Supergirl, Season 3, Episode 1: Girl of Steel
Oh, man, the CW shows are back! I just caught up with all of the ones that are on air right now, but I'll be doing these reviews on my own pace. So yeah, the pilot for Supergirl's third season is... actually not very impressive. It was the first out of the three that I watched in a row (alongside Flash and Legends of Tomorrow) and it's easily the one that didn't fill me with a lot of suspense. While the other three CW shows ended with huge status-quo-changing season finales, Supergirl's was more... conclusive. Sure, Mon-El was sacrificed, somewhat, but he more or less just took an extended vacation and it doesn't quite fill me with the oomph that it needs.
Add that to the fact that the season premiere is... I wouldn't say bad, but it's certainly underwhelming. As a standalone episode it works fine, but my reaction to the episode was mostly just a shrug. Mostly due to the fact that, y'know, I actually agree with Kara's reasons, but a majority of the episode focuses on the cast trying to prove Kara wrong.
The episode starts with a great emotional beat for Supergirl as she becomes obsessively driven in her work, throwing herself whole-heartedly into superheroing and being super-aggressive on cracking down on crime to stop herself thinking too much about Mon-El and curling up into a ball of grief. And, by god, Melissa Benoist gives a pretty awesome performance (Alex's actress is another that gives a pretty awesome performance, but we'll get to her later) in trying to show a woman that's so driven by throwing herself into this one thing and trying to distance herself from her emotions and humanity -- as much as no one bought that she's going to abandon humanity itself, dang if the acting wasn't very convincing. And doing something like this with the main character of your show is a tricky business -- you might step too far off and turn your character into an obnoxious twit, something that Arrow has failed a couple of times with their soft-retools of Oliver Queen over the past five seasons Arrow has been running.
However, the counter-arguments for Kara not being Supergirl 24/7, especially when the show keeps highlighting the fact that Supergirl's doing a fuckton of good and keeping crime at basically zero other than crazy dudes with invisible submarines? It actually manages to cause half the cast to look like asshats. Alex gets an amazingly heartrending scene when she tells Supergirl tearily that "Kara Danvers was my favourite person!" and suddenly she's not someone spouting nonsense because she wants Kara to show up at her wedding food testing, she's a sibling that's worried that she's losing her sister and I can buy that love would lead you to do some less-than-logical things.
Lena's scene in trying to get Kara to have lunch with her and be BFFs is another that felt more like it's just going through the motions, but then unlike Alex or James, Lena doesn't actually know Supergirl's secret identity. So. James's scene in this episode was the big frowning moment for me, though. The setup was terrible, with the whole 'Kara, you're missing your deadline, tut-tut' bullshit, but he particularly feels unsympathetic when he interrupts Kara's stopping of the villain just to call her out on 'ah-ah-ah, you're neglecting your fucking newspaper articles!' It's one thing to confront her at work, it's another to summon her with an emergency device just because. Kara was absolutely right to call James out on how bullshit it was, especially considering James's career as Guardian.
And honestly? Kara's speech when she basically quits from CatCo earned a little smile from me, considering my huge, huge frustration about the CatCo scenes that seemed to add nothing but be padding repeating the same two or three story beats over and over again. I get that being Supergirl all the time isn't healthy in the way that working on a job all the time isn't healthy and you need some rest and whatnot, but no one in the show (or outside the show) has so far made a good argument as to why Supergirl should make "I have to devote some time to be a journalist" a priority over "shit, a robbery!" Neither James nor Alex make good points, and they are the ones that ended up sounding petulant.
Still, at least this episode tries to give Kara a reasonably wholesome character development as she moves on from the loss of Mon-El, even if the conversations involved isn't quite less than ideal. I think another factor that goes against this episode is the fact that Bloodsport is actually quite a shit villain. I mean, reading the comics, there's really not much that's interesting about him visually, personality-wise or powers-wise, which leaves him his weird Vietnam war backstory that I've always felt like a desperate attempt by the writers of the time to feel relevant. I genuinely can't say much about the depiction of Bloodsport in this episode beyond "eh, it works". He does allow Supergirl to lift that goddamn submarine out of the water, which is an amazingly impressive scene.
Alex and Maggie are planning a wedding which... 's cool, I guess? I don't particularly care that much, their relationship was sweet enough but not a particularly big draw for me. They are dropping some pretty huge hints about Maggie's death and I'm definitely pleased that it didn't come in this episode. Alex's subplot about how her father's missing and she doesn't want to plan a wedding without him and all that jazz is honestly something that I half tune-out, but that scene with Alex and J'onn at the end is so amazingly acted that, hey, at least the bland subplot was in service of this amazing scene. At this point I won't be too surprised if Maggie does end up being a death this season... I really wish they did more with Maggie beyond "Alex's girlfriend".
There's also a subplot with Lena and Morgan Edge, a douchebag extraordinaire. He's familiar to me because I read the comics, and knowing what he represents makes me a bit more excited about this season than I have been before, but while he begins in what I thought was just going to be a huge deconstruction about the CatCo stuff (his arguments about CatCo's work being heavily biased on Supergirl isn't particularly wrong, although in their defense Supergirl doesn't actually do much non-heroic shit in the public). Morgan Edge, however, lacks that edge (oh ha ha) to actually feel threatening. There's a distinct feel of 'seen that already' in Maxwell Lord and even Mama Luthor before. I dunno if it's the poor plot (really? Blowing up a statue with a super-expensive stealth submarine... just to build condos and profit or some shit?) or the poor writing but I didn't quite manage to get invested in the characters.
Oh, there's also some weird, creepy ass dream about Kara's mother or something, as well as the whole 'mysterious kryptonian starship' thing we keep spookily hinting at. And a mother-and-daughter pair that has a longer-than-probably-necessary focus with Alex... which makes me think that they'll show up down the line.
Overall, it's an episode that could've been much, much worse. I feel like I've been a bit too hard on the review on this one, after writing it out. It's not the best foot to set off the new season on, and there certainly are a fair amount of weak moments, but the fact that they're trying to actually give character development to their main character is definitely something worthy of praise. It's just that Morgan Edge and Bloodsport are so dry, the obvious foreshadowings are painfully so and James just pisses me off.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Morgan Edge in the comics is a high-ranking member of Intergang, which was also involved in a plot to take over Daily Planet in the comics.
- Bloodsport, a.k.a. Robert duBois, is a Superman villain that had an... interesting backstory. He is super-obsessed with the Vietnam war, and wants revenge on the world for... something because he realizes his brother took his place and lost his legs in the process. Bloodsport basically dons himself up with a crapton of weapons and machineguns and bazookas and whatever, supplied by Lex Luthor. And he sort of stuck around as a villain afterwards.
- Not sure if we've ever seen Jimmy's SOS watch in this show before or not, but there you have it -- in the comics, Jimmy has a watch that emits a frequency with which he can call Superman for help.
- Girl of Steel, of course, is a reference to Superman's moniker, Man of Steel.
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