[Editor’s note: This review may contain spoilers.]
Director: Rob Greenlea
Writers: Eric Carrasco & Greg Baldwin
Stars: Melissa Benoist, Mehcad Brooks & Chyler Leigh
Summary
Alex is kidnapped in order to blackmail Supergirl into breaking someone out of prison.
Positives
No surprise but Lena’s subplot is the best part of the episode. Katie McGrath and Teri Hatcher were fun to watch on screen together. I love how Lena’s morality is being played with. Ambition is her greatest strength and weakness. She wants to do good things and help the world but, like Rahul Kohli’s Jack from last week, that ambition can blind her. Rhea seems to know this and is taking advantage of Lena. However, Rhea does seem to relate to Lena. I buy that she is connecting emotionally with Lena; it doesn’t seem like she’s lying even though the audience knows she is duplicitous.
I like Maggie’s questions about how Supergirl operates. She gets the job done but is impulsive and maybe too rough. For aliens and other super powered beings, Kara is necessary but I buy that cops would not be in love with her. I also like that Kara’s impulsiveness continues to be one of her weaknesses. That’s pretty consistent.
I really like that the villain has a connection to Kara and Alex’s past and is someone we have seen. We didn’t get new flashbacks; this character is in one of the early episodes, maybe the pilot, which is cool.
Negatives
This villain, Rick, is terrible. This guy is giving his tragic backstory as if he’s the only one to ever feel pain. Parents abusing their children is terrible but it’s obnoxious when someone acts like their pain matters more than another person’s pain. He is lecturing Kara and Maggie never considering that Kara’s entire planet blew up. She’s an alien in a world that hates aliens. Maggie was kicked out of her house as a teenager simply for being gay and lives in a country that consistently treats the LGBT community poorly. It might be insensitive but I had no sympathy for this guy and I feel like I should have. It’s not interesting either because nothing is done with the abuse angle. It doesn’t inform anything except for serving as an excuse to make him a crazy asshole.
Rick is also over powered like crazy. I buy that he knew Kara is Supergirl; that’s not a well kept secret but he knows literally everything. He has a complete understanding of D.E.O. technology to the point that he could outsmart Winn and knows who Martian Manhunter is to the point that he can block J’onn’s mind reading powers. How can he possibly block that? The only explanation for this is that he watched them for a year. The D.E.O. is a secret government organization. How exactly did he watch them? This is next level bullshit and that’s saying something for a show with a shape shifting Martian and a flying girl of steel. I never buy for a second that he can do any of the things he does and the show doesn’t even try to explain. We just know he stalked Alex for a year and that’s it. Does he have education in technology? Because Winn has done incredible things and this punk outsmarts him? Rick is able to do what he does for plot convenience. There are too many easy ways out of the situation the episode presents so the writers needed to find excuses to not use those solutions. But they didn’t find excuses. There was not even an effort; this is a surprisingly lazy script.
Maggie is a complete hypocrite and has no respect for the law. She has no right to lecture Kara about anything ever again. I like this character so much less after the third act of the episode.
Verdict
I hate this episode. This might be my least favorite episode of the show so far. Suspension of disbelief can only go so far and this episode destroyed mine like it was the Death Star and I was Jyn Erso hugging Cassian on the beach. The villain poses no threat because he has so much insane power and it makes the episode unbelievably boring. I never feel the stakes because it’s too ridiculous and the episode takes itself very seriously. There are some interesting ideas about super heroes similar to Captain American: Civil War but they’re completely thrown out the window by Maggie’s actions at the end. Lena’s subplot is a major redeeming factor but it’s only a small part and feels like it should be in a much better episode because this one does not work.
