Supergirl, Season 4, Episode 19: American Dreamer
I've been very behind on the CW seasons, and I feel like a broken record in apologizing for it. Sorry -- between writing up huge articles like movie reviews for Detective Pikachu and Avengers: Endgame and doing a new Let's Play that I honestly feel far more happy doing instead of reviewing episodes, I've definitely built up quite a backlog. This episode, though, is... it's all right, I guess? I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of plotlines explored in this episode, because I've never really cared for James Olsen's PTSD, or Supergirl having to resort to Kara Danvers' reporting skills to basically progress the plot, or the whole "Supergirl's reputation is shit!" storyline. Unlike Game of Thrones' recent episodes, though, at least the show did the legwork to reach this point, so while I don't personally care for any of these developments, at least it's logical to see them play out.
I personally don't really care about a whole on of Supergirl's civilian status being put front and center, and I honestly feel it's nothing but story-mandated nonsense that she feels like she's unable to go out in her costume to help people, having to leave poor Nia Nal to solve everything in the city as Dreamer (with cool lightning-whips or whatever those are, and however those relate to dreaming powers). Both actresses playing Supergirl and Dreamer are earnest and definitely perform pretty well, delivering what could otherwise be a bland, cheesy and cringe-y interview to change the city's minds into something that's fairly inspirational. Again, it's not the most interesting storyline at this point, and I feel like the show's retreading some old ground it's explored earlier this season, but the episode itself is pretty solid, if not particularly special.
That said, though, some parts of the episode -- like Supergirl realizing that Kara as a person has been ignoring her BFF Lena because she spends the majority of her time with Lena as Supergirl -- felt silly and didn't work that well. James's PTSD flashback of how he was apparently shoved inside a coffin during his father's funeral, while neat from a visual standpoint, felt like it came literally out of nowhere and doesn't really have a whole ton to do with his gunshot-induced mental trauma and just there to pad out that whole storyline. Like, sure, it's a horrific scene that will traumatize anyone, but it's just sort of shoehorned into the midst of this storyline without much reason.
Also, speaking of B-plots, J'onn J'onzz finally returns the magic runes back to Mars, and returns back to Earth (his actor, David Harewood, directed this episode), Ben Lockwood's son starts to realize just how horrible this Children of Liberty shit is when he sees one of his friends as one of the targets he's tasked to hunt down (they put a teenager on an alien-hunting squad!) and after Ben Lockwood takes a more proactive role in hunting down people as a militia commander, he ends up coming home to find his wife dead, killed by the wife of an alien he arrested earlier this episode and mocking about how "your children only have one parent now". And... and honestly, Ben Lockwood has devolved so much into such a huge hate sink that I sort of cheered at this scene, as horrible as it is to cheer at someone who's lost his wife?
Ultimately, though, while not spectacular, this is sort of a pretty solid episode. I just sort of feel that with all of the plotlines going on (Lex Luthor's plans, the Red Daughter, whatever Ben Lockwood's planning, the superhero serum) this episode focusing on Supergirl's popularity and Kara Danvers as a reporter felt particularly off and felt a bit more like a time-filler episode before we get to the bunch of episodes leading to the finale. It's entertaining, at least, so I don't mind it too much.
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