Supergirl S01E05: Shock Jock

Supergirl, Season 1, Episode 5: Livewire

Happy New Year, y'all. I actually watched this episode (and really the rest of Supergirl) before 2015 ended, but haven't done the reviews yet. So, yeah, let's start this new year off with Livewire.

It’s a mostly solid, if unspectacular, episode. There’s a nice theme of mothers and daughters running along the episode, and while it could’ve been done better at least they tried. There’s the obvious Eliza and Alex, Eliza and Kara, plus Cat and Leslie and/or Supergirl, because she’s taken a hard love mentality towards them. It all kinda falls apart rather messily because when you put some thought into it Cat’s methods really aren’t beneficial to either one of them at all – Leslie’s too much of an ass, really, whereas Supergirl improves thanks to Cat simply only because Cat happens to like ranting about Supergirl in front of Kara. Cat does get rather likeable this episode during her interactions in treating Kara Danvers more like a proper human being… but that comes at the cost of some rather random character growth that don’t make sense.

The unsubtlety of the show returns again in full force, however, in a cheap attempt to make Livewire even more hateable. Instead of just talking trash about Supergirl, she had to go and cross all the lines and insult Supergirl’s feminity and costume and adorkableness.. and honestly not much else. Unlike Livewire’s debut as a character in Superman: The Animated Series, Livewire doesn’t (rather justifiably) talk shit about Superman’s methods or goodiness. It would be something if all the wince-inducing Chastity Belt of Steel lines are just thrown in as part of Livewire’s rant, but no, Livewire’s rant is literally just talking shit about those three girly topics and not criticizing Supergirl for grandstanding or whatever.

So of course Cat Grant fires her, in no small part being a gigantic hypocrite as Livewire points out. Granted, Cat has probably warmed up to Supergirl thanks to saving her son last episode, and she is shown to have feminist standards (of course, considering the tone of the show) but honestly the change is so jarring and the speech so patronizing that I can only shake my head at how badly written the scripting for that scene is. Though the episode had Supergirl calling out “you mean girl!” as a freaking insult and that probably takes the cake for the worst line of dialogue in this episode.

And while being a huge jackass is definitely appropriate for Livewire’s character, the sudden change for Cat Grant to support Supergirl ends up coming a bit of the left field. Cat justifies her earlier disparaging articles simply as a form of ‘tough love’, which I call bullshit. Though Cat criticizes genuine parts of Supergirl’s blundering around, the random change to Cat wanting to take a mentoring role to Supergirl really feels tacked on and random. Ditto for her suddenly developing a conscience and doing that utterly overlong and eye-roll inducing “let’s ignore all the celebrity gossip and sell stories about soup kitchens because Thanksgiving!” Bah. I definitely understand the sentiment, but for it to come out of nowhere from Cat Grant’s mouth without anything really providing her with the impetus for this sudden character change. When honestly simply reporting some nice stuff about Supergirl for a change would feel a lot more sensible. The show tries to be deep and explore the different ways to be a mother or mother-figure but ultimately it all doesn’t hold up that well under closer inspection.

Ahem. Anyway, Livewire. Supergirl took down some random alien She-Beast earlier this episode, and the rest of the episode is basically an adaptation of the Superman: TAS episode where Livewire debuted. Basically, anyway, because that episode didn’t have all the random family drama between Alex and Eliza, or Cat Grant’s nonsensical ‘hard love’ plot. Livewire… really isn’t entertaining at all because the dialogue makes her even more cartoonish than her cartoon counterpart, and I do agree with Cat Grant that Livewire has ‘as much wit as a YouTube comment’. She’s awesome visually, of course, with all the lightning teleportation and the lightning whips and the giant face in Cat’s TV screen shrine thing, and the origin story’s faithful enough, but she ends up feeling very basic and undeveloped. It’s a shame. Maybe if she had cameoed in earlier episodes as one of Cat Grant’s people criticizing Supergirl, she would have much more of an impact.

That’s not to say that the shock jock isn’t fun, though. Her bad puns did make me chuckle a couple of times, and random poking-fun-at-feminity thing aside she’s a decent adaptation of her traditional depiction. She certainly had a lot more personality than every other villain that Supergirl has faced before.

Alas, how stupid was it for Supergirl to do the whole ‘take my hand’ thing? That was a poorly choreographed scene, honestly, since unless Supergirl was willing to drop the helicopter on the street, why couldn’t she just fly the helicopter down and land it on a building or some shit? It felt like an oddly convoluted way for Supergirl to lean in, go all ‘take my hand’ and… er, um, origin story! Yes, they wanted to have Supergirl be the ‘conduit’ so the struck-by-lightning cliché superhero origin makes more sense, but it comes at sacrificing, well, common sense.

Oh, and of course, we’re still getting more love triangle shit even if it isn’t as bad as the previous episode. Winslow gets to share a bit of his backstory – his father (the first Toyman, I assume) is in prison and he’s basically family-less for Thanksgiving. And then any attempts to share his story or capitalize on the cheek kiss naturally gets interrupted by James Olsen, who’s totally nice and supportive and stuff despite going on holidays with his ex. Which would probably be totally confusing to people who watch episode 4 and 5 out of order.

Still, the nice little development for the DEO story with the revelation that Jeremiah Danvers is working (and probably died) for the DEO, and the whole mystery behind Hank Henshaw, and how seamlessly it integrated itself into the Danvers’ family drama, is a nice bit of writing that I must applaud. Honestly who would think that Alex coming out as a DEO agent to her mother would be highly relevant to the main plot of the story?

Apparently the DEO has captured an energy-based alien, a Zaloratt, before. Zaloratts are a rather obscure DC alien race that the superhero named ‘The Weird’ (no, really), a Blue Beetle supporting character, hails from. No idea who the big alien manly-lady that Supergirl beat up is supposed to be, though.

Overall, it’s quite an enjoyable episode simply because of the nice backstory revelations, Livewire being hammy and crazy, the actually-not-very-sappy family moments and the minimal amount of stupid love triangle friendzone ex-girlfriend romance. It still isn’t quite enough to make Supergirl live up to her hype as this ultra-awesome superhero show, especially compared to all its counterparts (and, yes, despite what the tagline might have you believe, there are superhero shows starring girls out there). It’s starting to get there, but it’s not quite up to that quality yet, with way too many little writing flaws that really make it difficult for me to recommend this show earnestly.