Supergirl S05E07 Review: The Last Earthbender

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 7: Tremors

Okay, this was another pretty high-content, fast-paced episode. Where "Confidence Women" was the sort of episode that gave a lot of exposition via flashback, this one delivered a lot of present-day exposition. Within moments we quickly learn that, hey, Old Granny Levi (whose name is really Margot) is just a human agent of Leviathan, her parlor tricks are completely useless against Lena freakin' Luthor, and Leviathan's actually controlled by a bunch of ancient aliens, the leader of whom seems to be this sorcerer dude called Rama Khan... which is very unexpected for me, someone who actually knows who Rama Khan is, and vaguely know what the Leviathan organization is all about. Rama Khan and the other members of Leviathan style themselves as the secret rulers of the world, with Rama Khan apparently being responsible for numerous massive natural disasters in history.

Yet while we do get a bunch of neat action scenes and a... decent superhero CGI (I watch 90's-era Kamen Rider, I won't complain about the CGI for these shows), Rama Khan the earth-bender (the cast's nickname, not mine) isn't really all that threatening. Sure, he's got a great actor in Mitch Pileggi and the fight with him bursting out of the groud to just straight-up try and murder Lena Luthor is pretty dang cool... but the fight with Supergirl really doesn't sell him as a Seasonal Big Bad material, and I suspect before the season is over, someone else in Leviathan will take over. Probably his buddy in the secret undergroud bar, Gamemnae, who seems to be pretty poised to take a different technology-based approach to Rama Khan's brute-forcing his way through things.

The focus of the episode is still Lena, of course. Unlike Andrea, Lena goes into this Leviathan conflict far, far more prepared than Andrea is, using a forcefield to block out margot and really not giving a shit about the prospect of being in the crosshairs of this international organization. And it's kind of a refreshing, fun contrast to how pants-shittingly afraid of Leviathan other characters we've seen is. And yet Lena literally has Supergirl on her speed dial, and has been dealing with characters like Lex Luthor and Reign in the past. Of course she's not going to be afraid of what she views to be 'merely' an Illuminati ripoff.

Of course, Lena seems to be... losing her subtlety a bit? We get passive-aggressive moments between her and Kara throughout the episode, which Lena passes off as a rib on Kara's oh-so-excellent acting skills, but you can totally tell that Lena's pretty pissed about that whole "think I'm crashing in a plane crash" thing from last season. She spins Leviathan's attack on her to get Kara to invite her to the Fortress of Solitude, a location that we actually hear Lena speculate exists a couple of episodes back, ostensibly to get one of Lex Luthor's confiscated weapons.

Rama Khan arrives at the Fortress of Solitude, the only place on Earth that he can't locate his targets, and we get Supergirl vs. Rama Khan mark two, and there's just some fun hell-yea superhero fighty-fight moments when Supergirl freezes the hole Rama Khan pops out of solid, and starts trash-talking the ancient alien about how she's welcoming the earth-manipulating alien to Krypton. While all of this is going on, Lena ends up stealing Myriad, because she's been looking for a device that can unleash her mind control program.

And while I'm not sure if Lena intentionally let herself get caught, but apparently she did considering she went as far as to reprogram the Fortress' defenses against Kara. Lena has the mother of all rants and while I haven't agreed with every decision taken in Lena's descent to villainy, dang that's a well-acted rant. All the revelations, all the yelling about how Lena was willing to go so far as to kill her brother personally for Kara (the trauma of doing that, as slimy as Lex is, probably is another factor that , about betrayal... Lena's anger and raw rage is amazingly told, Kara's shock, surprise and guilt is palpable, and honestly, as melodramatic as these superhero shows can be sometimes this interaction between Supergirl and Lena Luthor is amazingly portrayed.

Lena then leaves Kara behind locked in the weird crystal prison in the Fortress of Solitude, telling her that, no, she's not a villain. She's not going to harm Kara (other than mentally, I guess) and she's not going to kill anyone. Hell, her supervillain plan is called Project Non Nocere, literally 'do no harm'. But, y'know, brainwashing the planet and everything. It's an amazing set-up that genuinely blows the Leviathan stuff out of the water, and I'm completely fine with that. It's clear where the cast, crew and writers' heart really is, and it's properly building up Lena Luthor as a believable, tragic antagonist. Leviathan's neat, but I wouldn't be surprised if next episode just has Supergirl beat up Rama Khan again (considering the title) and take down Leviathan's current head honcho temporarily, while the focus remains on Lena for the rest of the season.

J'onn and Ma'alefa'ak also get a significant amount of focus? J'onn goes through a bit of a talk with ghost-dad (hallucination-dad?) M'yrnn, an always welcome presence on this show, and M'yrnn tells J'onn that if he still believes that there's a chance to save Ma'alefa'ak and right their family sins, it's to do the risk of a mind-meld, a martian telepathic act that will bare everything that J'onn J'onzz is to his brother, exposing all of his true intentions while also allowing his brother to kill him at any point. I guess this is meant to be a foreshadowing and/or hint at what the Kara/Lena confrontation might look like, sans telepathy, I guess. J'onn tracks Ma'alefa'ak down to Lena Luthor's secret base, puts the Phantom Zone Projector on the table as a gesture of peace, and then bares himself to Ma'alefa'ak. The acting leading up to this was great, but the actual moment happened so quickly and I just wished that there was more, y'know? Anyway, Malefic's a good guy now, at least allegedly. It's a neat direction to take him in, anyway, we've sort of exhausted the avenues of him as a villain.

The B-plots of this episode... exists. There is more Kelly/Alex relationship drama but at this point I can safely say that I genuinely am uninterested in anything that goes on here. The problem about this relationship compared to, me being invested in Brainy/Nia or whatever is that Kelly herself is just such a collection of tropes. The acting and the actress is fine, but I just really roll my eyes when they ratchet up the melodrama for a character I barely know. Alex and Brainiac-5 sort of discover more about Leviathan and their secret base in a plotline that was hurriedly dropped and that was some weird pacing there. Brainy also gets his inhibition circuits knocked loose in a fight or something, which causes him to act like he's hyper-caffeinated, and it also sort of goes nowhere.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Rama Khan in the comics was not an alien, but rather an ancient Homo magi sorceror who ruled over the ancient kingdom of Jarhanpur (in Supergirl, Jarhanpur is the home planet of the Leviathan peeps), and led a group of powerful magic-using warriors called the League of Ancients. One of his most notable storyline is in the Grant Morrison JLA run, in the "Obsidian Age" arc where he fought a time-travelling Justice League. His powers in this show has been changed to power over natural disasters, whereas comics!Rama Khan is a more generic sorcerer. 
• Gamemnae, meanwhile, is an ancient Atlantean sorceress who served as Rama Khan's advisor and most powerful ally. She learned from prophecies about how in 3000 years the Justice League and Aquaman will pose a threat to her, and ended up manipulating Rama Khan and the rest of her allies to engage in some time-travel hijinks to eliminate threats to her rule. 
• Myriad, the brainwashing device that Astra and her little cabal used in season one, finally makes a return!