Supergirl, Season 4, Episode 21: Red Dawn
So Supergirl's fourth season is... it's not a bad season, honestly, and it's pretty ambitious. And clearly a lot better structured compared to season 3 due to not focusing on a single villain (Reign) for the entirety of it. We have a rotating cast of 'main' baddies in Agent Liberty, Manchester Black and Lex Luthor, plus Red Daughter thrown into all this, and while the season's got a lot of great moments, it's definitely got a fair amount of points of contentions as well.
In particular is Alex's stupid amnesia, which was shoehorned in as a random solution to a "General Haley wants to find Supergirl's secret identity" plot, which was never really brought up again after the obligatory two-parter, and Alex's amnesia is always sort of been in the background but never really focused on to any real degree, which, honestly, has always rankled me. Sure, I don't want them to focus on Alex's amnesia and make it a sob-story for the entire season, but the completely drastic solution to a pretty random problem that they could've solved in many other ways ends up getting a new wrinkle thrown in this episode... that, apparently, J'onn's mind-altering ability is near-permanent, and they can't just undo it at any time, unless Alex figures things out on her own.
And Alex does, over the course of this episode, in a pretty rushed and haphazard pattern, and... and Chyler Leigh does her damn best, but the pacing and writing is so poorly done that I rolled my eyes at every single time she gets a random flashback or whatever. In the end she recovers her full memory just as Red Daughter beats the crap out of Supergirl and damn near well kills her at the climax of the episode, and it's emotional and everything... but then we get the "KARA TAKE THE GRASS" scene which is just such an out of nowhere little detail that it sort of breaks any dramatic tension the scene has. And it somehow works, and Kara gets healed by chlorophyll, which is honestly a bit of an asspull.
Like, I get it. I get that they wanted to use more Kara/Alex sisterhood drama, but it just simply does not work at all.
At least that annoying side-plot is over.
And believe me, it's not the only side-plot in what's otherwise a pretty heavy episode of Supergirl as we set up the ending climax, and perhaps the biggest highlight of the episode is Supergirl finally meeting face-to-face with Linda Lee, the Red Daughter, and... and it's all right? Melissa Benoist's acting really saves a lot of what would otherwise be bland "you are evil!" "I'm not!" "well you are indoctrinated!" scenes. We also get that amazingly badass sequence in the first five minutes or so when Supergirl breaks free of her chains and states to Red Daughter that she's been exposed to Kryptonite way more than she has, which is pretty damn great.
Honestly, instead of some of the more redundant plot lines in the previous episodes, I genuinely wish we do get a longer, well-written and more fleshed-out encounters between Linda and Kara, with Linda more slowly realizing that the viewpoints that Luthor has been forcing down her throat is evil or whatever. But the scenes that happen are so fast and so one-dimensional about how Linda loves communism and hates indulgence that it kinda-sorta falls flat. We jump into a hostage scene, then a pretty badass (if the CGI looks wonky at times) action scene... and then when Kara's knocked out with Red Daughter's lightning zap powers and Linda flies off, she gets defeated off-screen when Lex Luthor does his whole paper tiger scheme and "rescues" America from the Kaznian invasion.
Again, none of these is outright bad. The invasion and betrayal happening off-screen is disappointing but not that terrible, the Kara/Linda scenes are all right but definitely could've stood to be so much more... but everything is just so rapid and fast-paced, and with so much other shit going on in this episode it's sort of unsatisfying, in a way. Like having a dinner entirely made of mashed potatoes. It's not as bad as the newest season of Game of Thrones, but it certainly could've stood to be more.
The side-cast are doing... stuff. Lena (and James, in the car) confronts Ben Lockwood, who is a complete idiot and hasn't even realized that he's just a pawn for Lex Luthor. Lena finally lays it out in front of the confused idiot's face, and Lockwood finally ends up trying to do something good for once and find out the root of this corruption. This eventually leads to a fight between the super-powered Lockwood and Otis-Metallo after Otis gives some silly little speech, but Lockwood eventually wins and rips out Otis's Kryptonite heart.
Oh, and while all of this is going on, Lena manipulates Lilian into helping her stabilize the Harun-El and save James again, with the threat of a truth-seeker alien octopus creature and poisoning her salad. It's... it's all right, both actresses do a decent job of being emotional, but it sort of feels like a repeat of previous Lena/Lilian scenes. Haley's in this episode as well, I think? She finally is in full-on ally status after discovering that the president is colluding with Luthor, and apparently they're draining "alien energy", whatever that is, to power Operation Claymore.
One very unexpected scene, though, was the whole bit with Brainiac 5. What seemed like a time-filler B-plot of J'onn, Nia and Brainy going to free some captured aliens ends up with a failed "Wookie Gambit" (Sam Witwer playing a badly-acting Brainy is hilarious). And while the whole "I want to confess my love to Dreamer" bit is kind of standard Supergirl drama fare, it ends up taking a surprisingly dark turn when, upon torture by a bunch of Children of Liberty and being stressed the shit out, Brainy ends up essentially getting "rebooted" and, in an amazingly acted sequence of Brainiac 5 going through a more robotic voice and emotional screaming, "the boxes get opened", and Brainiac 5 ends up reverting into basically a robotic doom-machine. He's not mwa-ha-ha evil like his ancestor, but he is so cold and calculating.
He beats the shit out of his captors, and instead of rescuing Nia, he ends up telling her -- without her consent -- to basically be a Trojan horse to inform him where the alien-draining sequence of Operation: Claymore is going to take place. And when J'onn objects at this, Brainy knocks him out and leaves him to be captured as well. He's still aligned with the good guys, but is just so ruthless and views everyone else as a pawn, and honestly, I've always felt like Brainy was sort of wasted throughout the entire season and this suddenly ends up making him so, so much more interesting. I just sort of wish that there was a wee bit more foreshadowing to this, y'know? Like maybe earlier in the season, we get a bit more of Brainy struggling with this 'ancestral memory' or something? I am very much familiar with Brainy's comic-book counterpart and history, but to people who have only experienced Brainiac-5 from the show, it'd probably be a bit of an ass-pull.
Overall, though, I really do enjoy the Brainiac-5 stuff and the Lena stuff. Ben Lockwood's also interesting since he's such a wild-card. But I can't help but be a little disappointed with the haphazard way they've handled Alex throughout this season, and while the Kara/Linda confrontation is all right, the execution definitely could've been handled better. Overall, though, it seems like this season, at least, will stick the landing.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- It's not made explicit, and he isn't specifically named, but Querl Dox/Brainiac 5 is the descendant of one of Superman's enemies, the Coluan alien Vril Dox/Brainiac. The evil, villainous Brainiac hasn't been mentioned before in Supergirl, but with how Brainy is referring to his ancestor as being a 'collector', it's clear that it's still the same old city-bottle-collecting Brainiac as before.
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