Supergirl S04E22 Review: Not One Who Kneels

Supergirl, Season 4, Episode 22: The Quest For Peace

The finale of Supergirl is pretty neat! Supergirl has been relatively... stable? It's been heralded as the best season of the show ever, which I would probably contest (granted, season 1 and 3 of Supergirl did get dire at times, so it's not like the competition was strong). There were some parts of this season that I really disliked, particularly the Alex amnesia subplot, the abrupt end of Manchester Black's arc, and how they sort of waffled on what to do with both Haley and Ben Lockwood in the back end of the season, but I do agree that this season of Supergirl has been, for the most part, deserving of two massive thumbs-up. It's certainly paced a whole lot better than its sister-shows, Arrow and Flash, for sure.

I do have a weakness for Frank Sinatra's My Way, though, which really leads into my enjoyment of Lex's execution of his plan of blowing up Kaznian torpedoes and warships in his Lexo-suit while singing in his own personal portable karaoke booth. After how it seems like we're not going to see Lex Luthor's victory and leaving it off-screen, it seems that they're just saving the visual effects budget for this episode. Oh, and Lex also gives President Baker a brief dressing-down in this episode, basically framing just how much of a pawn Baker himself is, and later on uses the perma-dead Otis as a scapegoat for Lex's plans.

It's really such a shame that -- and particularly so thanks to her limited screentime -- Red Daughter barely gets anything to do in this episode. She gets the expected "you betrayed me" yell and fights Lex briefly, but Lex beats her the fuck down both verbally and physically, which is honestly pretty damn mean. The fact that she shows up again in the climax only to take a bullet for the real Kara before being absorbed is also pretty depressing. I'm not really hoping for a full happy ending and the logistics of having her around as a recurring character would probably be difficult, but I really wished that we got a bit more of her as a character. It's not quite that bad, but I really wished there as more to her other than to be used as a plot device in her final episode, y'know?

But at least the confrontations are well-done. Granted, Ben "Agent Liberty" Lockwood has once again just degenerated into a racist super-soldier that's going around happy to murder everything in his path, completely and blissfully oblivious of the larger forces at play. I did really love that we get to see the moment when Lockwood realizes that he truly is nothing more than a pawn that doesn't even know he's a pawn when President Baker off-handedly just declares Lex Luthor the new secretary of alien affairs without even telling him.

Meanwhile, as all of this is going on, Kara basically is on a "solve problems through journalism" bug, and ends up wanting to really expose him through a written piece, especially when Brainiac-5 reveals that he has quickly restored the notes that were supposedly wiped from CatCo. Then Brainiac-5 reveals that he's all robotic and scary now and left J'onn and Nia to be captured and taken to the alien prison facility.

Lex also summons both Lena and Lilian to gloat about his huge plan, with him now basically being the puppet-master behind the President of the United States, while his huge huge plan is to harvest aliens to use as energy batteries. Which... umm.... o... okay? That final goal honestly is sort of foreshadowed before, but the fact that apparently all aliens can have their energy drained is a bit bizarre -- hell, I can't even fit batteries for my television remote to my air-conditioner remote! I thought his plan was more on the veins of incorporating alien powers into human soldiers, a la multiplying Eve, which is a bit weird.

I do love that Lex then talks about how his real final plan is to use said energy to blow up Argo City with Superman in it using the Claymore Satellite, which Eve is very pissed off about -- Lex insists it's all about Superman, though, and it's interesting that this is the first real hint that Eve has an alternate plan other than just being a Lex fangirl. Meanwhile, I absolutely love the conversation between Lilian and Lena when left alone in the oval office about how Lex really needed to drink that tea because Lilian's poisoned it, while Lex, of course, knew all along.

And after these slower scenes, the plot just hits the pedal and doesn't really slow down. We get a brief montage of Kara's piece, "How Lex Luthor Divided and Betrayed America", be sent out and somehow read by every the people protesting or holding Luthor banners or whatever. And that plot point is done with. Meanwhile, J'onn, Nia and that recurring alien bartender end up staging a riot and we get an action scene, leading to Nia astral-projecting to Brainiac, Kara and the others.

And then Kara, Alex, Brainiac and James arrive on Shelly Island, and we get a couple of quick face-offs. Agent Liberty shows up with a bunch of Harun-El powered Children of Liberty, and the team of Alex and James stay to fight these two. The fight plays out for a while, and we get some neat action scenes, but eventually the bad guys lose, with James and Ben injecting each other with the Harun-El cure at the same time.  As this is going on, J'onn and Nia, after a brief stink-eye piss-off contest with super-logic Brainiac, ends up doing the highly reckless plan of using their mental powers to scream really loud and try to overload the Claymore. This showcase of emotion-over-logic ends up overwhelming Brainiac so much for some reason, and he starts randomly quoting Monty Python and shit before reverting back to happy Brainy who goes rah rah Nia, you can do it.

Some great acting on those involved, particularly J'onn's delivery of his speech about not letting another world die, and Brainiac-5 as he reverts back to goofy Brainy... but the alien sidekick trio then basically sit out the rest of the episode.

And... and none of these three storylines are bad conclusions, honestly. The reporter piece, the Children of Liberty arc, the soulless-Brainiac arc... they are all neat conclusions, but they just sort of... wrap themselves up too quickly, I guess. The Brainiac bit is forgivable because it's just a plot point introduced last episode (really really wished it lasted longer, though) but the way it is solved by Brainy just "oh no you are doing something fuzzy I CANNOT COMPUTE" is a bit anti-climactic. And considering how scary the first half of this season play out the sprawling web of hatred and mistrust among the Children of Liberty, it's odd that we don't really see a montage of people rejecting the Children of Liberty and it's just "oh, the article is out", and the good guys just beat Ben Lockwood and his four cronies in a straight-up fistfight.

And then, of course, we get the fight between Supergirl and Lex Luthor, with Supergirl showing up with a Kryptonite Suit and it's... it's nice, but the huge emotional point ends up just being Red Daughter's sacrifice as she jumps in the way, gets shot, and gets reabsorbed. Not even a final meet with Mikhail, too! Supergirl and Lex's fight end up going into the upper atmosphere, but when Lex's suit gets damaged, he refuses to accept help from a Kryptonian and elects to fall to his explosive death below.

Except, of course, it's Lex frikkin' Luthor, so a huge explosion isn't going to kill him. He's got a portal that he zips through back to his base. Except except, the only person who can guess Lex Luthor's contingency plan is his own sister, and Lena's right there with a Harun-El extractor to revert Lex back to just being a man. Lex mocks Lena, telling her off that she doesn't have the guts to shoot Lex... except Lena does, straight in the chest.

Lex mocks Lena half-heartedly, and I really do enjoy just the sheer amount of fucked-up, one-sided sibling rivalry between these two, and just how much Lex lives to torment Lena. And as Lex is dying from the gunshot, he then pulls out one last weapon, one last spiteful act before he dies. Lena talks about how she's grown beyond seeking Lex's approval and defining herself in comparison to the rest of the Luthors, but Lex then tells Lena how all of her friendship and fuzzy new family is bull-crap, showing and revealing that Kara Danvers and Supergirl are one and the same, mocking Lena for being so naive and foolish before Lex Luthor finally dies.

And... credit where credit's due, I saw this coming a mile away, that Lex was going to reveal this to Lena... but the decision to make this a spiteful final act before his death is something that ends up framing all of this in a completely different way. . Alex and Kelly kiss and basically end up sort of being shoehorned together, because... they kind of were, in these past few episodes.

The rest of the episode is an extended epilogue, divided neatly into two parts -- a wrap-up and foreshadowing for Crisis on Infinite Earths, which all the other three CW shows also had. We'll cover the foreshadowing a bit later on, but from the first part of the epilogue we learn that President Baker is, of course, removed from office. Haley is the new Secretary of Alien Affairs, and publicly thanks and exonerates Supergirl's name. We learn that James apparently is wearing an eyepatch now to work, arrrr, because he got his eye injured in the fight against Lockwood? I'm genuinely not sure if it's just a temporary injury or a permanent one, because... well, I frankly don't take James Olsen that seriously already, seeing him with a goofy eyepatch won't help on that front. Speaking of Lockwood, we get the utterly hilarious scene of him mulling in the jail, and he has to see his son basically talk about what a hate-filled shitbag he is.

Most interestingly is the friends'n'family game night, where Lena Luthor acts like such a happy friend, telling Kara that she's with her always... but later on, in her own office, she cracks a photo with Kara and looks very, very pissed off. I would totally love to see Lena Luthor as a villain in the next season, and I would think so, except...

We've got three future villain potentials thanks to the rest of the credits sequence. First we see Eve trying to sneak away in a train station, only to be confronted with an old lady who tells Eve that she cannot "run away" from Leviathan, which is apparently everywhere and everyone, and presumably the one who sends Eve to work under Lex Luthor in the first place. I'm not sure if the show is well-equipped to handle another sprawling Illuminati-lite conspiracy, considering how the "hate group that can be in your own neighbourhood" Children of Liberty starts off amazingly well-executed before genuinely petering out. But Leviathan's cool, even if it's traditionally a Batman enemy.

Also, the god-damn Monitor shows up, after also having a prominent role in the final scenes of this season's Arrow. He shows up out of a portal and brings a green martian with him, who is most definitely Ma'alefa'ak, because he starts ranting about getting vengeance on his brother. The Monitor then shows up right next to the corpse of Lex Luthor, so maybe the show's not done with him yet. I'm not sure why the Monitor is gathering villains or whatever, since he seems pretty benevolent (if a dick) in Elseworlds and in Arrow, so... get your speculation hats on, I guess?

Overall, though, foreshadowing for future crossovers aside, this final episode is... it's a very succinct conclusion to this season, which is all I'm going to say. Frankly I do think that they sort of tried to fit in too much, and I would've definitely had some of the plotlines be resolved either in the previous episode or dropped entirely. Still, all in all, I would definitely call this season of Supergirl a resounding success.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The title of this episode is a reference to the much-maligned Christopher Reeve movie, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Jon Cryer, who plays Lex Luthor in Supergirl, plays Lex's annoying nephew Lenny Luthor in that movie, which is a fun fact that I just found out today. 
• The Monitor brings J'onn's insane brother Ma'alefa'ak (a.k.a. Malefic), or, well, at least that's what I assume who the angry green martian is. Ma'alefa'ak's portrayal is different from adaptation to adaptation, but he really hates his brother J'onn, and in the original comics continuity, he was a green martian who felt ostracized because he was not able to use telepathy, and ended up engineering the horrible mental-spread disease called "H'ronmeer's Curse", which ended up wiping out almost all of the green martian population save for J'onn, who was teleported to Earth in a freak accident. 
• Leviathan is a shadowy organization that primarily menaces Batman and his allies, first introduced in Batman: The Return and Batman Incorporated titles. This organization is led by Talia al Ghul, who created her own organization to become the antithesis of Batman's own Batman Incorporated organization. Since Talia has appeared in Arrow, it's interesting if the Earth-38 version of Talia also looks like Lexa Doig.