaznian Supergirl, all the more infuriating.
That about does it for now! What did you all think? Am I being too hard on Lexy Boy? Let me know in the comments and then come back for double trouble featuring the pew pew eye lasers of presidential doom. Until then, stay super y’all.
Best Line of the Night:
Supergirl: “You have powers?”
Lex: “I have powers.”
