Supergirl S05E04 Review: Bye James Olsen

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 4: In Plain Sight

Well, that was... uneven? There are some decent moments in this episode, but it's mostly sort of rushed. The Ma'alefa'ak storyline is relatively muted, mostly due to the fact that unlike most other emotionally-charged confrontations in Supergirl, we really don't quite have enough screentime between J'onn and Malefic for the conflict to really have the oomph it deserves. Maybe add another five or six episodes down the line and the two might actually develop into believable brothers, but we have had such a lack of proper interaction between the two that all we really have between them is Malefic's seething hatred and J'onn's guilt. It's not terrible, but the combination of the sub-par CGI in the opening fight sequence and the genuinely bland and repetitive "oh no Alex wants to bring out the Martian-killing gun" and "Malefic takes over another one of J'onn's friends" felt rather flat. It's enough of a plot to be stretched out over 40 minutes without being too tiring, but it's also something that I feel we've seen before, and, hell, done better in the show. There's also a wind-controlling metahuman/alien or something, but she's kind of just there, vaguely connected to the plot while not being a proper antagonist.

And Alex's girlfriend being this literal plot device that's able to detect Malefic while also turning Alex into a bit of an extremist in hunting down the bad guy feels a bit eyeball-rolling to me. I dunno. Kelly still feels flat to me as a character, more of a plot device than her actual thing, and I really wished that there was a bit more to her.

Speaking of characters that really could've been better... James Olsen! Easily the character that Supergirl struggled with the most, throughout its four-seasons-and-a-bit-more run, the show has never found anything good to do with James Olsen. Mechad Brooks tries his best for sure, but the character's gone from a bizarrely non-geeky adaptation of Jimmy Olsen to flat love interest to angsty vigilante to Lena's love interest to the People's Hero and... and they really never stuck and never really ended up finding anything good to do with James. I'm not sure if the actor wanted out or if the writers finally decided to shrug him off, but we get this random story about how James returns to Calvintown, find out that it's a town with one of those "everyone is corrupt" government, and then after meeting a poor kid called Simon Kirby whose mom is unjustly imprisoned, James decides to stay behind and be a champion of the people.

And it might've been a bit believable, but everything just happens so quickly through a series of expositions, and James Olsen's character throughout the past couple of seasons have been so inconsistent that when he decides to leave National City and start up a newspaper in Calvintown to champion truth or whatever (as impractical as that is), yeah, why not? I dunno. I never hated James Olsen in the show, at least I don't think I did, but it'd be hard for me to say that I'll miss him. Hell, even that farewell scene at the bar feels particularly muted for the CW superhero show that has been infamous for wearing its heart on its sleeve.

The other B-plot in the episode is Kara's investigation into William Dey, which also crisscrosses with Nia Nal and Brainy's little lover's spat. Brainy and Lena get a couple of neat scenes, and so do Kara and Nia, and I kind of appreciate that this doesn't end up overtaking the entire episode. At the end of the episode Kara sort of discovers that William Dey is involved in some huge conspiracy... but Dey claims that he's a good guy all along, that the douchebag persona is something he's cultivating to get everyone to hate him, that he actually think Kara's writing is the bomb (such an important thing to emphasize in that conversation that I groaned a little) and also he's a secret agent investigating Andrea Rojas. Okay sure whatever. I'm genuinely unenthused about this character or what he thinks about Kara's writing, or if this "actually super nice secret agent guy" is in fact another facade. The William Dey stuff is decently written and acted enough for me to not really complain about it, but like everything revolving around the CatCo takeover storyline, I'm just sort of passively consuming it until the inevitable Leviathan/Lena Luthor tie-in happens.

Speaking of Lena, she shows up to help out the Super Friends to fix the Phantom Zone Projector to beat Ma'alefa'ak in this episode after Alex goes a bit off the rails. Credit where credit's due, at least the mind-controlled-Alex/J'onn scenes are done well by the actors, and J'onn's heartbreak at being called out as a scum faker loser by the woman she loves like a daughter is well-portrayed. But the episode ends with Ma'alefa'ak teleported into Lena Luthor's lab, and it seems that this is where we're going? The slow buildup to whatever the fuck Lena's master plan is has been interesting, but I'm curious to see where Ma'alefa'ak comes into all this, and how Lena's going to get the martian's mind-altering powers into play.

Overall, though, a pretty underwhelming episode. There were some decent moments in it, but I can't say that any of them particularly appealed to me. James Olsen's sendoff was very muted; the Ma'alefa'ak stuff was repetitive; the William Dey stuff earned a shrug; the Lena stuff is toothless buildup and... eh. I'm not sure what direction Supergirl's heading towards now, but it's one where the episodes feel particularly oddly directionless. I'm not quite sure how to put it into words, but I feel like none of the half-dozen ongoing plotlines feel like they're doing anything for me, y'know?

DC Easter Eggs Corner: 

• Simon Kirby's name is taken from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two comic book authors whose thematic relevance here is that they're the co-creators of DC's first Guardian.
• After being hired as James' photographer, he's quick to call James "Chief", which is what comic-book Jimmy Olsen always calls Perry White. 
• The wind-making alien/metahuman lady is called "Breathtaker", sharing a name and powers with a minor enemy of the Teen Titans, a member of the mercenary supervillain group called the Hangmen.