Supergirl S05E06 Review: Reach Your Cyborg Buddy

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 6: Confidence Women

So this episode is both simultaneously an episode is very light on actors to give Supergirl's actress time to film scenes for the Crisis crossover (Flash also had an equivalent episode this season, "Kiss Kiss Breach Breach"), and also very much reminds me of the whole-episode flashback to Agent Liberty's backstory to humanize him in the previous season. And while Agent Liberty ended up being kind of a dud as a villain, I remembered actually being excited at seeing just how he at least appears to have a proper backstory and a sympathetic background that led to his spiral of darkness. This episode basically does the same for both Lena Luthor and Andrea Rojas, even if is pretty full of what's obviously retcons -- and timeline/continuity errors if you pick apart the time stamps of this episode relative to what we know about Lena's history in seasons two through five of the show.

And... and it's serviceable, I suppose. It also tries to really frame just how badly Lena takes the whole "Kara has been hiding her Supergirl identity from her for 90% of the show" motivation and gives some extra oomph to Lena's hatred towards being burned by friends she opens up to (YMMV on whether this was necessary or a bit too much), as well as really redefining the history behind Lena and Andrea. It also gives us Andrea's backstory and the frankly rather rushed revelation that she has a magic medallion that gives her Nightrawler superpowers. And... and I feel like the series could've done a bit more to hint at this? Like we've got so many underwhelming villains-of-the-week playing second fiddle to Ma'alefa'ak in the past five episodes, I feel like foreshadowing Andrea Rojas as the mysterious shadow-teleporting Acrata metahuman would've gone a long way to making this episode feel a lot less crowded.

Anyway, after a botched attempt to rescue Rip Roar from DEO custody and realizing that teleportation isn't particularly useful when up against a dang Kryptonian, Andrea ends up coming up to Lena and asking for her help, and after a pretty hilarious "what's a DEO" bit by Lena, the two sit down for a drink and that's the excuse we get for the episode to go full-on flashback backstory. Turns out that Andrea was the one friend that Lena Luthor had as a child growing up, the one person this poor introvert with questionable familial upbringing had opened up to before Kara, and they meet up in a boarding school and became fast friends, bonding over detached multi-millionaire families and their mutual love of Titanic. 

The episode does try its best to give us a lot of Lena and Andrea nuance, and it does a lot to actually make Andrea a proper character, but it does move a bit too fast for its own good and ends up feeling like more of an exposition dump at times. We learn that apparently as a kid, Lena was pretty obsessed with a fantasy story she heard from her mother about a magic Acrata medallion, and as she grew older and got exposed to Lex Luthor's hate-boner against Superman, she ends up associating the legends of the medallion with what's essentially Kryptonite. Neat, unexpected cameo by Jon Cryer, too.

Meanwhile, Andrea's dad's company isn't doing very well and we get a lot of suicide implications going on. Lena ends up roping Andrea for a carpe diem adventure into some exotic jungle, and somehow Andrea's little childre storybook has particularly specific directions to the clues they need. It is Andrea that accidentally falls into the mysterious vaguely-Mayan/alien temple, and when she touches the medallion, suddenly the old lady from Leviathan shows up and basically tells Andrea way too many things about herself and also ropes her into this creepy mysterious cult, promising that all her problems will go away if she keeps the Medallion.

And it's interesting? Leviathan was built up to be this Illuminati organization that just happens to employ aliens and metahumans, but from how it's porrayed here there's something almost mystical and magical about them, or at least some alien superpower going on considering the Acrata medal's implied to be magical. Regardless, there's a neat Faustian-deal quality to Andrea's backstory -- she hides the medal from a disappointed Lena, and overnight her dad's company ends up rising from the ashes like a phoenix as their competitors fall via some exploding phones and she becomes successful and stuff. Whether it's mystical, powerful alien superpowers, or just a really far secret syndicate reach isn't particularly clear just yet, but it's fun.

And that part of the backstory is genuinely interesting, even if both Lena's obsession over the medal and Andrea being a shadow-jumping supervillain is both something that we were introduced to right in this episode. We get a bunch of continuity callbacks (perhaps a bit too much) with the surprise recurring cameo of Jack Spheer, Lena's ex from way back in season two, and you'd be forgiven for having to google up who he is. We get references to the Lex Luthor master plan that we keep getting flashbacks to in season four, where Luthor plans to turn the atmosphere into Kryptonite. Andrea, meanwhile, a couple of years after the fact, meets the same Leviathan old woman who tells her to kill a man, and the Leviathan agent blackmails her with a very sinister threatening of how within a week, she could completely ruin Obsidian North and cause her father to commit suicide by jumping off a building. They instruct Andrea to activate the super-powers within the medallion and basically force her to be an agent of their crazy cult.

(Evidently, since last episode's plan involves sending a tsunami onto National City, they don't value Andrea all that much.)

Alas, the Big Betrayal(tm) happens when Lena meets Andrea at some gala or whatever and realizes that Andrea is parading around with the Acrata Medal as a necklace, which I felt was a scene that happened way too fast and ended up being comical. Really? Andrea couldn't have claimed that it's a replica? Or actually hidden her secret cult medallion in her purse? Whatever the case, Lena makes the large (but accurate) logic leap that Andrea betrayed her by stealing the medal, breaks up with Jack Spheer, and refuses to ever ever ever trust anyone ever again. Right until she moves to National City to reclaim the Luthor name and meets a slightly-pushy-but-very-friendly blonde reporter named Kara.

On the same vein, we get to see Andrea's romance with Russell "Rip Roar" Rogers, which is pretty rushed but all we kind of needed to see was when Russell ends up discovering the Leviathan secret, and was very nearly disposed off by Granny Leviathan and her thugs. This, by the way, happens when Russell finds the medallion in Andrea's bag and fiddles around with it -- lady's really careless with her magic superpower trinket, isn't she? Andrea manages to convince Granny Levi to spare Russell by making him part of Leviathan, and somehow this involves cyborg Dr. Octopus modifications, instead of allowing him to be a plant-in-high-society the way Andrea or Eve were? S'weird, but okay.

And the pacing's not the best, but it does kind of put Lena's absolutely angry feelings of betrayal that drives her in this episode in perspective, sort of? It's a bit muddied, but it does give Lena's anger towards Kara as something more than "Lex Luthor's last cruel thing to do to his sister". I just really wished that the previous seasons did a bit more to really emphasize how betrayal is Lena Luthor's trigger button, y'know? We get the revelation that Lena's big plan in this season involves both of her previous best friends, because Lena's also the one who lured Andrea into National City to get back at both her and Kara.

After the long flashback, we culminate in Lena assisting Andrea in rescuing Rip Roar, while Lena distracts her Super-Friend by pretending to be in danger. There's a quality of hilarious over-poweredness as Lena is able to supply Andrea with a device that's able to turn nearly every single person in the DEO into mind-stunned statues, even if it admittedly is the sort of weapon that Lena would theoretically be able to devise from Ma'alefa'ak. We get a neat little fight scene with the survivors of the brain-blast as J'onn, Alex and later Supergirl end up fighting against Acrata and her one-woman raid. We even get the Aurafacian back, and it's so neat to see this little canister causing the dang spider-web tattoos to jump out and latch to random DEO agents. I was pretty m'eh about it in its first appearance, but this stupid parasitic alien tattoo is growing to be one of the more fun recurring adversaries in this show. Eventually, Andrea is able to hold back the DEO people long enough to bamf away with Rip Roar.

Of course, Lena's done playing nice with Andrea, and blackmails Andrea by threatening Rip Roar's life into giving her the Acrata medal -- and, well, throw it into the pile of villainous things Lena does! It's a pretty great episode for Lena overall, as she gets the medal (and honestly it's implied that she does this out of spite more than anything else), manipulates Andrea and Kara like a fiddle, and via some Luthorcomputer sleuthing, manages to get Eve Tessmacher's brain to tell her all about Leviathan. On the same vein, while Supergirl and her buddies couldn't manage to stop Rip Roar's jailbreak, they did learn enough to know the name of the organization they're fighting.

Meanwhile, it's not a good day for Andrea at all, because when they went to the airport to get Rip Roar out of the country, he gets shot by a Leviathan agent masquerading as an old man who's cleaning the runway. Although to be fair, that Robocop cosplay is pretty dang conspicuous. The Leviathan agen also tells Andrea that the medallion isn't the source of her bamf-ing abilities, it's the catalyst to activate them. Okay, if you say so.

Overall, despite my own snarking, it's... it's an ambitious episode at least. Lena and Andrea's stories and their character analysis and history telling are told relatively well, even though there's a whole lot of inconsistencies and logic loopholes, but they're minor enough that I can honestly overlook them. Not a great episode, but definitely not a bad one. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Acrata, of course, is Andrea Rojas's comic-book couterpart's superhero pseudonym. Comic-book Acrata is a superhero who used an ancient Mayan medal that gave her shadow-walking abilities, although from the way that this episode is framed, it seems like TV!Acrata's powers come from something more alien. 
• Bernado Rojas is also the name of comic-book Andrea's dad, although he was a researcher there instead of a tech company boss. 
• Having been absent since -checks the wiki- season one, wow, okay, Maxwell Lord's company is mentioned as being the Rojases' business rival. Leviathan completely ruined their stock in the past couple of years as part of their 'reward' to Andrea. 
• Jack Spheer, a.k.a. Biomax, makes an unexpected return after his stint as a villain-of-the-week in season two. The writers even remember that he was implied to be Lena's ex by showing their relationship!