Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling rather refreshed after the three and a half month break between the first not-quite-half of this final season and the second definitely-more-than-half. I wonder if the show used this time to up its game and really start laying the groundwork for a strong finish. After all, we did have a mostly clean slate.
So what do we open with? A monster of the week and no real sense of direction. Sigh. At least Brainy got some good lines in.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
1. Look! Up on the Lens! It’s a Spot! It’s a Smudge! No, it’s a Lens Flare!
I have many gripes with this week’s episode, most of which anyone reading these columns are intimately familiar with, but one thing I cannot gripe about was the cinematography this week. I dunno why it is but the show felt like it was taking visual cues more from the recently concluded Superman & Lois than past seasons of Supergirl. Now, it doesn’t fully commit to the somewhat muted colors and slower camera work but for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a sense of place. Catco was more than a hallway, a meeting room, and a desk! We got to see J’onn’s watchtower from many more angles than usual! WE GOT ESTABLISHING SHOTS.
It’s possible nothing is different and it’s just the three months or more away – plus most of part 1 taking place in the aforementioned Watchtower or the Phantom Zone – that’s gotten my attention. I’ll concede that. However, it remains true that the episode looked and felt more whole than the show has in a while, than many of the longer running CW shows have in a while, and that’s worthy of an entire, positive thought…even with the lens flares covering half the screen at one point.
2. Supergirl VI: The Quest for Peace
If you had told me that the central conflict of “Welcome Back, Kara” would have been “moving too swiftly” on environmental issues, I would have stared at your face and said: “That tracks.” OK, I would’ve sighed very deeply first but at this point, nothing surprises me about Supergirl ham-fisted attempts to address thorny issues facing the US or the world at large. It’s admirable, it’s important, but G-d damn if it doesn’t always feel so half-baked. Two seasons ago, they tackled the rise of right-wing militias and the ways the media is used and abused for fear mongering. Last season, they tackled the role of journalism and the dangers of corporatized tech platforms.
However, as I traced across each season, the approaches to each ended up being overly simplistic to the point of not actually saying anything meaningful or constructive and, in some cases, being actively detrimental to their overall arguments. So, too, is this the case with “Welcome Back, Kara” and its attempts to solve climate change.
Now, we don’t actually get the crew attempting to solve climate change in one episode, rather they’re trying to clean up some of the garbage in the ocean they discovered. Taken in isolation, this is a fine episode to have. Seeing the ways in which the crew attempts to use technologies we don’t have to try and solve a very real problem is what aspirational fiction is for. It gets harder to palette when a piece of fiction attempts to lean over and be like, well if only we did this one thing, the actual problem would be solved, but this is a world where aliens exist, people can fly, and
What is frustrating to watch is when a show takes a real problem, gestures towards it with “it’s complex” and then shames the one character who is actively trying to think up solutions for a problem that’s only going to get worse and worse for thinking it needs to be addressed with urgency. It’s especially galling in light of the IPCC’s report on climate change. Yes, it is important to proceed with caution and consideration, but it is not enough to say “it’s complicated” and then not have any characters try.
Continued belowI understand that the point was to show how unhealthy Zor-El’s obsession with his failure to “save Krypton” is. It was to communicate how he is motivated by guilt, and thus looks for a clean, simple, single solution, rather than attempting to solve systemic, and multi-layered, issues with systemic, multi-layered solutions. However, Supergirl fails to do the work necessary to fully differentiate between that aspect of his attempt – the rashness and egoism – and his attempt writ large. It IS complicated and there ARE no easy solutions, and blundering in with a purported cure all may cause more damage, but that doesn’t mean the framing of the show has to condemn the idea in the process.
3. GET ME ARTICLES OF LEX
OK. I’ve filled my soap box quota for the week. What’s next in my notes? OH G-D DAMMIT. Are we seriously paralleling Zor-El and Andrea’s obsessions but with Andrea it’s just kinda swept away? I cannot tell if Supergirl is trying to set-up Andrea as a Cat Grant stand-in i.e. a positive force that will save the company she helped ruin, or if they’re going to lean into the “her obsession will be her downfall” angle. I really hope it’s the latter because it’s a far more interesting approach.
Part of why I hope that is, well, she’s a bad boss. She wants impossible goals – always has – she threatens to fire her entire staff if they cannot meet those goals, and runs the paper with a vendetta rather than for what is actually there. It helps soften the last point because it’s with Lex but by focusing on a single evil antagonist, she is willing to dismiss the less sexy but far more important aspects of a story. William’s piece about the garbage patch, ham-fisted as it’s described, highlights a piece of journalism most of the public forgets about: the large, inter-connected, hard to see ways in which horrible things happen through simple negligence, bad laws, and abuse of systems. “Toxic Garbage Patch Legally Created Through Loophole in 1987 Law” is a lot less attention grabbing than “Lex Luthor Poisons Ocean” after all.
4. Oh Mother, Where Art Thou?
It was nice seeing Nia & Lena bond over their dead mothers. Er, well, not nice but in an episode of things I found rather frustrating, these instead made me feel invested in Nia’s journey to self-confidence in her superhero life. Moreover, because we’re not actually there yet, we get to see it develop over the course of many episodes rather than condensed into just the one! That’s good shit right there, plagued as it is by the CW’s cursed inability to trust its audience to pick up on context clues and the actors’ non-vocal performances.
I’m worried though. Is this the last episode for Lena this season? Is Katie McGrath getting her own plot line in rediscovering her roots or is she leaving until the finale? I hope that doesn’t end up being the case! Now that she, and the show, has been freed from the shadow of Lex, I’d want her to stick around. I get it though, if they want to pare down the main cast and to focus more on Nia (and Kelly, who suspiciously wasn’t around this episode.) I’m all for getting more character-centric episodes and there’s no better time than in the final season.
5. So…Where Do We Go From Here?
Rather than lay the groundwork for…whatever the rest of the season is going to be focused on, or doing an intense focus on Kara’s return, “Welcome Back, Kara” decided to have the crew fight a corrupted CG-garbage robot and seemingly resolve Kara’s trauma from the Phantom Zone in one episode. It’s kinda baffling why they would choose to have this be the focus of the mid-season premiere. It’s an odd lull and while, structurally, it makes sense to have this be a relaxed beat before ramping up after spending six episodes dealing with the Phantoms, it ends up feeling like there isn’t really a plan.
I think what got me most was how the episode ends up being more focused on Zor-El than on Kara. Sure, we get plenty of scenes of Kara looking at a photo of a phantom and having memory flashes and clearly being traumatized but the show doesn’t do anything more with it than that. It feels like the very emotional conversation that caps off the episode, prior to the Nia stinger, should have come next time, after having sat with this new status quo for Kara. We don’t see all the ways this is affecting her, just a couple select ones, and by not sitting with it for longer, we don’t get a real sense of how fundamentally difficult this is for her.
Continued belowHer breaking down for Alex isn’t cathartic because it hasn’t built in us in the same way it has for the character. We spent way too much time setting up the giant trash bot fight and not enough highlighting and exploring Kara’s return. We don’t get a reckoning of how this second time re-traumatized her from her first “visit.” We don’t see her even attempt to learn what happened from her friends. Hell, we don’t even get her pushing her superheroics to the forefront in order to distract from the article she’s being forced to write. There’s no conflict there and that’s not what you want from a very important moment for your central character.
Maybe Nyx will fix that when she inevitably shows up again.
That about does it for now! Sorry to be a downer upon our return. I thought I had more positives than I did. What did you all think of the return? Were you more enthused than I was? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you next week for, uh, well I don’t know. Something to do with Nia’s dreams? Yeah, that sounds about right. Until then, stay super y’all.
Best Line of the Night:
Brainy: “Come on, you sorry excuse for a Roomba!”
