Supergirl S04E04 Review: Tears of Logic

Supergirl, Season 4, Episode 4: Ahimsa

A pretty okay episode, as much as that whole bit surrounding Fiona feels bizarrely weirdly handled. After her final scene in the season premiere showing her stabbed in the back and pretty obviously killed, this episode reveals that she's alive all along... only to be killed at the end of the episode? That's genuinely pretty bizarre, and I honestly don't really think that the character is important enough to either warrant the shock of being the death at the season premiere to really matter as a cliffhanger, and I genuinely do think that the J'onn/Manchester storyline could've worked just as fine with them finding her corpse. I dunno. It just feels genuinely edited poorly.


"Ahimsa" is a weird episode in general, though, with it being filmed to try and get as little Melissa Benoist as possible  with the whole armour thing, while also showing her face in an Iron-Man-esque display and having her dub over the lines. It's a pretty weirdly-paced episode, is all I'm saying, although I'm definitely a fan of how the show still manages to work  in the armour/weakened Supergirl plotline into the main themes of the season.

The bulk of this episode is basically carried by Alex and J'onn, as well as new character Manchester Black, although it happens to relatively varying degrees of success. The J'onn/Manchester storyline works pretty well as a fun introduction of a fantastically fun, snarky character, and J'onn's struggles with his pacifism and inaction is a neat conflict that I felt was balanced pretty well between his angst and not taking up too much screentime.

Alex's story, meanwhile, is a bit more... iffy. She argues with Supergirl on whether she should come into action especially with her super-suit armour only allowing her to go into action for brief periods of time, causing President Bruce Boxleitner (it's so surreal seeing him in this show) to admonish Alex for carelessly endangering such a powerful resource. After a nice little talk between Alex and J'onn, playing well into their familial dynamic, Alex ends up "choosing her gut" and brings Supergirl along into the episode's final mission, although that ends up earning President Boxleitner's ire,  where he sends in Col. Lauren Haley to supervise the DEO. I really think that this story arc feels rushed, and I really don't think that Alex is given as much time to breathe between "oh no, the president is mad at me" to "I have to make a decision".

The B-plots of this episode is kind of all over the place, and I can't help but think maybe some of these probably would've flowed better if they were cut out, especially in a busy episode that didn't really give its main storylines time to breathe. We've got Lena and Brainy's scene where they basically technobabble the Kryptonite in the atmosphere away using nano-machines after an impromptu psych-help session between Lena and Brainy. It's a fun scene, admittedly, delivering into some fun lines ("tears of logic!" "I am not a robot!" "What kind of box?") but ultimately I kind of felt that this solution to the Kryptonite atmosphere stuff feels really out of nowhere and rushed. Maybe both the Alex and the Kryptonite atmosphere storyline would've worked better if it had been dragged out for exactly one episode longer? I dunno.

The Guardian stuff really also feel shoehorned in. It's supposed to be a parallel to the "dare to act" storyline for Supergirl and Alex, but it just has so little buildup, and Guardian himself nearly does jack-all in that final fight other than run down a couple of Kopy-copies with his bike. The payoff is interesting, though, with there being no lawsuits to Guardian... but the media ends up painting him as a "Guardian of Liberty", someone who protects Earth from aliens. That's a pretty fun angle to bring Guardian to.

Agent Liberty, meanwhile, is in full villain-mode as of this episode, which is... well, I honestly kinda wished that they had at least tried to make him a wee bit more sympathetic for a while longer, but here he basically ends up telling Mercy and Otis that they're thinking too small by using the mind-controlled Hellgrammite and Kopy (really? "Kopy"?) to just attack police stations. Liberty sends the aliens to an amusement park with the express purpose of killing children. At the end of the episode, the freed Hellgrammite ends up killing Mercy and Otis (maybe?) and Liberty ends up being the sole leader, making use of the weird alien grub to... do something to poor Agent Jensen. Mercy at least got to get into an argument against Alex and Kara that highlights all of their hypocrisies in making the aliens attack humans with mind-control powers, which is neat, but I do feel that it's way too little and a bit too rushed.

Ultimately, I do think that the episode is too jam-packed of subplots and characters that it ends up feeling way, way too haphazard. The fight scene in the park being pretty jumpy from one character to the next feels pretty bad, too. This episode sort of marks the end of the first 'arc' of this season, I feel, with Mercy and Otis taken out and possibly killed, a new status quo in the DEO, a new character introduced... but while the story is solid, the execution is definitely sub-par.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Manchester Black is the highly-popular anti-hero and antagonist in the 2001 story "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & The American Way", where he is introduced as the leader of a ruthless vigilante team known as The Elite, who hated the fact that superheroes would capture their villains and turn them to the police instead of killing them. The telepathic and telekinetic Manchester led a swath of anti-heroing through Metropolis, killing criminals and coming into conflict with Superman, eventually being brought down when Superman pretended to 'lose it' and kill all of Manchester's allies. Manchester would later be an on-and-off antagonist and reluctant ally of Superman.
• The union jack shirt he has at the end of the episode is a reference to his comic-book costume. 
• Lauren Haley is a relatively minor supporting character in old, Golden Age Wonder Woman comics. I'm not sure if she did anything particularly significant beyond being a recurring military ally. 
• Beebo, a recurring popular children's doll seen in Legends of Tomorrow, apparently transcends the multiverse and also exists in Earth-38, being seen prominently in the fair.