Supergirl S05E15-16 Review: VR Games

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 15: Reality Bytes; Episode 16: Alex in Wonderland

Episode 15: Reality Bytes
We continue on with the whole Obsidian North VR storyline, and for both of these episodes, it's basically a bit of a late introduction to the concept of the whole VR-world thing. We see this in glimpses last episode and it's been mentioned a couple of times throughout the season, but Obsidian North's whole VR goggles thing just felt like a weird thing in the periphery while we focus on different things. "Reality Bytes" has a main storyline where the J'onn and Alex Manhunter P.I. duo go off to investigate a missing person case, another pretty fun, if, again, standalone plotline, and said missing person case leads to the fact that Obsidian's VR-land is able to basically be exploited. Shocker.

Anyway, the visuals and the plotline as J'onn and Alex track bartender Al's missing brother Trevor is pretty neat, because we learn that apparently there's a bug in Obsidian North that allows someone to bypass all the failsafes and prevent them from ever getting out of VR-land, and Trevor has ended up being trapped in a nightmarish torturous house-of-horrors by crazy programmer Richard Bates, who is angry that Trevor is having, well, VR sex with his wife. Which... holy fuck, Obsidian North, do you not even have guidelines for these things? Without even going into the problem of underage users of the VR lenses, do they think that this isn't going to be one of the first things that people would do in a VR land? We get a pretty decent, tense build-up to the crime, though, and it's a very solid sci-fi story through and through.

More interestingly -- and something that gets built up upon in the next episode -- is the fact that the very pro-Obsidian and pro-technology Kelly, in her first moment of real relevance outside of being a satellite character, is extremely disturbed to realize that the very bug that allowed Richard Bates to turn VR-utopia-land into a torture house is something that came up during testing and something that Kelly had reported. I do think this is smart; putting a member of the supporting cast as someone who's supporting the whole VR lenses thing means a lot more in making the VR situation ambiguous and more of a debate compared to it just being Andera Rojas.

In the B-plot, Nia discovers that some asshole bigot is attacking the trans community and scaring her poor roommate in order to draw Dreamer out, and it's... it's definitely a better way to do an LGBT-inclusive storyline than Batwoman's tenth episode. This episode's Nia story still has the subtlety of a brick to the face, but it works with what we know about Nia's character, and we even get a classic "are superheroes allowed kill scum?" angst bit thrown in. The plotline is extremely simple, and some asshole punk with a knife really can't hope to stand up against Dreamer and her brand-new glow-whip trick, but the acting and Nia's clear frustration and anger, and her attempt to rein that anger in, is definitely done well. It's just that I do feel like the Nia storyline could've really been given more time to breathe, and the dialogue could be written to be a bit less "lifted from an angry internet forum poster"... although I suppose that it fits the sort of character that the transphobic punk is supposed to represent. Nia Nal is a character that Supergirl definitely under-uses, and while not perfect, this is certainly a neat spotlight on her. Other decent smaller scenes include Brainy slowly and methodically helping out Nia in the background and informing the authorities of other assholes that target trans people; while Kara ends up being a neat mentor to Nia at the end of her story.

Anyway, a pretty solid and fun episode overall, even if it does feel a bit too standalone. The episode does end with a neatly ominous beat of Old Ominous Lady Margot taking Richard's comatose body and putting it in some sort of bizarre body-holding facility that can't be up to any good.
________________________

Episode 16: Alex in Wonderland
And we finally get a proper sense of the VR storyline, and how deep the VR rabbit hole goes. It certainly doesn't take much for the audience to realize that Leviathan's big sinister and insidious plan involves the VR lenses, and that Andrea Rojas is their unwitting pawn for whatever they plan to do about it. And the plan is... to make people be unaware that they're stuck in VR-land, and have them think that VR-land is reality? And then kidnap their bodies and store them in Margot's evil warehouse of cocooned comatose people?

This episode is also heavily Alex-centric, which is awesome. Less awesome is the revelation that after being MIA since... season three? Season two? Since forever ago, Jeremiah Danvers has just fucking died off-screen due to a heart attack, and so we'll never get any sort of follow up to him trying to escape Project Cadmus or any of that jazz. Utterly bizarre and pretty poorly done. Still, Alex is working through a lot of grief, ranting about how Jeremiah was a wonderful father to Kara and always wanted to protect her, but essentially abandoned Alex. Not inaccurate, but Alex is clearly projecting a lot of her grief, and the scene at the beginning of the episode of her alienating Kara and Kelly is definitely a very well-done one showing how ugly grief can make someone.

So after getting drunk on wine, Alex ends up deciding to put on those fancy-schmancy Obsidian North VR contact lenses, and lets herself loose in a world where she is Supergirl. I'm not sure how the logistics of VR-land works, and how VR-land is able to craft such a tailor-made and accurate representation of a top-secrete government facility and its staff. Does it draw inspiration from Alex's memories? And if so, how many ethical rules is it breaking?

The biggest complaint, though, is the fact about how much of Alex's wandering around in VR-land being Supergirl and whatnot has very little to do with mourning Jeremiah or her initial fight with Kara. There's the unbridled joy as Alex ends up being Numero Uno in this new world instead of playing second-fiddle either as a daughter or as a superhero, and that's neat, but I don't think that emotional plot thread is followed through in a satisfying manner. The actual showcase of how dangerous VR-land's attempt at making at least some of its users lose their touch with the real world is amazingly done, though, with Alex-Supergirl finding a couple of users that feel... a bit off, but maybe they're just kooky or really into LARP-ing, yeah? And then she starts losing touch with reality herself, being baffled that there are two Supergirls, and then ripping out her VR lenses and waking up to the real, solid hard reality... that she's Supergirl. That bit is greatly done. Also greatly done is the over-exaggerated scenery-chewing bits that the virtual versions of Hank Henshaw and Brainiac-5 are doing. David Harewood has too much fun playing the Saturday Morning Cartoon version of Hank Henshaw.

The actual resolution of the plot is all right. We get some Kelly focus, which is welcome, and as the formerly biggest supporter of Obsidian North, her basically trying to get Alex to focus and accept reality -- the reality where her father's dead and she's not Supergirl -- is neat in concept, but in execution it's just underwhelming. And it's basically just "life sucks, accept the parts of it that suck and move on". I guess there's something to say about Alex being super self-independent that the avatar that Kelly sends in is a younger Alex instead of Kara or someone else, but it's a bit obvious that Melissa Benoist isn't available because she's sitting in the director's chair.

I'm also not 100% sure what makes the VR-mind-takeover works. Is Leviathan specifically targeting some specific people, or is it just literally just random? Because presumably a lot of the people that Margot abducts are people like Richard Bates that are essentially dispensable, otherwise we'd get a lot more people like Alex where their family members return to find them with red eyes half-dead on the sofa or on the bed or something.

In the B-plot is another Kelly storyline before Kelly gets wrapped back into rescuing Alex. Kelly gets approached by William Dey, who's super convinced that Lex Luthor is evil and that maybe he's the mastermind behind the VR glitch, and they basically discover that some of the people that have logged into VR-land for too long are actually missing... and then William enters the Warehouse of Evil only for a hologram to make it a so-near-yet-so-far bit. A far more interesting way to take William's character as a conspiracy-paranoid investigative reporter than the forced romance we've been having in the past couple of episodes. Andrea Rojas is also involved in a brief B-plot of her own where she's apparently not very aware of the mysterious glitches in her products and whatnot, but she still has enough of a soul to want to help out when things actually get risky. I still don't really care about either one of these characters, but this episode is good effort in trying to make them relevant. (Oh, and post-Crisis Eve Tessmacher is working for Rojas now. Okay?)

Overall, a clunky episode, but one with a very strong protagonist. Chyler Leigh's performance throughout this episode is A-star all throughout, and it's a pretty strong story for Alex despite the lack of cohesion with the framing Jeremiah-death storyline, which is still handled pretty poorly. I'm still not fully sold on the VR storyline, for sure, but at least it seems that we're going somewhere and I really would like to see Leviathan actually do something and be just a mite bit more involved in the events going on.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The dating app Upswipz was featured in the third season of Legends of Tomorrow, founded in part by Ray Palmer. 
• Jeremiah Danvers hasn't been seen since... season 2, I believe? The real-world Psi is a recurring secondary antagonist in season three.