Supergirl S02E04 Review: Roulette!

Supergirl, Season 2, Episode 4: Survivors

A pretty great episode, this one, and a good chunk is because of how focused it is. Or maybe the DC fanboy in me is just geeking out at Roulette and Miss Martian.

The main plotline of this episode had the two ever-flirting team of Alex and Maggie Sawyer track down an alien homicide to discovering a fight club ran by... Roulette! Which was out of the left field but very welcome, and actually makes sense considering the new alien culture plotline that's been going on. And, hey, Roulette is actually played by a Chinese woman which is a neat little bonus. I mean, she's the same actress that played Jiaying in Agents of SHIELD so there's not much in lieu of facial variance but hey, it's something. 

Granted, Roulette was less of a character than main villain Jiaying... but she played her part really well as a hammy, 'can't touch this' upper-culture fight club organizer. And I loved it. I do hope she'll end up mattering in the grand scheme of things and not just a one-off villain, and that her 'benefactor' that allowed her to elude arrest at the end of the episode is actually someone relevant instead of just her being, well, 'can't touch this'. She did get a good argument in against Supergirl, how she's giving the aliens stranded on Earth some purpose, but the fact that she makes them fight to the death and kidnaps people who owe her money kind of puts her squarely in the evil territory. 

The Alex-Maggie stuff is honestly a bit boring, but the alien gladiatorial combat thing really is fun, especially when we discover that M'gann M'orzz, a.k.a. Miss Martian, is fighting in said combat. We'll talk about M'gann's character later on, but it is cool to see M'gann unleash martian rage on that one random spike-alien, the Martian death-fight was well done, and DC fans will get a kick out of seeing Draaga randomly show up and beat Supergirl around. What, how did Roulette convince an alien as powerful Draaga to sit in a box and just chill? 

The Roulette plotline is serviceable backdrop to the large amounts of characterization done for J'onn, M'gann, Mon-El and Supergirl, though. Thankfully they dialed back down the CatCo plotline into two very short and sweet scenes with Snapper Carr, but they had to shoehorn a Lena Luthor scene into the episode. I just wish they just... stop with the whole CatCo nonsense. It's repetitive, boring and adds nothing to the story.

Also, Alex and Maggie flirt a lot in this episode, and apparently just as Alex wants to get Maggie to come over for a drink... Maggie already has a girlfriend! Poor Alex. I don't care that much for this part of the episode, but it's not one that's poorly written and the fact that the romance takes place alongside the Roulette plot means that this doesn't feel as tumour-ish as some romantic threads in other shows.

Mon-El, meanwhile, has a lighter plotline despite the opening flashback -- we see that he was a palace guard that the Prince of Daxam sacrificed his life to rescue, and we see just how discoloured and racist Supergirl unintentionally is, mocking the Prince of Daxam without knowing much about her. It's less Supergirl's fault and more of the general society of Daxam and Krypton -- we also briefly hear a slur against Kryptonians from Mon-El during the flashback. But Mon-El is perfectly willing to play nice, biting back all the unintentional insults from Supergirl, and being buddy-buddy with Winn to be let out. Mon-El doesn't kill or hurt anyone (other than that dude he arm-wrestled with) but Supergirl and Winn are definitely trying to steer him in a heroic direction. It's also fun that they're giving Winn something to do beyond just being Friend-Zone Man. Ultimately, though, the Mon-El subplot is an entertaining distraction to lighten up the episode from the moody green martian talk.

J'onn confronts M'gann and basically asks M'gann to bond with him. Getting all our collective minds out of the gutter, it's not sex but rather a kind of martian telepathic bond that's unique to them. M'gann is super evasive, only managing to tell J'onn about the horrors of concentration camp, and how she's been smuggled off-world by a White Martian that was nice. Of course more veteran DC fans will know she's fibbing on a crucial part of her backstory, but the reveal they did and the little fake-out that M'gann's reluctance to bond with J'onn is about either the fight club or her survivor's guilt is well-done.

Because, of course, M'gann wasn't the young green martian shipped off-world by a white martian that grew a conscience. She was the white martian.

And while J'onn is convinced that M'gann is fighting and probably death-seeking in Roulette's arena out of a sense of survivor's guilt, J'onn tells M'gann to forgive herself for surviving. It's a whole different guilt, though -- M'gann feels guilty because she was complicit in the torture and genocide of the green martians, and she's running away from that. It will be interesting to see how J'onn will react when this inevitably gets out, and the J'onn/M'gann part is consistently the emotional highlight of the episode. If nothing, seeing J'onn finally show more emotion than just stoicness is very welcome.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Roulette, a.k.a. Veronica Sinclair, looks absolutely exactly like this in the comics, right down to fancy Chinese dress and dragon tattoo. In the comics she's primarily a Justice Society of America enemy (specifically, her nemesis is Mr. Terrific) and she's featured in one of the most memorable episodes of Justice League Unlimited. In the source material, she pits superhumans against each other instead of aliens, though. 
• Draaga is a Superman enemy, an alien gladiator from Mongul's planet Warworld, who fought Superman several times. While his role here is barely a cameo, JLA S01E12-13 has a longer, more detailed adaptation of the comic-book version of Draaga.
• M'gann M'orzz is indeed a White Martian masquerading as a Green Martian in the comics, though this time around it's Martian Manhunter that she's hiding this fact on instead of other superheroes.
• Roulette addresses Supergirl as the 'Maid of Might' and the 'Girl of Steel', two of Supergirl's common epithets in the Golden Age.
• Winn briefly notes how Mon-El could've 'leapt tall buildings in a single bound', which is a phrase very often used to describe Superman's powers. Mon-El is also noted to be unable to use heat vision or super breath, something that comic-book Daxamites cannot do. A change from the comics is that the Daxamites are weaker than Kryptonians physically, whereas comic-book Mon-El is physically stronger than Superman.
• Warworld is briefly mentioned by Mon-El as a place he had seen Draaga fought before, and Draaga's origin story is traditionally tied to Warworld.