Supergirl, Season 2, Episode 8: Medusa
As the first part in the purported "four-part-crossover", Supergirl's portion of it doesn't actually have anything to do at all with the huge Dominator plotline, other than Flash and Cisco appearing in the end. Which is fine, to be honest. In an ideal world, the Supergirl episode probably could've been the origin entryway of the Dominators from Supergirl's Earth into Earth-1, but this episode had to do double duty as the mid-season finale, and all things considered it does have to put its own cohesiveness first before the crossover's. It's like one of those comics during DC's big events where they slap about how this issue is part of the current Crisis-in-whatever story, but other than a random OMAC wreaking havoc for one or two panels, it is standalone and is just telling its own thing. So yeah, as a comic book fan it's a thing I'm used to. So let's review this as an episode in its own right.
I bet anyone who tuned in to Supergirl during the crossover week found themselves absolutely confused at the fact that, hey, it's doing its own thing and it's a bit too late for newcomers to understand what the fuck's going on. There are several points in the episode where the inter-Earth portal opens and closes, and you expect Flash to pop out and aid in taking down Cyborg Superman or whatever, but nah.
The rest of the episode was focused more on wrapping up, surprisingly, the Cadmus conflict. Cadmus wasn't as detailed or as far-reaching as its Justice League Unlimited counterpart, instead seemingly just being limited to Lillian Luthor and Hank Henshaw as the major players for now, but it's still a pretty decent villain to see in the past few episodes. Henshaw is revealed to have stolen a Kryptonian virus named Medusa, which was designed to murder all non-Kryptonian life. No idea how Cadmus knew the existence of Medusa at all, which is a bit of a plot point, but maybe it was unleashed in a past, unseen confrontation with Superman? They somehow engineer it to kill all aliens except for humans, and we get a very chilling scene where Hank Henshaw, masquerading as J'onn, waltzes up to the alien bar -- a recurring setting throughout the past few episodes, and basically kills every alien within it with a chemical weapon. The main plot boils down to our heroes stopping Cadmus from killing all aliens with Medusa.
Oh, and the central theme in this episode, surprisingly, draws parallels between Supergirl and Lena Luthor. After a trip to the Fortress of Solitude and a brief scrap with a reprogrammed Kelex, Supergirl finds out the ugly truth -- that her father was actually responsible for a virus that is tailor-made to basically commit genocide on anything that's non-Kryptonian. Yes, it's meant to defend their home planet, but the very idealized image that Kara has kept of her parents is slowly crumbling. It's a nice little follow-up to her disillusionment with her mother from season one (as badly as that story is told), though this time in a more tangible sense. She was raised with the idea that Krypton was super-civilized and all that jazz, only to find that her glorious Krypton isn't above creating savage weapons of destruction, a weapon that very nearly claimed the life of her friend Mon-El.
Lena, meanwhile, is confronted by Supergirl about the possibility of her mother being the head of Cadmus, and she is absolutely livid with the accusation. Despite Lena's defense, we did see Lena and Lillian interact with each other, and it's clear that Lillian... favours Lex so much more than Lena, who's adopted. Lillian has a lot of issues of her own, but it seems that familial ties won out, because Lena shows that all Lillian had to do was ask and she would give the isotope to her. It's ambiguous throughout the episode's later half whether Lena is actually evil or not, whether she's trying to impress mommy, or if she's gaming her mother because she knows her arrogance... and it turns out to be the latter. Lena isn't naive at all, and she doesn't put her mother on a pedestal. In fact, quite the opposite -- Lena knows how horrible Luthors can be, and she knows how to appeal to her mother's ego. It's a nice bit of comparison between Lena and Kara on how they deal with their own parents being relative disappointments to them.
Obviously, Lena throwing her lot with her mother thanks to Supergirl's accusation would be a very stupid plot development, and thankfully it's just a ruse. The acting and the writing is believable enough that I actually thought that it's the case for a good chunk of the episode. So yeah. It's curious, really -- Lena at this point is unambiguously a good character, but still... will she enter an antagonistic role in the future? Only time will tell.
J'onn, meanwhile, faced his eventual transformation into a White Martian... encapsulated by his fight against Cyborg Superman, where J'onn notes that "you're right, I'm a monster" before transforming into a gigantic creature that's shaped like the White Martian's monstrous look while still having green skin. Cyborg Superman has been effortlessly one-shotting Mon-El and taking out Supergirl pretty easily throughout this episode, but J'onn's transformation into this monster puts the fear of god in his expression and it's very awesome.
The rest of the fighting scenes are also pretty cool. Cyborg Superman is this unstoppable force throughout the episode, with the multiple brawls between him and Supergirl being very fun to watch. Cyborg Superman might not be the most well-fleshed character, but I honestly feel he's a lot more relatable than Lillian is in this episode -- if anything, his rage at J'onn stealing his life is very justified.
Mon-El is mostly kept out of the fighting scenes, and is mostly around just to flirt with Kara and build up the inevitable romance, though in a far more believable and organic way than Kara/James or Kara/Winn last season. Mon-El did get into a pretty brutal fight against Cyborg Superman, and ended up being the sacrificial lion that spends the majority of the episode sick and delirious -- though he did steal a kiss. There are two other minor plot-threads, with James and Winn keeping the Guardian thing secret from Kara, or Alex coming out (AGAIN!) to her mother, but those two plotlines are honestly so irritatingly repetitive, though also mercifully short. Eliza Danvers, Kara's adopted mother, gets a few more scenes this episode, first to participate in Alex's coming-out plot, then to drop hints that Mon-El fancies Kara, before being instrumental in reverse-engineering a cure to heal Mon-El, as well as turn J'onn back into a green martian.
Overall, I think the Lillian/Lena dynamic, while intriguing, needed a bit more work. But it's a pretty solid mid-season finale, with Cyborg Superman and Cadmus at large being a huge enough plot thread to jump-start the second half of the season, whereas Lillian Luthor being taken down is a very satisfying way to end this batch of episodes. It's amazing how far Supergirl has gone in the space of eight episodes, with its quality being miles and miles above its first season. Overall, pretty happy with most of this series -- I still dislike Guardian.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Medusa isn't based on anything from the comics (although Kara's father Zor-El is indeed involved in some morally ambiguous events and is an outright villain at one point in the comics) but the idea of a Kryptonian weapon that would destroy all non-Kryptonian life while sparing Kryptonians in event of a great disaster is somewhat similar to the concept of the Eradicator, a being created by the Kryptonians to do exactly that.
- Flash and Supergirl last teamed up in the Supergirl episode "World's Finest", and Flash calls their deal that Supergirl would come to help him if he needed the help. The circumstances of why Flash needed Supergirl's help will be detailed in the Arrow episode "Invasion".
- We get another "thank Rao" from Supergirl, a reference to the Kryptonian sun deity.
- In the comics and most adaptations, J'onn's true form isn't actually the humanoid-with-green-skin that this show treats as his default green martian form, but actually a far more, well, alien look. It's not quite as monstrous as the white-green-hybrid form that J'onn turns into here, but J'onn has been known to transform into monstrous martian monsters when the stakes are really high.
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