Supergirl, Season 3, Episode 23: Battles Lost And Won
Yeah, that's a pretty messy finale. I suppose the bigger priority at this point isn't merely the question of how to defeat Reign, but how to fix the mess that the third season of Supergirl has devolved into. And... you know what? For a messy finale, they definitely could've done worse. There is a whole lot of weird focus on different parts of the series that we ended up focusing on, mind you, which I didn't think was the best use of the screentime.
First up, the first, oh, five minutes of so of the episode is basically a wrap-up of last episode's big earth-shattering crisis, with Supergirl, Alura, Alex, Guardian, the Legion of Super-Heroes and off-screen!Superman (finally, a mention of what he's doing) rescuing people. The Legion's return isn't necessary, but it's definitely welcome considering how they've been such a huge presence this season and left the show after its mid-season break abruptly. The CGI in these scenes, especially Alex's lightning shield and the water tsunami thing, aren't the best, but eh.
M'yrnn gets the dramatic sacrifice that we built up to in the previous season, and after a very well-acted and tender moment with J'onn, he apparently bonds himself to the Earth and stops Reign from unleashing apocalypse. Which... which I honestly, genuinely think would've worked better as the final scene in the previous episode.
And then... and then we get to basically setting up the fourth season, which is probably just as bizarre as the rest of the pacing and plot-making decisions done for this season. Sure, there's some exposition about how to defeat Reign. How Samantha has to go to the weird dimension of the valley of non-symbolic darkness to actually drink from some magic pools, see the ghost of her mother or something and... I dunno. The Samantha story has officially gone off the rails, and I really wouldn't minded so much if it wasn't the most mundane and inane Fantasy 101 without any real buildup. I'll just acknowledge how absolutely moronic it is to introduce this facet in the previous episode, how utterly stupid it is, and move on with my life.
Also stupid? Is the fact that Corville, who was killed off like a classic henchman last episode, apparently isn't dead, but manages to crawl around enough (mind you, in a room with three Kryptonians with X-Ray vision and super hearing) to press a conveniently located distress beacon, and then drop off dead. Why even include him at this point?
The rest of the scenes at the DEO basically explore the various dramas. Obviously there's the one about Samantha and oh no she's in danger. There's the genuinely "not the right time, Alex" bit where Alex angsts about how she's in danger all the time but she also wants to be a mommy, which, again, is a pretty well-delivered storyline but also one that I genuinely cannot get invested in when they keep shoving it in our faces in increasingly inappropriate moments. There's the sudden revelation that, hey, Saturn Girl and Brainiac 5 have returned because in changing timeline, they caused the original, supervillainous Brainiac to unleash an AI virus. Which means Brainiac 5 and Winn have to swap places. Oh, and they need a leader in Mon-El, who also needs to return to the future. Oh, and Guardian feels the need to give his secret identity out to the world because that one lady is far more calm when she saw her non-helmeted face. Again... none of these really come out of nowhere, but they also feel too much like the show is just trying to set up and sell the fourth season to us. And yeah, admittedly the Reign/Witch storyline is genuinely uninteresting after so much meandering and dicking around, but it honestly feels far more distracting than anything.
The actual fight between Supergirl and her allies against the witches are... okay. But it feels more cathartic than epic, even if we did get a pretty neat CGI flight moment where Supergirl and Reign's battle takes them spinning around the Legion ship and sending it careening off-course in a neat shot. But then in Reign's dying throes, her red eye-beams blast people apart, including killing off Alura and Mon-El... and, wow, they don't do a good job at making Alura a character, huh? When she got eyebeamed through the chest all I could muster is a shrug -- I think I felt more emotion for Winn's angst on whether to go to the future or not. And then Supergirl pulls off the climax from Superman: The Movie, goes back in time, pulls off some Harun-El bullshit and then sends Reign into the shadow realm or whatever where Samantha can beat up her weird doppelganger thing.
Of course, nothing about this climax really makes sense. I've stated my disdain about the silly valley of eternal darkness and its two magical pools many, many times. The time travel is even worse than Flash and Legends of Tomorrow combined. And while the show tries to give some token lip-service to Supergirl's whole "I absolutely, definitely am not allowed to kill" credo, apparently the alternative is... to force-feed Reign poison and watch as weird Kryptonian Dementor ghosts drag her off to hell? What? And also, Kryptonian Dementors? What? Oh, and also Samantha's ghost for some reason. Oh, and the fact that Kara's story and whole goals to not kill the enemy ends up being sort of hollow. Yeah, this storyline just went off the rails really hard, huh?
The rest of the episode is then just devoted to wrap-up. Alura returns to New Krypton with the witches as prisoners and has a farewell that's as lackluster as her role and her return to life. The Mon-El dilemma (something which has always felt artificially engineered in the first place) ends up with... everyone just shrugging their shoulders and going their separate ways, with Saturn Girl never loving Mon-El in the first place, Mon-El being needed in the future and Supergirl and Mon-El sort of collectively shrugging their shoulders. It's dumb. I'm not someone who's ever really invested in shipping characters, but I can definitely bet that there's no one who cares that's going to be pleased by this cop-out of a conclusion.
Oh, and Winn has to go off, and his departure is... well-acted, I guess? Winn has sort of been relegated to the sidelines a lot since his original introduction, bouncing between roles as Mr. Friendzone to Male Lois Lane to the bad guys' son to Cisco Ramon to a bunch of alternating sub-plots, but the actor has been criminally underused. Writing him out of the series in this way is probably the best if they're not going to really utilize the character. And, again, we do get a pretty well-acted and well-written conclusion. It's just really weird that this genuinely just got sprung to us out of nowhere.
The other status quo changes? James outs himself as the Guardian, which feels like a post-script more than anything. Lena Luthor keeps the Harun-El for sinister experiments, but probably not really because the show's determined to make Lena Luthor be a good, nice upstanding character. J'onn steps down and wanders the Earth, Alex becomes head of the DEO where she's still a hero but is out of the line of fire so she can adopt a kid. Oh, and some naked Supergirl doppelganger just showed up in Siberia.
Overall? A pretty goddamn train wreck of a finale, really. It's no fault of the episode itself, but more of accumulated nonsense from the past couple of episodes, and it's hard to fault episode 23 alone for the faults introduced by the past four or five episodes for being such a goddamned clusterfuck. This episode at least have some really neat scenes -- M'yrnn and Winn's farewells being the only real praiseworthy scenes. Ultimately, it's a trainwreck of a finale for the third season of Supergirl. I just kind of hope they do better next season!
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Brainiac 5's evil relative that has unleashed an AI virus is, of course, the original Brainiac, a.k.a. Vril Dox, the iconic Superman enemy.
- The Martian Manhunter leaving a peacekeeping organization to live among humans and better appreciate their culture is basically his arc in Justice League Unlimited, where Carl Lumbly (M'yrnn J'onzz's actor) voices him.
- Supergirl's time-reversal isn't the first time that a superhero in DC comics have done so in the climax of a battle to saved a loved one. Most famously, Superman did it in his first live-action movie, but CW fans will probably also have flashbacks to Flash's Flashpoint arc.
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