Supergirl S05E19 Review: Earth, Wind and Fire

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 19: Immortal Kombat

That sure is an ending of the season. I don't think this season is the worst season of Supergirl... season one or three would probably be the biggest contenders for that, but this fifth season, despite having a lot of great moments, great performances and great story concepts, ultimately sort of felt like it wasn't laid out particularly well. Part of it, of course, could be laid to blame on the coronavirus outbreak forcing a hasty finale for the season, but even from the first half of the season I've already been commenting on how inconsistent things like Leviathan are and how the Kara/Lena storyline felt way too dragged-out. Still, I did enjoy this run of the fifth season, despite its weaknesses.

This finale does seem pretty rushed, though, and I still am kind of reluctant to be too harsh on this episode, considering that they had to adapt the script and scenes for the penultimate episode for this one. We still rushed pretty quickly into the mass of villains that take over the finale, with Lex's little cursory tour of the Leviathan base earning him a magic plot-device pin that would protect him from the anti-alien forcefield that they have erected around their ship. Rama Khan and his two goons -- Tezumak and Sela, each controlling a different The Last Airbender element -- prepare to absorb Kryptonite to murder Supergirl.

We get this moment where Lex shares all of this with Brainy... and there is this moment where Lex gloats about how he'll stop Leviathan after they kill Supergirl and deal with her once and for all. In front of Brainy, who is clearly already showing signs of not fully trusting Lex anymore. And for a while, it does seem like it's just Lex being his idiot and self-assured self, although I do like that it's sort of set up as Lex goading Brainy into doing things on his own? I don't fully buy it, but, again, the intent was there and maybe with more time and more scenes shot, this episode as it was originally conceived wouldn't have felt so jarring.

Supergirl and Lena end up basically sort of teaming up together, although there's still an icy undercurrent that basically amounts to 'don't bring up the past', although we did get a very well-delivered "I made one mistake, and as payback you hurt me in every way imaginable" speech at one point. Kara is at least willing to work together and Lena is chastised due to her overreaction, and, as always, the actresses sell their scenes, so at least it works relatively well. Being a superhero season finale we need our fighty-fighty, and while they buy time for Lena to build an Anti-Kryptonite suit, J'onn and M'gann use their martian powers to shapeshift into fake Supergirl decoys to draw out Leviathan's agents. Also, Alex got her own super-suit (it's something straight out of Mass Effect), and I absolutely love the hilarious scene of Kara screaming in delight and the martians thinking that there's an attack. We get some short confrontations as J'onn, M'gann, Nia and Alex face off against Rama Khan's own backup, with Tezumak controlling and turning into fire, and Sela turning into electricity. None of them really have any personality beyond being minibosses. There's also a B-plot at this point of Alex briefly sneaking into Obsidian North with Kelly's help to investigate Eve's kidnapping of William.

Eventually, after a couple of neat Kara/Lena scenes, Supergirl flies off to save William from a panicking Eve, who's just trying to protect her mother from Lex's assassins. It's an honestly pretty quickly-resolved situation of Supergirl saving William and sort-of befriending Eve. It's mostly interesting due to the interesting situation that episode 17 establishes Eve in, but ultimately this is another plotline that sort of just felt like it was ticked off of a checklist.

The Leviathan Last Airbender trio show up, and... to be fair, the special effects budget really ended up looking impressive particularly in the scene where Rama Khan and his goons show up in clouds of flame, sand and lightning. Kara's Kryptonite Armor is deployed, Iron Man 3 style, and we get a brief fight where she's backed up by M'gann and Nia, before Leviathan retreats again. Eve tells Kara that Leviathan plans to have the huge Obsidian Unity event as a springboard to kill everyone there because of evolutionary god-like reasons or something, and Supergirl ends up donning a set of VR goggles to give a hope speech to everyone there. It's... it's all right, as these Supergirl speeches go, but it does end up feeling kind of off thanks to recent real-world events that they probably didn't foresee happening, since a lot of the world is indeed seeking some solace and release in entertainment. Yeah, this whole 'technology is evil' bit really ended up not coming off particularly well thematically, but eh, Supergirl foils the evil villain's huge mass murder plan.

J'onn, meanwhile, draws out Rama Khan and his two goons by sending a particularly rude telepathic message and while Rama Khan is kind of a very flat villain, his actor Mitch Pileggi had a lot of fun hamming it up as an angry, short-tempered god. While the rest of the Super-Friends fight the Airbender Trio... Lex points out that Supergirl is foiling Gamemnae's plans, and, having figured out that these Leviathan goons answer to some sort of higher power (okaaay? This kind of came out of nowhere, I feel) Lex gets Gamemnae to unleash Andrea Rojas and her Acrata medallion, which feels really shoehorned in... but, hey, at least Andrea gets to participate in the season finale. The huge emotional point, of course, is Lena putting herself in harm's way to protect Supergirl's body from Andrea, giving her own friendship speech to talk Andrea down.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, we get Brainiac-5's storyline in the background, which has been another part of the season that alternates between frustratingly repetitive and interesting, and this episode seems to conclude this long-running sequence. We get a nice bit of Brainy talking to Female Brainy in a bar, basically deciding to take down Leviathan on his own by using the bottle-universe technology, being fine with the idea of sacrificing himself to take down Leviathan if that's what is needed. Again, just like the Kara/Lena storyline, it could've been done better with a lot of heavier focus and better pacing. Still, when Brainy does manage to sneak into the Leviathan base and starts to revert back to his original green-skinned form and has to work through the pain to hack the Leviathan computer, Jesse Rath portrays the scene very well. With Rama Khan and the two goons arriving back to recharge, they get instead sucked into the bottle. We get some cool scenes of Gamemnae starting to glitch and her true metallic-monster form appearing in screens behind her, which is a very cool visual.

Lex then arrives on the Leviathan base, seemingly initially distressed that Brainy has caused his plans to go haywire... until dropping the panicked facade and talking in his normal chessmaster tone, telling Brainy that this is, of course, part of the plan, he just didn't think that Brainy would be so stupid to actually die doing it. And Lex saunters off with the bottle, while Nia (who has been haunted by dreams of Brainy from the previous episode) breaks down from not trying to figure out the Brainy dreams properly. The episode ends with a couple of cliffhangers -- Brainy is seemingly dead, Lex and Lilian have the magic Coluan shrink-bottle, and Gamemnae transforms into her true, terrifying demon-metal-robot form.

Ultimately? Ultimately, this is kind of a mess. We move from plot point to plot point without really giving too many of them any sort of meaningful conclusion, and as I mentioned above, a lot of them feel more like checking off a checklist more than anything. Eve Teschmacher's storyline as a reluctant pawn, the Kryptonite and the Kryptonite armor, a repeat of Andrea being used as a Leviathan assassin, even the Obsidian Unity VR thing felt like it was quickly brought up and resolved rapidly. The focus of this episode is undoubtedly the Kara and Lena working together at last, repairing their relationship, as well as Brainy finally doing something and taking a stand. All framed with Lex Luthor going 'all as planned', of course. And... ultimately, it's a serviceable ending, I suppose. The Lena conflict is resolved in an actually believable manner (episode 18 notwithstanding), most of Leviathan is taken out, and the Obsidian VR murder plot is shut down. This actually serves as a decent season finale, albeit one that has a couple of larger cliffhangers than usual, plus the seeming death of Brainiac-5. The performances of Melissa Benoist, Katie McGrath, Jesse Rath and Jon Cryer do carry a huge chunk of this episode, making it feel at least as a decent closer to Supergirl for a while. It's still messy, though presumably the original intent was for the finale to involve Kara and Lena fighting and taking down Lex. This affirmation of alliance is a good enough end-point, though. Considering events, this is a decent effort.  

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• As noted way back when we talked about Gaememnae and Rama Khan, the Leviathan inner council is based on the ancient warriors in Grant Morrison's JLA run in the ancient nation of Jarnahpur, which the Justice League time-traveled to the past to fight. Tezumak was one of the members of this League of Ancients, a South American monk from a pre-Aztec Meso-American civilization who piloted a mighty ritual armour. enchanted by the gods of his people, which resembled a huge Iron Man suit. 
• Sela was also a member of the League of Ancients, a warrior-lady of unknown origin who lived only for the glory and enjoyment of battle. Alongside the rest of the League of Ancients, Tezumak and Sela would menace the Justice League until they were ultimately betrayed and absorbed by Gamemnae. 
• Eve Teschmacher's (I have apparently been mis-spelling her name for the better part of two seasons) arc in this episode is loosely based on the Eve Teschmacher in the 1978 Superman movie, where Superman also convinced Teschmacher to help him in exchange for him saving her mother.