Supergirl, Season 3, Episode 5: Damage
Okay, I'm not going to be particularly wordy with this episode. It's not terrible, it's just... there. It's an episode that probably is something that many others would appreciate more than me. It's not written terribly, it's just that both of the plotlines of this episode just don't appeal to me at all. I guess part of it is the fact that Maggie's actress has to leave the series, and a graceful exit is far better than abruptly killing her off for shock value, but at the same time I just never quite bought into the fact that "but I wanna have kids' excuse as something to utterly rip the two apart, especially after the past few episodes emphasizes so much to how they're happy and cute together and all that. Still, I guess it's somewhat of a bittersweet note that their breakup isn't anyone's fault, and they're otherwise super-compatible... but eh. I dunno. I've never been one to get super-duper invested in shipping, and while the two actresses have done an amazing job at making Maggie and Alex be likable, I've always thought that their storylines tend to kind of bog down episodes and transform the superhero show into a romance show. And it's a very well-executed one, don't get me wrong, but still, from a narrative standpoint I'm actually glad that it's pushed to the side? When it was Kara and Mon-El last season, at least the superhero plotlines do tend to revolve around those, instead of us having to break away from it specifically.
The problem is that the A-plot isn't quite that interesting either. Sure, on paper, it's a pretty decent Superman/Supergirl plot. Their ally, Lena Luthor, is being framed for a crapton of sick kids who may or may not be having lead poisoning (lead poisoning does not, in real life, cause random life-threatening seizures, but this is a superhero show. So.) from Lena's detonation of the lead bomb that fucked over the Daxamites at the end of the second season. And Lena's played by a great actress that executes her role as a self-loathing person who's driven by both the guilt that she may be responsible as much as her own hate for her Luthor blood. What kind of didn't work out that well is the fact that Morgan Edge is so obviously behind it all (while at the same time completely being untraceable, all Lex Luthor-style), while Kara and Samantha's searching for the true culprit ends up being a pretty bland detective clue-hunt. I suppose Kara saving the plane and Lena is pretty cool, but honestly a lot of this episode just felt kinda flat to me. Particularly perhaps due to the fact that Lena rushing to Edge's factory, pulling a gun and trying to Luthor-execute Edge feels like such a strange sequence in my head.
There's a sub-sub-sub-plot about James and Lena's office relationship that has James take a bullet for Lena in the mid-episode cliffhanger, but that's honestly just so dry-cut that I have nothing to say about it other than to acknowledge it exists. Though the shooting thing did give us the cool moment with Samantha's invulnerability at the end of the episode, though, so that's cool.
Of course, though, part of what makes the episode not quite be terrible is particularly strong performances from Lena and Alex's actresses. I also do acknowledge that dipping Supergirl's toes into other genres is definitely a great way to appeal to a larger audience, and while 'chick flicks' have never been my thing, I do know that it appeals to people and I'm fine with that. Overall, though, a combination of multiple factors in this episode that didn't just work quite right make this a pretty sub-par episode.
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