Supergirl S03E17 Review: Submission

Supergirl, Season 3, Episode 17: Trinity

We continue with Supergirl's Worldkiller plot by finally kicking off a pretty epic beginning to the endgame for season three, with a pretty badass superhero-on-superhero action that involves Supergirl, Mon-El, Saturn Girl and Martian Manhunter facing off against Purity, Pestilence and Reign. It suffers from the same problems that Supergirl has where sometimes the fast-moving characters slamming into each other feel weightless, but overall the quality of the episode still feels pretty great.

A good chunk of the episode is spent on Lena Luthor angsting about how she has hidden the truth from her supposed allies, and no one really trusts her -- not even Supergirl. And there's also a running plotline of Supergirl pulling a Batman and sending James, as Guardian, to poke around in Lena's Lexcorp labs and find out if Lena still has a bunch of Kryptonite stashed off somewhere -- a job that Guardian chickens out on because of his love for Lena... to which Lena reveals that, she, too, pulled a Batman and actually synthesized Kryptonite on her own. Okay? Also seems pretty weird that Supergirl still hasn't revealed her identity to Lena yet. I completely forgot about this one little detail, and I just assumed Lena already know?

And then we have the fact that Supergirl's wishy-washy about whether she should bring Lena along into the pretty weird traipse into the alternate mind-world dimension that the human personas of the Worldkillers are sent to, which is honestly pretty nonsensical even by comic book standards. There's a huge deal about some convergence during a Solar Eclipse* (which gives some cool shots but nothing much) that makes it ideal for Supergirl and party to get into the weird alternate-dimension world and save Samantha and Julia... but the way it's set up with Brainiac-5 essentially handwaving it away feels a bit weird.

*Speaking of which, I don't buy that Supergirl loses her powers in a Solar Eclipse -- it's no different than night-time, and neither solar eclipses or night time has ever been shown to affect Superman or Supergirl... so maybe we can chalk this up to ambiguous Kryptonian magic-science?

And while the eventual action scene is neat, I do feel that the buildup and resolution of many of the non-Reign Worldkillers are weird. Pestilence and Purity hardly do anything before they die in a mutual kill when Julia takes over Purity for a while, and Reign absorbs their powers, and the way that Supergirl made such a huge deal about saving Julia Freeman ended up feeling like it amoutned to nothing considering how she's just handwaved as a casualty of the fight. The way we dragged out Pestilence's debut is also a bit weird in hindsight, and how the Legionnaires just went 'yay we can go home now' also feels pretty rushed (don't they realize that Reign just absorbed Pestilence's powers and that's the reason why Blight is somewhat different than Pestilence?). 

There are some neat moments in this episode, and as a whole it's actually a relatively well-paced installment of Supergirl. Between the Solar Eclipse, the Lena debate, the superhero showdown and the actually horrifying scenes of Sam and Julia in the dark forest of death where they straight-up lose their  memories and identity... lots of well-executed scenes, and I guess I'm being a little hard because of the weird pacing on how they're handling the Worldkillers in general? We'll see how this goes, I guess. 

(Oh, and Alex gets a new suit and a new space-gun, but it came in a really awkward spot, pacing-wise, in this episode.)

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Lena being able to manufacture Kryptonite is probably a reference to 'synthetic' Kryptonite from the comics, where both Lex Luthor and Batman found ways to replicate Kryptonite artificially, although these synthetic Kryptonite tended to have a lesser effect than natural ones.