Welcome back, all ye Supergirl fans. For those didn’t abandon ship during last week’s angst fest or for those just getting back into the show, I have good news and bad news. Good news: this week’s episode made me glad I continued watching. Bad news: I don’t know if I can quite call it good. Let me give my five thoughts and you’ll see why. Spoilers ahead.
1. Openings and Endings
This episode’s opening and ending gave me confidence that this season has (possibly) left behind some of its weaker aspects in terms of episode construction. While it still feels like a monster of the week show, the focus on the morning routine of our three important leads (Kara, Alex/Maggie, and our mystery woman, Sam) grounds it more in their experiences – Kara’s loneliness and the hidden fear that she sent Mon-El to his death, Alex & Maggie’s beautiful and peaceful home life, and Sam’s hectic and awkward attempts to get both her and her daughter ready for the day.
The pacing of it, with minimal dialogue and the right number of cuts, worked to get me into the episode and cleanse myself of last week’s episode. The ending acted as a mirror to this, bookending the episode, and setting up the next one as well (I sense some more J’onn in our future).
2. Video Game Krypton
The CW is usually pretty good about using their CGI in interesting ways but here, they just gave us a cutscene from a Supergirl videogame that only exists on Earth-prime. The first-person perspective and the entirely CG asteroid belt and exploding planet made me laugh aloud at the silliness of it. This is a gripe more than anything but it gets a spot here because it comes during the best scenes of the episode, the fear scenes.
3. Fear Factor
Hey, Gotham, you should take some notes from Supergirl over here on how to show your fear. This is how you show it! Not with Pennywise shaky run cam but with thematic and character driven fears that build upon themselves and provide drama. These were some of my favorite scenes of the episode. Wait, let me take that back. Kara dealing with the fallout of the fear scenes were my favorite. Melissa Benoist gave such a natural performance when she has to confide in Alex (and to a lesser extent Winn) and it really got me.
Also, last episode, take notes on how to deal with grief in an interesting way! Kara, as revealed here, has the added problem of believing that Mon-El is dead and that she is to blame for that. When she realizes this, and is just in tears, vulnerable in the most human of ways, I was right there with her. Unlike last time when I couldn’t understand her anger over Mon-El, I now understand her grief and tears. Well done writers, you turned that around on me.
Do I wish this was better telegraphed and written into Kara? Yes but I’ll take what I can get.
4. Decisions, decisions
One of these is a character decision, the other two are actress decisions. Let’s start with the most frustrating one. What the hell, child whose name I cannot remember because you make me so angry? Why would you walk into the middle of the scene of the crime from your nice, safe pizza place/café?! While construction equipment, cops with guns, and a META-HUMAN are still there?! Ugh. I was ready for her to be crushed and that might make me a bad person but that was a stupid decision on her part.
Lena Luthor, please pick an accent. I noticed it last time but it was very apparent this time. Katie McGrath, while doing an excellent job as Lena, seems to be having trouble keeping whatever accent it was that she picked for last season. It makes for some awkward scenes and for some stiff line reads, which is unfortunate. Hopefully, that’ll get sorted out soon.
Finally, subtlety, thy name isn’t Sam. I wish I had better things to say about the new, mystery but no longer a mystery, woman but almost every line read she had was super over-the-top and tonally more of a fit for Gotham than here. (Someone save me from this Gotham shaped hell I seem to have trapped myself in). Her acting, when she wasn’t talking, was good though. Her presence filled the screen and nothing felt inauthentic, her facial expressions varied and meaningful. But every line, much like Psy, was wooden or overly dramatic to a point where it just didn’t fit the scene.
Continued belowAnd speaking of awful dialogue…
5. Dialogue Disasters
I really should stop harping on this, since it is a problem across all the CW superhero shows, but the dialogue keeps being kind of trash, although it was much, much better this time. It is very exposition laden in ways that feel like filler and could be easily written into the scenes themselves or just gotten rid of (especially with all the technical jargon at the DEO that we hear every. episode).
Every line Psy said was ripped straight out of the “mysterious yet vague villain” handbook and made her a much less creepy villain and the whole DJ vs. Band fight was cringeworthy and ultimately only there to set up some much better lines.
Although the worst dialogue exchange has to have been between the principal and Sam. There was this perfect ping-pong of responses that didn’t really accomplish anything and felt manufactured, like I was sitting in the canned dialogue factory.
Yet there were so many good scenes! I talked about them before but Winn and J’onn are both (once again) given some of the best and funniest lines of the night and Jimmy Olsen and Lena have some great banter, with Lena also giving a wonderful speech telling Kara to get her head back in the game at her job (something she’s been kind of bad at since leaving the tutelage of Cat Grant).
There was a lot to love about this episode and a lot to groan at. What do you all think? Did y’all enjoy this episode as much as I did? Let us know in the comments and next week I’ll see you again for some more Kryptonian action and hopefully the continuation of some of these mysteries.
