Supergirl recap: Weird Lex, but okay
Supergirl clears up the Kaznian invasion issue. As Kara and Red Daughter were slugging it out, Lex assured Baker that he wasn’t in danger of the forces amassing off the coast. After all, Lex engineered every step of putting him into the Oval Office and isn’t about to undo that.
When the Kaznians attack, Lex in his Lexosuit calmly handles it, catching a missile mid-air and tossing it back to destroy the Kaznian aircraft carrier and singing along to “My Way” the whole time which, weirdly, might be the most unsettling things he’s ever done.
Red Daughter arrives to find that Lux has betrayed and single-handedly defeated her people. He blasts her with Kryptonite and stuffs her into one of the pods he’s using to harness alien energy and taunts her about being either “dumb or staggeringly naïve.” After all, did she even bother to Google him? If she had, she might’ve learned how much he hates Kryptonians.
When Lex and Eve discover that Otis is dead, they frame him for all of Lex’s crimes, allowing Baker to pardon Lex and install him as the new secretary of alien affairs. Oh, and he sends the Copy Eves after Lockwood, who’s powered up with more Harun-El and easily defeats them. He’s. Not. Happy.
Since Lex has made Supergirl public enemy No. 1, Kara sets out to expose him through journalism, vowing, “I will not let fear win.” Thankfully, Brainy was able to recover all the notes Baker wiped and she gets to work.
Jerk-mode Brainy also shocks Kara, Lena, and Alex by casually mentioning that J’onn and Nia were captured and sent to Lex’s alien-siphoning facility and will also need to be rescued.
Then Lena receives an offer she can’t refuse to meet Lex at the White House. Do I not understand where National City is located? How is everyone getting to D.C. so quickly? Lillian’s there, too, looking smashing, as Lex reveals his plans: He’s harvesting alien energy as a “super-charged disposable battery,” suggesting that humans should be as cruel as nature.
“Try not to quote Hitler in public, dear. It’ll hurt the brand,” Lillian reprimands him. That’s just good advice, y’all. Oh, but Lex isn’t done: He wants to use all that energy to charge his new and improved Claymore satellite to vaporize Argo City and kill Superman.
When Eve pulls him out of the room for a sidebar, Lillian tells Lena that she’s poisoned Lex’s tea and needs him to stop flapping his yap and drink it already. Meanwhile, Lex coldly tells Eve that she’s a mere lacky and has no say over his plans for all that energy. “Superman will burn,” he says. Yeesh.
Naturally, Lex knows his mother tried to kill him and gloats about how meaningless the truth is, and nothing will change the public’s mind now that he’s built himself as a hero.
And at that moment, Kara’s investigative piece—which Alex says rivals Woodward and Bernstein and was written and fact-checked unbelievably quickly, even for a Kryptonian—hits push notifications across the country. Everyone with a smartphone stops to read “How Lex Luthor Divided and Betrayed America.”
While that’s going down, J’onn and Dreamer enlist help from their fellow captors at Amertek’s Shelley Island-based power refinery to start a fight, allowing them to escape and shut down the power-dampening pylons.
Nia astral projects to Brainy, who accurately predicted when she’d accomplish that task, and extracts her location. (It involves ions and writing on breath-fogged glass.)
Kara, Brainy, Alex, and James zip to the island, where Brainy finds J’onn and Dreamer, who fires a well-deserved near-miss energy bolt at him. Ha! You didn’t see that coming, did you, computer boy?
Brainy states that they can’t stop the launch on Argo, but J’onn refuses to run from this battle after failing to protect his own planet. He exerts his psychic energy to energize the alien energy pods needed to overload the core, and Dreamer joins him, despite Brainy’s warning that this is a clear suicide mission.
Then Brainy has a moment that beautifully caps his season-long arc: his voice fluctuating between the familiar and the mechanical, he struggles to keep his emotions locked in Lena’s little boxes, but soon enough, the sub-routines and matrices of his new programming give way to Socrates, Memento and Monty Python. He returns to himself and cheers them on, even shouting at Nia that he loves her.
Meanwhile, Alex and James battle Lockwood and his Children of Liberty with the goal to inject him with Lillian’s Harun-El extractor. James and Lockwood end up injecting each other at the same time, with James sustaining an eye injury in the process.
Kara, meanwhile, takes on Lex, who’s shocked to find her among the living and asks how she did it. “How do you think I did? I’m Supergirl,” she replies. Despite his respect for her glossy cape and perfect hair, he unloads Kryptonite blasts at her. At first, her Lena-provided Kryptonite suit holds up, but she eventually weakens.
Just as Lex is about to deliver a fatal blow, Red Daughter is sprung from her pod thanks to J’onn et al, and she pushes Kara to safety absorbing the blast herself.
As she dies, she tells Kara, “My Alex was nothing like your Alex.” After she’s gone, she turns into purple vapor and is absorbed by Kara, from whom she split off in the first place. Ashes to ashes, sort of.
When Lex emerges, Kara’s eyes glow purple. “This is for Red Daugther,” she says, laser eye-ing his Lexosuit. As he starts to plummet to Earth, she grabs him, but he’d rather die than accept her help.
He Icarus-es to Earth, but no, that’s not how Lex Luthor dies. He opens a portal to his workshop, where Lena’s waiting for him, as he anticipated. She jabs him in the neck to remove his Harun-El and pulls a gun on him. Despite his boast that she’ll never use it, she shoots him in the chest.
Sadly, Lena doesn’t double-tap, allowing him to claim one last victory before dying: He activates footage he collected of Kara revealing her Supergirl identity as recently as the Kaznian facility they visited.
Everybody in her life knew, he tells her, and they all mocked her for being foolish. “It’s been standing right in front of you all this time, and you chose not to see it,” he says. “Kara Danvers is Supergirl.” Lena, of course, is rocked to her core. Then he dies. Probably. I mean, who knows.
In the aftermath of the Fourth Estate (and various superheroes) saving the day, the cabinet invokes the 25th amendment and removes Baker from office. James is sporting an eye patch, the new president lifts martial law and reinstates the Alien Amnesty Act. Haley, as the interim secretary of alien affairs (get it, queen!) takes to TV to thank Supergirl on behalf of a grateful nation. From a prison television, Lockwood watches his son speak to reporters about learning the importance of alien/human unity after the bad example of his father.
Then the gang arrives at J’onn’s for wine and party games. Brainy and Nia are holding hands, and Alex interrupts Kelly’s “I think I like you” speech with a kiss. Then Lena arrives, seemingly no worse for wear, and when they divide into teams, Kara asks, “You’re with me, right?” to which Lena replies, “Always.”
Privately, Kara says she has to tell Lena the truth, but Alex tells her to wait until things are calmer. Later, we see Lena drinking and smashing a framed photo of her and the Danvers sisters, and I’ve got to say, I’m nervous, friends. I’m nervous about this. Don’t make Lena the big bad next season!
Speaking of Supergirl season 4, the show plants a few seeds. Eve, in a dark wig, is trying to slink out of town when she’s stopped by an older woman who tells her that the work she did with Lex may have failed to move the needle, but Eve is still needed. “Leviathan is everywhere. Leviathan is everyone. And Leviathan is coming,” she tells a nervous Eve.
Elsewhere, a portal opens to disgorge the Monitor, who greets a Green Martian who’s been trapped for too long, a phantom to his people, who’s there to avenge himself against J’onn J’onzz, the brother who wronged him.
Finally, Lena apparently left Lex’s body where it fell, which is deliciously cold, but the Monitor arrives to work some kind of magic over him.
See? You can’t keep a bad Luthor down.
Snaps of the cape
I hereby move to have a Supergirl fight scene set to Mötley Crüe in every episode henceforth.
Which storyline resolved more quickly: Logic-jerk Brainy, or Red Daughter? I was more surprised that they restored Brainy as swiftly as they did, although I did think Red Daughter might get a glimpse of little Mikhail before shuffling off this mortal coil.
Alex Danvers wandering the streets with a wine bottle is the energy I’d like to carry with me into the summer.
All in all, this was an excellent season of superhero television. Supergirl is always adept at elevating emotional truths in scenes where logical concerns might otherwise rear their ugly head. Frankly, that’s why I love it. Good people, fighting for admirable values, and talking up journalism while they do it? Sign me up for that every Sunday. See you in the fall, Super-friends!
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