Supergirl, Season 4, Episode 13: What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way
I've always felt that Supergirl works best when it's dealing with big, flashy superheroing like this episode, with the live-action adaptation of the anti-hero team the Elite, complete with a title that homages the original issue where Manchester Black and his Elite members made its first appearance. Supergirl has been a show blessed with a charismatic cast, but a very rocky history. Season one... it sucked, honestly, whereas season three went off the rails in the second half. And despite a pretty strong start, this season has not really endeared itself to me particularly with how they are stretching some plotlines in this season. Between Alex's dumb amnesia (which is still a dumb plot device) and the Children of Liberty, at a point where we're usually entering second half of the season, it's honestly pretty irritating that we're sort of just revisiting some of the same-old, same-old storylines.
Fortunately, though, this episode was far, far more entertaining. The episode brings back Manchester Black with his comic-book accurate purple hair (which is a lot sillier IRL, and props to the actor for rocking it) as he engineers a prison break with his buddy, the Hat. Menagerie from the previous episode, and a surviving Morae, show up to round up Manchester Black's little band of merry anti-heroes, and they make their stance clear: they will fucking kill all of the alien-haters.
It's the sort of reactionary "when will the killing stop?" bit that Supergirl, I think, manages to portray well. It's not that you're supposed to pick a side between the Children of Liberty or the Elite, as Supergirl herself points out that none of them are doing things correctly. Even if the show does (at least for me) really skew more to making the Elite more sympathetic in their mission, their huge plan in this episode is to aim the Claymore Satellite, a super-weapon the President of the U.S.A. has been building, to blow up the White House and everyone there to 'send a message'. It goes on a whole new level when you go from killing criminals to killing politicians, after all.
Manchester Black and his brood is honestly pretty charismatic, from their DIY Youtube videos and muttering about low angles or cracking jokes about how Supergirl is "probably standing with her hands on her hips", it all eventually leads to the pretty cool confrontation between Kara and Manchester at a bar in, um, Manchester. Manchester himself tells Supergirl how she is like a fairy tale... noble and good, but outdated and can't function properly in the real world. I'm honestly pretty engaged in this story, and am curious if we'll actually have a conclusion similar to how the comic-book version of this story arc plays out.
All this while, we get a couple of B-plots going on. We get J'onn who's utterly confused and conflicted about everything that's going on -- whether he should pick up the sword (and that all of this is a sign that he's just not cut out to be like his father), or should remain a pacifist. It's a genuinely great scene for J'onn, who I've always felt to be wasted for a vast majority of this season. We also get Brainiac attempting to train Nia in the Fortress of Solitude, with a fun pissing contest between Kelex and Brainy. Nia ends up learning to try out astral projection against Brainiac's wishes, going a bit too far and too fast... but impresses Brainiac anyway.
Supergirl's faith is shaken when she realizes that President John Sheridan Boxleitner Baker is planning to unleash Operation Claymore, which is an anti-alien satellite laser cannon thing. She confronts the president about it, causing the president to have a knee-jerk reaction to launch the satellite right now. Of course, this is all part of Manchester's plans to goad Supergirl into goading the president, all to find out where the satellite is at. It's an actually fun and clever bit of writing, in my opinion.
Supergirl ends up also telling this to Alex, who gets her own faith in the government shaken, and resolves to do anything she can. It's... it would be touching, I guess, if I wasn't so filled with disdain about this entire amnesia subplot. Benoist and Leigh are fantastic actors, and they do sell the scene reasonably well, but I'm still just tired because the entire scene just feels utterly redundant. Yes, we get it, Alex is a reasonable, good person even without her memories, it was cute for a single episode, but I just really don't give a shit about this subplot.
The episode ends with a pretty great climax as Supergirl shows up with her "Super Friends" consisting of Martian Manhunter, Dreamer and Brainiac (and Alex joins later), facing off against the Elite. Sure, the fight is pretty quick, but we do get a pretty badass bit with the Hat fighting against Nia and Brainiac, with them doing a cool little call-back to "dreams" and "differential calculus" from their training. Alex hands Supergirl that collapsible armour, while Manchester Black uses the aid of Brainy's stolen flight ring to fight Supergirl in the air, before J'onn finally confronts Manchester and knocks him down to Earth, while Supergirl knocks the satellite off course, causing the beam to harmlessly blow up the pool next to the White House. After a slight pause, she ends up blowing up the satellite by flying through it. Later on, she tells President Baker that, oh, no, there was absolutely no other way she could've stopped the satellite without that particular maneuver, which I thought was pretty hilarious.
So, yeah, a pretty solid episode. We've got a couple of side-plots, though, and the ones involving Lena is... interesting? James basically allows one of his reporters to dig into L-Corp, in a nice callback to a B-plot from a previous episode. Meanwhile, Lena gets a friend in Alex, who quickly figures out that the current government is shit, and that she would rather be on Lena's good side and wants to cooperate with her. The Agent Liberty B-plot, though... I'm just not sure where all of this is going? We get the president and Ben Lockwood having this whole photo op thing, and then he deputizes Agent Liberty into an actual agent of the nation, becoming director of alien affairs, while Ben himself deals with a bunch of his Children of Liberty who wants to take over, only for Ben Lockwood to snap and beat him down and retake his organization.
I'm... I'm not sure about the direction we're going with the Children of Liberty storyline, because they've honestly been pretty bland and more annoying than anything, and the novelty of having a human radical group be the enemy has definitely faded away. Still, this episode featured the Elite, and they were a pretty well-written, charismatic faction. Definitely a fun episode for sure.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- The title and premise of this episode is a huge homage to Action Comics #775, in the Superman story "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?" and the introduction of Manchester Black and his group of kill-happy anti-heroes, The Elite, which is adapted into this episode. The line-up of the team is similar to the first incarnation of the Elite, with Coldcast being swapped out for a Morae.
- The Hat, a.k.a. Rampotatek (no, really), is a Japanese man with an access to a magical hat powered by a demon, which allows him to pull out anything from that hat. Supergirl's version has him be powered by 5th dimensional magic.
- Super Friends, of course, is from Challenge of the Super-Friends, one of the many, many times CW's made this joke. Maybe I should review that cartoon some time in the future.
- Kelex snidely remarks about the "Cosmic Anvil", which is one of the many, many wacky items from the Golden Age that Superman has in his Fortress of Solitude. The Cosmic Anvil is most famously featured in All-Star Superman where he uses it to create miniature suns to feed to his pet Sun-Eater.
- Brainiac mentions his buddy "Val", a reference to yet another Legion of Super-Heroes character, Karate Kid, a.k.a. Val Armorr. Not to be confused with the 1984 movie.
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