Supergirl S02E22 Review: Kneel!

Supergirl, Season 2, Episode 22: Nevertheless, She Persisted

The season finale! It's... it's messy. But at least we got Superman vs Supergirl out of it, which is easily the best moment of the episode. The rest of the episode is... m'eh, kind of there. Let's talk about the good stuff first before I break down the rest of the episode.

Supergirl versus Superman is pretty epic, and pretty much what I wished from the encounter with the limited budget that the series has. Keeping evil zombie Superman for only the opening act is also well-done, as far as I'm concerned. One of the reasons why I praised Supergirl's interpretation of Superman is how traditionally dorky and bubbly he is, and keeping him as an evil thrall for the entirety of the episode isn't really going to do anyone any favours. Superman's apparently been enthralled with Silver Kryptonite (a.k.a. Cannabis Kryptonite) which causes Superman to hallucinate that he's fighting an appropriately hammy Zod.

Yeah, the episode does make huge pains to point out that Supergirl beat Superman at his full strength, but a combination of main character syndrome and the fact that Supergirl's actually stronger than Superman in the comics canon means that it's not a result that bothered me at all -- though the internet backdraft is apparently huge. The fight was pretty brutal, with Superman egged to going all out thanks to seeing his greatest mortal enemy apparently spouting generically hammy stuff like the iconic "KNEEL!" It's a lot more impressive than the underwhelming Daxamite invasion, and it's clear that the showmakers know just which of the fight really deserve to get all the budget.

It's an amazing fight, especially when it goes from the Daxamite mother ship to the random house and finally to the pool, but that's honestly the only real good part of the episode that I can unabashedly say that I really loved.

Because, shit, I really loved that. It's not as epic as the speedster battle royale from Flash's finale, but it's still pretty awesome.

On the other hand, though, Supergirl's fight with Rhea, the actual final battle, ended up being absolutely underwhelming. After going through all the trouble to set up the trial-by-combat stuff, Rhea literally betrays Supergirl the first moment she can, then whacks Supergirl around with some really underwhelming visuals. And she randomly has kryptonite infused into her blood because... reasons. It felt really weird.

The episode also tries its best to incorporate most of season two's main characters other than Jeremiah Danvers (who's obviously absent because they're saving him) and Hank Henshaw (which is weird, you'd think that the Cyborg Superman would relish the chance of cracking up evil alien skulls, but apparently David Harewood can only play one character per episode? It's weird)... and not all of the characters are integrated well. As in, well, most of them. Maggie, Alex, James and the President pretty much did nothing, though I guess James might've appeared more and I might've missed it? Gray armour among a sea of evil minions with similar-looking gray armour doesn't work that well. Winn, Lena and Lilian kind of did slightly more as they try to fix the MacGuffin, but it honestly doesn't do much and after the relatively large role Lena played in the last couple of episodes she doesn't get a lot to do beyond a very truncated exchange with her mother.

J'onn wakes up due to plot convenience of M'gann touching his mind all the way from Mars, and then, um, she shows up with a bunch of white martians quite randomly in the climax and doesn't do much other than her ground pound. It's cool to see, for sure, but all things considered I think I would prefer that they only had M'gann only appear for the ambiguous psychic reunion, because it's too small of a cameo to really matter. I think what would've been great to show would be National City's aliens like Winn's girlfriend Lyra rallying up to protect the humans, thus showing the central conflict of bad alien-human relations and kind of spitting in Cadmus's stance of all aliens being evil, but nah.

Really, so much of the climax could've been done. Cadmus was basically kind of forgotten and kind of hanging around in the background, waiting to be explained or extrapolated but never getting the chance to. The alien-human hate war thing is kind of ignored in favour of punching random silver-armoured Daxamites (Superman's effortless whacking of the one that attacked CatCo is hilarious, though), and Lena's internal turmoil is basically shoved aside into a ten-second scene.

So yeah, everything kind of came to a bit of a screeching halt, and the only real plotline that got any kind of resolution was Kara and Mon-El's romance, and even that ended up being a doomed farewell as the detonation of the lead atmosphere doomsday device ends up forcing Mon-El to be exiled from Earth. Why they didn't just hop to Barry's dimension and leave Mon-El there, and Kara can visit every weekend, or Mon-El could follow M'Gann's army of white martians to Mars... I have no real idea.

And, I dunno, for all the topic this season about the whole alien hysteria thing, we don't get any conclusions either way, beyond a token line of saying how Cadmus still hates all aliens. We don't get to see the aliens help (other than the white martians coming in, which is different from the alien denizens of National City pitching in to defend their home). The President being an alien ended up mattering jack shit in the end, too.

So yeah, as far as conclusions go, it's a pretty sorry excuse for the conclusion of season two, and was barely serviceable for the conclusion of the Daxamite arc, and felt kind of rushed, with a barrage of scenes that tease the third season (random baby being sent by cultists from a dying Krypton! Mon-El gets eaten by a wormhole! M'Gann apparently having an army of green-sympathizing white martians!). Instead, have entire scenes devoted to Rhea monologuing the same things she's been monologuing all season, or Cat Grant and Supergirl having yet another inspiring conversation (of course Cat knows Supergirl is Kara, by the way). I dunno. It might not be as messy as some other season finales, but it feels woefully underwhelming.

Oh well, at least we didn't get a stupid flashback montage and a five-minute-long speech on friendship and acceptance like the first season's finale. Whatever it may be, Supergirl's second season is infinitely better than the first one, so yeah, kudos on that.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• In the comics, especially the post-Crisis continuity, Supergirl is actually stated to be more powerful than Superman in terms of raw strength and speed, due to being exposed to raw, concentrated yellow sun energy in her pod when she was drifting in space.
• General Zod, real name Dru-Zod, is one of Superman's most iconic enemies, a Kryptonian warlord freed from the extradimensional prison of the Phantom Zone. General Zod is very well-known in the mainstream audience due to being portrayed as the main villain in several live-action movies, among them 1978's Superman: the Movie, 1980's Superman II and 2013's Man of Steel. Both in the comics and in Man of Steel, Zod is known to be such a irredeemable villain that Superman is forced to execute him. Several allusions to the live-action movies are made, among them:
• Zod telling Superman to "kneel", a reference to the memetic and iconic line "kneel before Zod!" from the 1978 movie. 
• Zod standing next to a parent protecting her child and causing Superman to go ballistic to protect them, a reference to the climactic conflict between the two in Man of Steel. Another allusion to that movie is also made when Superman grabs Supergirl/Zod in a choke-hold and attempts to snap her neck.
• There are many, many different kinds of Kryptonite in the comics, although Silver Kryptonite and its effect of causing paranoid hallucinations hails from the TV show Smallville, as a synthetic variation created by Brainiac, and it was later retroactively introduced into the comics, where it also has hallucinogenic properties. 
• Mon-El being exiled from Earth in order for him to survive lead poisoning is also from the comics, except in the comics he was sent into the Phantom Zone instead of in a pod to space.
• Supergirl gets called 'Woman of Tomorrow'. 'Man of Tomorrow' and 'City of Tomorrow' has been used to describe Superman and Metropolis multiple times in earlier comics, though it has since been phased out. 
• Cat Grant mentions the Myriad incident at the end of the first season, as well as the articles that Kara wrote in this season, among them Slaver's Moon and the alien fight club. In addition to that, Superman also mentions Kelex being destroyed by Supergirl, which happened earlier this season when Cadmus infiltrated the Fortress of Solitude and reprogrammed the poor robot.
• Rhea telling Supergirl that "you will bleed" is, of course, a reference to Batman's iconic line in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which is used in literally all of the trailers to that movie. "Tell me, do you bleed? You will."