Supergirl, Season 1, Episode 4: How Does She Do It
I have the luxury of binge-watching Supergirl without suffering through the little switch-up of episode ordering thanks to the Paris bombing, so we're reviewing this one before the Livewire one as it's meant to be watched.
Yeah, this episode... is one of those wacky hijinks episode that would have been perfect in one of those slice-of-life shows. The character tries to juggle so many things and forgets stuff and babysits her boss's child and gets overwhelmed, especially when some love triangle comes in to complicate things up, and the guy he likes only views her as a friend that he can talk to... in a superhero show? Bah. The Black Widow parody trailer with basically the same premise is, y'know, a fucking parody.
And maybe if done elegantly it might actually be good, but the plot just suffers from ADD as we jump from the myriad of mostly-uninteresting plot points. We've got someone spying on Supergirl. We've got Kara having to babysit little Carter Grant or risk losing her job. We've got James and Lucy's little love drama, we've got Kara wanting to get out of James' friendzone. We've got a serial bomber. We've got the train thing. We've got Maxwell Lord being implicated in it. None of this really get time to breathe as we jump from one scene to another... appropriate, perhaps, for the theme of the episode about Kara trying to juggle the two aspects of her life. It also makes the episode utterly uninteresting to watch, since none of the plot threads are interesting to watch at all bar the short scenes with Maxwell Lord.
Kara is frazzled throughout the episode, but her arc in this episode seems to be a very banal 'how do I multi-task' with the point made being... really, that Kara shot herself in the foot when she offered to babysit. Or at least when she left the kid with Winslow Schott. She otherwise really doesn't learn to do much. There's the whole friendzone thing, of course, but that is so obvious the moment that, hey, Lucy Lane turns out to be a good person to Kara.
Carter Grant himself isn't annoying, at least not moreso than his comic book counterpart. We get to see a nice, more human side from Cat Grant as despite her obvious frustrations and her bitchiness and her power-career woman attitude and her desire to stick it in Lois Lane's face for winning an award, she still prioritizes her motherhood above everything and is fully prepared to receive this super-big award via mail if she can't be a mother for a day. It speaks volumes about Cat Grant's character, that she is an awesome mother... one that is the sole thing I remembered from her character in the comics, so it's great that it gets represented here..
Carter's a bit fun in some scenes, like when he tells his mother that the best thing about Supergirl is 'her legs' before brushing it as a joke, but ultimately ends up being one among many, many distractions in this episode to both Kara and the audience.
Honestly though after the whole stunt with Carter somehow getting into the train with a bomb (while Lucy's in the other location with the bomb for maximum drama) it's honestly a huge suspension of belief that Cat didn't fire Kara. Kara didn't even do anything to really appease Cat -- she could've been responsible for 'introducing Supergirl' or some shit like that that would work to the wacky hijinks theme of the episode, but not only does Kara royally fuck up Cat's task, she also gets rewarded for it by not being fired. Yeah. Doesn't make sense.
It doesn't help that the random mad bomber whose name I don't even remember is extremely bland compared to the already sub-par quality of villains in this show. The show tries to be artistic and withhold details about the bomber's backstory and how it relates to the sick girl back home, with only the briefest allusions to being (obviously) employed by Maxwell Lord, but the explanation we get isn't only inadequate, it's also downright confusing.
Maxwell Lord, at least, is interesting. In between hamming it up, Lord gets a nice scene with Kara at the end that's absolutely reminiscent of Lex Luthor. Yeah, they're not going to play with the nice-but-jackass businessman angle for too long as Lord reveals his hand to Supergirl while the Girl of Steel isn't able to prove jack shit, which is Luthor's M.O. in most modern incarnations, most notably for me Superman: the Animated Series where Luthor and Superman's first meeting is relatively similar. The idea that Lord is using the high-tech drones and mad bomber to 'test' Supergirl's powers is a bit suspect, and he has the dignity to (at least try to) look distraught at his employee blowing himself up. Time will tell if Lord will actually be a threatening villain on the level of Luthor or even Lord's comic-book counterpart, but so far he's easily the best thing in this episode. Not that there's much competition.
But as awesome as Lord's plans are, it's really filled with holes and a crapton of insane coincidences. The two trains bomb thing kinda makes sense if Lord is trying to judge Supergirl's priorities or whatever, and the failsafe kind of justifies Lord's person being at risk for two of the three bomb incidents. But his reasons for doing so -- and being so obvious as to use his own specially manufactured bomb -- ends up not really holding up to notch, though maybe we might learn that he's as big an egomaniac as Luthor is and wants Supergirl to know that it was him that did it? The bit with the train doesn't make sense either, Supergirl only finds out about the bomber getting on the train because James was following Carter. How was Lord supposed to test Supergirl out, then?
Alex is only around to defuse bombs, apparently. She's got an awkward little scene talking about government with Lord that I kinda tuned out. Lord did manage to divulge his sad backstory -- that his parents were killed thanks to the government being dicks about safety requirements -- which is something, but Alex and Lord's scene was pretty stilted and doesn't flow well. All Alex does, really, is just watch when people deal with bombs.
Henshaw is still being mysterious. Kara catches the glowy red eyes at one point when she's a bit delirious, and Henshaw uses his presumably-Cyborg Superman powers to rip apart the bomb casing and stick his hand in to defuse it. Still being cryptic and creepy, but ultimately accomplishes nothing.
James and Lucy... yeah, they fought because James prioritizes Superman over Lucy. Um. They make up at the end of the episode. Somewhere in between we find out that Lucy is a decent human being that struck up a friendship with Kara, and something about friendzones and moving on and speaking out your mind and being a good friend and stapler destruction that kind of go around and around itself. In any case, though, Kara basically encourages James to, well, admit that he's not quite moved on yet at the risk of being thrown back into the friendzone. Yay relationship complications -- I don't really care.
Winslow... ends up being an idiot who can't even do his job of playing games with a kid properly. We get a nice, extremely subtle hint of his eventual Toyman identity when Kara comments on the toys on his desk, but he's otherwise just Mr Nice Friendzone Guy. Who can't even distract a kid with videogames right.
Overall easily the weakest episode thanks to a crap plot (well, a series of crap plots) and crappy handling of said crap plots. It's banal and dull, with a shitty cliched romance subplot that only serves to bog it down even further. Only the pretty fun performances from Maxwell Lord and Kara, and the short but fun Cat Grant scene, really makes this episode not a total disaster. Talking about the two genres without me sounding like an anti-chick-flick show is going to take a metaphor. It is kinda like cooking, really. Some things are pretty great separately. Like, say, creamy pasta and hot chili sauce. Both are individually great, as much as I hate chili I know a lot of people love that. Mix them together? Unless you've got the taste sensibilities of a sow, it doesn't work. Alien superhero action quasi-sci-fi stories and wacky hijinks chick flicks are kinda like that -- the addition of two together ends up making this icky paste that just doesn't work as well as they do individually.
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