Supergirl S05E13-14 Review: What If?

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 13: It's A Super Life; Episode 14: The Bodyguard

Episode 13: It's A Super Life
As with its two cousin shows, Supergirl celebrates its 100th episode with a nostalgia-laden look back through its five-season-long history, and... and it's an interesting way that we go through this, as we get the glorious return of Mr. Mxyzptlk. Humbled by his defeat at the hands of Supergirl, and also court-mandated by those pesky lawyers and judges in the 5th dimension, Mxyzptlk shows up at Kara's apartment to make amends, and it's an interesting way as Mxyzptlk basically offers Kara a one-time deal to change an aspect of her history and repair her massive rift with Lena, taking us on a trip back through the past couple of seasons of Supergirl. The way that Mxy's magic works in this episode is set up and displayed pretty interestingly. Kara will actually have a chance to basically replay the events that happened, like a video game autosave feature, and actually be able to change history.

And that's really the whole plot of the episode, with us just going into the various major events where Kara could've told Lena about her secret identity, and maybe a world where Kara doesn't even meet Lena at all, and it's so very, very interesting. This sort of history-laden "what if?" and "for want of a nail" stories tend to be the basis of bland Elseworlds comic concepts if not done well, but this episode jumps back and forth from various periods in time, and actually having the story be rooted in the show's 100-episode-long history is way, way more engaging than it would've otherwise been. Likewise, the "don't fuck with time" moral is actually a lot more interesting with the fact that Mxy keeps Supergirl safe during her sojourn into what-if-land, while allowing Kara to, via trial and error, pick and choose how to spend her wish.

Plus, Mxyzptlk's very, very dry humour (and the bunch of meta jokes, like him complaining about the amount of exposition in season 3) yet his actual, genuine attempt to help Supergirl out is pretty neat, and I do really like the fact that this episode actually brings in a fair bit of past-season stars like Agent Liberty, Mon-El, Reign, Winn (again!) and Thomas Coville to act out the 'what-if' moments of those seasons.


Of course, what we do learn in this episode tells us that Lena Luthor's abandonment issues... really run deep, and while Kara's attempt to change more recent events predictably ends in what's essentially the same thing of Lena being angry at the betrayal, turns out that changing things from nearly the get-go isn't that much different either. Kara revealing the truth prior to Mercy's attack on L-corp in season four, or during the Reign storyline in season three, ends up with Lena being absolutely furious either way, and the domino effect ends up with unforseen deaths, including one timeline where it's even Kara herself that dies, and another where Lena, Sam and Mon-El all die during the Reign event.

Kara then goes all the way to the start of her relationship with Lena and reveals her secret identity almost immediately after trying to tell Lena how she's totally interested in trusting her and being her friend, and kudos to both Benoist and McGrath for making this scene be pretty dang heartwarming. And this alternate timeline ends up being very, very sunny and happy... but then this leads to a massive resurgence of the Cult of Rao, and in alternate-world, Ben Lockwood ends up being radicalized anyway and ends up exposing Supergirl's identity to the world by holding Lena Luthor and Thomas Coville hostage, and said identity reveals ended up with the deaths of Kara's other friends.

Kara's last wish is to get Mxy to take her to a timeline where she never has any sort of relationship with Lena at all, and because this is still a superhero episode, this leads to a fight with stakes as this timeline is apparently one where fifth-dimensional magic somehow doesn't work, and Lena is basically the dictator ruler of the world after having no friend to lean on and murdering Lex Luthor and ruling National City with an iron fist. Also, she's a Metallo. It's basically a massive excuse to gather all of the available Super-Friends for a massive action scene, with Lena employing Reign and a brainwashed Brainiac 5 against the assembled forces of the Super-Friends,  which is admitterdly pretty cool.

Kara and Mxy, with the help of their friends, manage to escape this darkest timeline by getting Mxy's magic 5th-dimensional hat back because, sure, why not? But the experience basically ends up with Kara deciding that, hey, it's best to not think about what could have been, and instead accept her mistakes and decisions, whatever they may be. While the episode is definitely a bit more protagonist-morality-centric, I totally believe that Lena Luthor is the type of character who would definitely overreact that much. Whatever the case, Kara ends up freeing herself from the massive amount of guilt and self-loathing she's been feeling since Lena finds out her identity, and shows up in front of Lena to tell her that, hey, she's done feeling sorry for herself and Lena's responsible for the rest of her decisions in the future. It's an interesting way to give Kara a fair bit of character development, and since I'm honestly more than a bit tired about Lena's woe-is-me crazy monologues, I guess it's a neat way to move on from that.

Overall, though, the episode is great. Kara and Mxyzptlk play off each other amazingly well, the development and the history of the show being explored are likewise done well. A pretty great entry before we jump back into the whole Leviathan-Luthor storyline.
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Episode 14: The Bodyguard
It can't be all winners, though, and we're back in a very typical episode that's finally settling down on the main storyline of the season. Without the fun distractions of guest stars or a nostalgia-driven what-if scenario, "The Bodyguard" goes back into a combination of the storylines that we're going to explore this season and... and my biggest problems that I said during my review of the Winn two-parter still stands. The fact that we're basically just ignoring the chunk of episodes at the beginning of the season as a weird anomaly, as something that should've happened and most of our main characters are aware of but didn't actually happen is bizarre.

"The Bodyguard" itself isn't a terrible episode, though! It's a solid hour of superhero television, and while I do decry the repetitive nature of what we're doing post-Crisis, this episode seems to be laying a lot of groundwork for the rest of the season and finally doing, well, some of that exposition that Mxyzptlk lampshades last episode. The villain of the week is a Chlorophyllian, as our heroes -- mostly the newly-minted P.I. duo of J'onn and Alex -- go around and look for who's threatening Andrea Rojas and her company's huge VR push. Thanks to Lex Luthor pulling some strings to impress Leviathan, Lex ends up stringing Supergirl along and basically gang-pressing her to be Andrea Rojas's bodyguard. The plotline is mostly fun (if throwaway) detective work as the assassin turns out to be a lady called Amy Sapphire, an alien whose husband died by suicide after being addicted to VR tech, because technology is bad or something. The technology-morals stuff isn't... being handled particularly well, I feel, and the very phoned-in excuse that "the VR helped people who's scared because of the terrorist attack cope" also feels like it's just there to offer a token counter-argument. If nothing else, though, it does finally bring in the promised Luthor-vs-Leviathan bit, even if it's still moving at a pretty glacial pace.

The B-plot is Lena, who, thanks to some encouragement from Lex, ends up testing Project Non Nocere on humans... particularly those in the prison. Basically it's a pretty interesting, self-contained bit; Lena realizes that just merely removing aggression isn't enough, because then some people ends up being taken over by their desire to have vengeance, as Lena finds from a meek prisoner. Afterwards, though, she fixes it so yeah? Lex doesn't really do much other than his typical subtle manipulation (which is far more entertaining than when he was a generic card-carrying villain during Crisis itself) but his talk about how Lena shouldn't let her obsession with Supergirl do her in because it's Lex's obsession with Superman that did him in is... an interesting thing to bring up.

In the C-plot barrel, we get the show's honestly pretty banal shipping of William Day and Kara, which... some people might like (and, judging by my brief look in review sites, most people hate), but I just am so indifferent to the relationship or the character at all. Brainy gets a neat little scene where he talks to one of his alters (the jacket one) about Lex, which is neat, while Alex angsts about the lack of a weapon and J'onn gives him a shape-shifting arm gauntlet thing. Also, in what is easily the most eye-rolling bit of "been there, done that", Andrea Rojas activates her Acrata teleporting powers, and at this point I genuinely wonder what we gain by having a repeat of this instead of having Andrea keep the Acrata powers through the Crisis. Eh. Overall, an all right episode.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Mr. Mxyzptlk last appeared (played by a different actor, which Mxy lampshades) in the season 2 episode "Mr. and Mrs. Mxyzptlk".
• Mxyzptlk brings Kara to revisit the following episodes: the season 2 episode "The Adventures of Supergirl", the season 3 episodes "Trinity" and "Shelter from the Storm", and the season 4 episodes "Fallout" and "Will the Real Miss Tessmacher Please Stand Up". 
• Mxyzptlk references the Hat, who's part of Manchester Black's Elite organization, and reveals that the Hat got his powers from Mxy. In a roundabout way, this also explains why Supergirl's Mxyzptlk goes around hatless, when Mxy's bowler hat is a prominent part of all of his character designs over the years.