Supergirl S04E02 Review: Hate Speech

Supergirl, Season 4, Episode 2: Fallout

It's really interesting just how... political (?) Supergirl ends up getting to in this fourth season. I'm not an American and honestly am not particularly caught up with American politics, but I know enough to know that at least a huge chunk of the hate-raising modus operandi of Mercy and Agent Liberty is meant to emulate that of the current American president's stance on aliens of a different sort. Politics -- especially politics I'm not well-versed about -- is a can of worms that I'm not going to touch, personally, so I'm just going to talk about this episode as, well, a TV superhero episode.

"Fallout" is more of a continuation of the season premiere, dealing with the resignation of President Marsden as the controversy surrounding her alien nature threatens to tear the country in half with demonstrators on both sides of the argument coming into blows in front of the White House. And that seems to be the theme of this episode, with the amount of hate-speech in the dark web intensifying after the president being outed as an alien. And it's... it's racist as all hell, but some of the arguments -- that an alien "infiltrated" the government without making her true nature clear -- isn't particularly wrong.

The main action storyline in this episode ends up with Kara talking to Lena over the current events, around the same time that Mercy Graves hacks the LexCorp network and causes all of the holographic image-inducer things that aliens use to walk around undetected to malfunction (something that ties into the Brainiac subplot), leading to Mercy personally assaulting the LexCorp building and putting Kara in hijinks where she has to protect Lena, but she's trapped in her Kara Danvers guise. It's fun superhero stuff, and probably the longest this sort of sequence has been shown in Supergirl, and I do love the sudden surge of competence that Eve Tessmacher got in this episode.

We also did get a bit of a backstory on how Mercy Graves relate to Lena, and that she was her mentor and elder-sister-figure in a broken family. It's... it's definitely interesting, and it gives the brief supersuit-arm battle between the two some heft.

Of course, Mercy apparently planned to be captured, and her plans hinge on... on having the one guard assigned to guard Otis and her to be an anti-alien man? It's a bit of a bizarre plot hole in an otherwise pretty tightly-plotted episode, since it's utter coincidence that there is even an anti-alien member in the DEO, an organization that regularly works with Supergirl and J'onn J'onzz, and it's said anti-alien member that gets assigned to watch the Graves siblings. But after this coincidence, the Graves siblings manage to break out, steal the anti-Daxamite lead mist thing, and unleash Kryptonian to knock Supergirl out of the sky as she flies back from the White House, leading to the cliffhanger of this episode.

The B-plots of this episode are... definitely well-handled. J'onn looking for Fiona and realizing that the DEO is too busy felt like a distraction, but he ends up showing up at one of the anti-alien rallies, witnessing first-hand the power of Agent Liberty as he riles up a crowd, telling them how the aliens have stolen their rights and makes them feel insecure and scared, and I do love how the scene of Agent Liberty's hate speech is juxtaposed against Supergirl's own speech about hope.

The Brainy plot is a bit simpler, but also pretty effective at showing how the alien community reacts and is wounded by the simple action of deactivating the holo-masks. Brainy's attempt to buy pizza from someone that he interacts with (under the guise of "Barney"), Massimo, leads to an almost physical altercation had Nia not been there to stop the racist pizza people from harming Brainy. Brainy also seems to be... entranced by Nia in a way? But throughout the episode, poor Brainy ends up performing sub-optimally until Alex Danvers talks to him, and he realizes that it's the emotions and disappointment that he feels at Massimo's fear and hate that causes him to feel emotions. It's not a particularly groundbreaking plot, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Nia herself also gets a bit of a subplot, arguing with James Olsen and asking him to write a statement about where CatCo stands in this whole situation, about how simple human (well, alien) rights isn't really an opinion. It's a bit on-the-nose, but definitely framed in a decent enough way that I believe that it's something that Nia -- herself a transgender woman (revealed neatly in passing dialogue during her rant to James) and having witnessed the racism towards Brainiac earlier in the day -- would say. 

A fun little bonus! Newly-elected president Baker is played by Bruce Boxleitner, otherwise known as Babylon 5's John Sheridan. That might not mean much to you, but I sure as hell hope that he gets a whole lot more to do!

Overall, while definitely politically charged, I'd argue that this fourth season of Supergirl still stands pretty well on its own, dealing against issues of racial prejudice and general societal paranoia. The episode doesn't do anything particularly spectacular, but was definitely a solid one.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• President Marsden is identified as a Durlan, the shape-shifting alien race that Legion of Super-Heroes member Chameleon Boy belongs to. 
• The lead-spraying anti-Daxamite device was the plot device used at the end of the second season, and Otis mentions the DEO's usage of it earlier.