Supergirl, Season 6
It's just that I never got to really watching any of them when the TV shows came back due to real life and other interests getting in the way. I did, eventually, watch some of the shows, but it was pretty slow going. For your reference, the first of these was done in early 2024! I decided to go with Supergirl first, with its final season. I really don't think there's much content to really deep-dive in a lot of these episodes, so I'm going to do what I did with the last Legends of Tomorrow season I watched, and do a 'partial season' review like this.
And... I'll probably have to explain how I do these reviews; I didn't write all of this article in one go, but rather watched an episode and wrote a couple of paragraphs for each episode, so on and so forth. I don't think I had the encyclopedic knowledge of the CW-verse that I used to have, nor do I want the pressure of having to maintain that standard, and honestly, nor did I have the time or interest to do so again. But if you see some minor inconsistencies in the reviews, that is what to blame. These TV episode reviews are also tricky to write because sometimes there's a natural mid-season cutoff point, but sometimes I just talk more in certain episodes compared to others.
But I still do want to talk about these shows. So while it will probably take some time, you'll probably see me do The Flash, Black Lightning, Legends of Tomorrow, Stargirl and Batwoman. At the very least, the TV shows that I have covered here. I know there are a lot of other DC TV shows -- Pennyworth, Peacemaker, the Penguin, Lois and Clark... those, I think, I'll reserve for much later, and I'll have to see if I like them enough to talk episode-per-episode. (I'd much rather talk about the new Batman or Superman cartoons). This has nothing to do with the soon-to-be-released Superman movie, since I've been doing this rewatch since early last year, but it's a nice little coincidence that I could post the first of these close to the release date of that movie.
Anyway, Supergirl time! Last we left off, we had some storyline about Lex Luthor finally becoming a villain with the power of a VR Metaverse, Lena and Kara have a bit of a BFF spat, and also Brainiac was pretending to be evil and ended up getting caught up in the whole thing...
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Episode 1: Rebirth
And, well, 'Rebirth'... it's less of a season six premiere, but the final episode of the previous season. And I really can't be too mean to the previous season since it was haphazardly put together during the zenith of the COVID-19 restrictions. And... it's a okay ending, I suppose, with the caveat that I really have no memory of a lot of the supporting characters when I watched this episode. I know the big names like J'onn, Alex, Lena, Lex, Lilian, Nia and Brainy well enough, but I really find myself having to look up a lot of the other characters (particularly the CatCo plot). And since we jump from one character to the next a lot as we establish the sheer scope of Lex Luthor's latest ego-driven plot, we then go straight into dismantling it. It doesn't help that the whole Leviathan / Obsidian North / Lex plot is kind of convoluted, although I do think that around 10 minutes in, the show does the rather understandable decision of just focusing entirely on Lex. The, uh, robot lady from Leviathan ends up getting blown up in the opening act, and then we focus on Lex's plan to make everyone uploaded to the VR-world agree with him, and then kill everyone else with satellites.
And then the episode just... barrels through moments that's probably meant to be a bit more emotional, but everything just kind of feels perfunctory even among CW standards. J'onn and M'gann have this whole talk about the significance of the mind-meld, which... leads to zero payoff other than a big CGI explosion scene. Brainy trying to be evil because of logic, which was one of the few plot points that I remember from the previous season (certainly not because it's good) is just handwaved aside with a uwu-I-love-you handwave. Lena and Kara also just basically kind of shrug and return to being good friends with an apology. I'm also not entirely sure why Supergirl went through all the grandiosity of having to record some memoirs of her time on Earth, was it something I missed in season 5?
Anyway, Lex shows up with his hypocritical 'humans shouldn't be forced to bow down to alien ideals' while being perfectly happy to enforce his own ideals on him. We get a rather bland fight, Supergirl dies for five seconds before some deus ex machina brings her back to life. Lex... very randomly dances in the Fortress which is quite cringey, before the rather haphazard editing of the climax leads to Lex losing his powers, Supergirl shunted away to the Phantom Zone, and also Lena uses Myriad to wipe Lex and Lilian's memories of Kara's identity. Ultimately the whole episode feels like it's just really trying to clean slate in the neatest possible way while also dealing with all the scheduling issues. It is... functional, but I can't say it's a particularly good watch regardless.
Episode 2: A Few Good Women
So this kickstarts the first half of Supergirl's sixth season, where... thanks to the lead actress being on maternity leave, the titular Supergirl had to film all of her scenes separately from the rest of the cast, leading to her showing up only in Phantom Zone sequences separate from the rest of the regular cast. Which, under better writers, might perhaps lead to something poignant about how the world is coping without Supergirl. Which is a nice thread to pull! Under CW, it's just a lot of angst. In other words, we're back to normalcy for these shows.
The Earth storyline has our heroes deal with the fallout of the season premiere, with Lex Luthor being put to stand on trial. It's... it's okay. Jon Cryer is entertaining enough to hold his own in the proceedings, particularly when he pulls off the 'arrogant self-assured politician' card that ends up getting to charm the faceless jury, and his genuine surprise at the fact that he won the trial by being honest. Lex re-framing Eve and Lena as being jilted or hysterical women is probably one of the actually well-done Supergirl takes at feminism in that it's not shoved in our face so much but it just... plays out.
Our heroes attempt to rescue Kara from the Phantom Zone, and we get a decent discussion between J'onn and M'gann, as well as Alex, about whether to put on the 'soldier mode' or 'empathy mode', which... really isn't that black-and-white in real life, but I appreciate them showing our heroes -- the two that view Kara as family instead of having a hero-worship of her like Nia and Brainiac -- being super-stressed in response to Kara's disappearance. There is some technobabble about why they can't access the Phantom Zone properly (something about the Crisis breaking it up) and some of the Game of Thrones wight-cosplayer Phantoms broke out, but the action scenes are clearly playing second-fiddle in this season.
The Phantom Zone plot is... it's there, and probably the weakest part of the episode. (Second-weakest, I guess, since I have no investment at all with the the Z-list CatCo plot) Supergirl wakes up and fights the Phantoms on her end, and meets... her dad, Zor-El! I really do think they burned this 'the parent is actually alive' plot point to the death with Kara's mom, though, and I really didn't care about Zor-El showing up here. Again, it's obviously just there to have Supergirl have a plot in a Supergirl show, but it feels like some of Arrow's more uninspired island outings.
Episode 3: Phantom Menaces
This episode feels very much like a 'connective tissue' episode, going through the same ground as the previous episode without the novelty of being the episode that introduces these concepts to us. The Supergirl-in-Phantom-Zone plot has Zor-El be abducted and Supergirl meet a brand-new characer, the banished fifth-dimensional imp princess Nyxlygsptlnz, based on Mxy's girlfriend in the original comics. She's lost her powers after being banished by her dad, but she gets them back by a literal motivational speech from Supergirl, which does feel kind of unearned? The Phantom Zone scenes generally happen so fast that it's a bit hard to feel emotionally invested.
J'onn and Alex continue a bit of their storyline from the previous episode -- J'onn gets a nice scene with M'gann that puts into context the whole 'emotional bond' thing they did in the season premiere. The 'A-plot', such as it is, has our heroes del with the fact that the Phantoms that hitched a ride on the not-vampire alien last episode wreak some havoc, with M'gann being one of the victims. It's a pretty all right action scene, for what it is.
But it's Brainy and Lena that ends up having the best emotional moment here. There's a very great scene where Brainiac, who has activated his emotional circuits or whatever, gets very excited at the suggestion of killing Lex Luthor and lists the many, many different ways that he could do it. This leads to a discussion with Lena where Jesse Rath delivers a great 'explosion of emotion' moment as Brainy just breaks stuff out of frustration. Lena, meanwhile, is all set on being cheeky and stealing funds from Lex to fund hospitals... until Lex does the rather darkly-hilarious "what did you expect was going to happen" thing and blows up the hospital. This is honestly the sort of thing that would make a harder stance like what Brainy is suggesting (or even Phantom Zoning him, no?) more palatable? But the show decides to spin it into a "cut off the toxic friends/family" with Lena deciding to step away from LexCorp and refuse to engage in the sibling rivalry that Lex has been stringing her along for her entire life. It's neat, for what it is.
Episode 4: Lost Souls
And this episode very clearly splits the story into two parts -- the Phantom Zone part and the real-world part. I probably have the least to say about this, other than the fact that our heroes dealing with Kara and going through a "What Would Supergirl Do" mentality feel a bit more strongly shown in this episode. It's just that the plotline is not quite as interesting. The Prime Phantom or whatever starts reproducing more and more, there's something about M'gann having a sliver of a phantom's soul in her, and there's a huge, dramatic moment where Lena and Alex have to make a choice on whether to use the episode's MacGuffin (which can only work once!) to create a portal to save Supergirl, or to revert the psychic aliens back to their human forms. Oh, and random Ghostbusters ripoff machines are also utilized. There's a scene of the party dwindling as they charge into the Phantom lair in the sewers.
It's all right stuff, and I felt like the arguments were a bit more genuine than the last two episodes. I felt like Lena's struggle about 'thinking differently' than the other heroes, and finding that it's okay, is a much better "real-world emotional problems translated into a superhero crimefighting setting" than the Lena/Lex sequence in the previous episode.
The Phantom Zone stuff is... also a bit better, if predictable, mostly because Nyxly is a bit less of a cipher. I really didn't care about her introduction last week, but seeing her as a trickster that projects her own problems with her dad towards Kara is quite interesting, giving us an antagonist for that half of the story. Nyxly stabs Zor-El and tries to get her and Kara to go back to the third dimension, but when Kara rebuffs Nyxly's offer, she gets vengeful, forcing Kara to smash the portal back home. Nyxly appears to have been vaporized, but it's honestly rather obvious that it's one of those fake-out superhero deaths. The Kara/Nyxly stuff is all right, but one problem I still have is Zor-El. Who, despite being the father of our main character, feels less of a character and more of a plot device.
Episode 5: Prom Night
As another cheeky way to get around Melissa Benoist's pregnancy, we now start off with a two-parter where our heroes time-travel to the past, so that Supergirl can still show up in the Supergirl show, but played by a different, younger actress. Admittedly, the handwave-y excuse to all of this is kind of bullshit. I highly doubt that the only Supergirl DNA that they have lying around requires them to travel back to 2009, and if time travel is required, why they didn't call on their sister-show time-travelers, the Legends of Tomorrow, for help. But hey, an excuse plot is an excuse plot.
The episode itself is just a bunch of fun. Brainy and Nia get to explore a bit more of their character arc this season, with Nia struggling with impostor syndrome and wanting to ask her mom (who's living in 2009) for advice, while Brainy is struggling to deal with his mission imploding around him and is stress-eating. Throw young Kara and young Alex into the mix -- Alex comes off as a control-freak but is also struggling with so much that her family's sacrificed for her sister; while Kara wants to prove herself but isn't as independent as she thinks she is. Oh, and thanks to Crisis retconning, Kenny Li is back alive again, though I had to wiki him to remember who Kara's old boyfriend is.
There's a fair amount of genre comedy here with Brainy being dragged into clubs and whatnot -- which I don't care for, but the actor sells the reaction so well that I don't mind. We have two antagonists -- a young Cat Grant (played by a different actress, which is genuinely impressive) trying to investigate the 'miracles' of this small town, while two generic alien bounty hunters called Mitch and Naxim Tork act as the obligatory threat that's preventing Brainy and Nia from doing a quick zip-in, zip-out mission. The excuse plot is just pretty hammy time travel shenanigans, but I do appreciate them trying to tie into the season's "who is Supergirl to you" overarching plot by having a young Kara and a young Alex be the ones to ask it.
Episode 6: Prom, Again!
The second part of the prom two-parter is... it's there. I must admit that I wasn't particularly invested on any of the actual storylines. The zoo-menagerie aliens are such flat episodic villains that I didn't even bother to remember their names, and I ended up remembering why I found Cat Grant kind of insufferable in the first season of Supergirl. Even without the poorly-handled feminist rants in season one (this episode has a much better female-empowerment side with Kara, Nia and Cat), I really didn't find Cat's "fuck everyone, my career comes first" personality to be particularly endearing. Her origin story at the end is nice enough, but I found her to be quite irritating when her role is to wander around and break everyone's plans and extend the episode to fit its runtime... and the whole 'let's rewind time a couple of hours' solution was nowhere as engaging enough to be worth the screentime the episode dedicates to it.
Despite that, though, I did find that the actual emotional bits to be pretty well-acted, which is what the season seems to aim to do. Nia finding her confidence was kind of expected, although her conjuring a bad CGI pink cougar from her dreams is unexpected. I did find the short bits of resolution to young Kara and young Alex about Alex's control-freak big sister tendencies; as well as young Kara showing that she has bigger plans for her life to young Kenny to both be done well, but I also felt like all of these scenes could've been very easily integrated to the previous episode. (I felt like I would've given more of a shit about Kenny Li if he's an actual character instead of being just that one guy from an older flashback). There are some bits and bytes of your typical rom-com tropes, but not quite enough to justify all of it being stretched to a full episode, I feel.
Episode 7: Fear Knot
The last episode in this initial batch of "Melissa Benoist is unavailable" batch is... an interesting one. I like it a bit better than the high school two-parter, although it does admittedly get a bit repetitive. After getting the plot device from the past to track down Kara's location in the Phantom Zone, J'onn reveals that their headquarters is actually a secret spaceship and they travel into the Phantom Zone. With one last hurrah for the whole 'phantom' concept, J'onn warns everyone that the Phantoms might cause hallucinations... and that's what the episode leads to. Admittedly, I wasn't paying full attention and was rolling my eyes at how utterly stupid-for-the-sake-of-being-stupid Alex Danvers was when she got into an argument with J'onn and locks him in a cage, but turns out that we keep zipping back to this time period two minutes ago and showing the hallucinations everyone is having.
It all relates to their fears in some way -- Alex is afraid of being the reason that their situation is fucked up, Lena deals with a 'Kelpie' which also ties to her mother's death, Nia deals with a situation where the time she take to interpret her dreams is too long and leads to their doom (which is probably the one plot thread here that flows smoothly from previous episodes)... it's all nice and well and good, but it honestly is a bit too repetitive and I really do wonder if the ideas of these characters being subjected to fear visions wouldn't have been done better for the first five or so Supergirl-less episodes dealing with the Phantoms. As it is, by the time the third vision rolls in it just feels like we're burning screentime. The conclusion of this episode also feels rushed and leads to a bit of a 'so what' with the fear visions, as some of our heroes just... get over it. They beat the visions and manage to rescue Kara and Zor-El. Oh, and there's also a subplot of Zor-El giving Kara a whole hope speech... which is also a huge miss in my opinion because of the sheer lack of time that we've spent with Zor-El throughout the season.
Still, this is technically the 'midseason finale' of Supergirl's sixth season, with Supergirl and Zor-El rescued from the Phantom Zone and Nyxly hitching a ride. And... I don't think it's anywhere as messy as the previous season was, but it was definitely quite strangely structured.
Episode 8: Welcome Back, Kara
After the Phantom Zone plot and with Melissa Benoist finally rejoining the main cast, we get a bit of a breather episode to settle back in before Nyxly or Luthor comes back as a villainous force. And for a good part of this episode it deals with Kara's PTSD and a "it's okay not to be okay" moral, where she finally breaks down and admits that the Phantom Zone wasn't a nice fun trip and she's feeling a lot of weight from all the trouble that her disappearance has caused. Thus is mirrored, albeit less heavily, by a similar sentiment from Lena and Nia discussing their motherly woes.
Zor-El's return and introduction to human society becomes a bit of a catalyst of this episode's superheroic plot. There was a brief moment where he shows up as 'Uncle Archie' in CatCo which disappointingly does not lead to any actual hijinks. Zor-El tries to rush headlong into helping Earth -- in the way that he failed to help Krypton. Finding Earth's polluted seas to be the thing to obsess about, he reprograms the robot Kelex to clean the ocean. The plot is pretty standard 'good intentions marred by a lack of care', as Kelex gets infected by DEO alien trash, goes nuts, and morphs into a giant trash golem -- a far cooler CGI effort than the previous 7 episodes. They beat the robot with some teamwork, and we get a Superman IV: Quest for Peace homage with Supergirl chucking the giant trash golem into the sun.
Zor-El then decides to go to Argo City to meet his wife and confront his past, which... I honestly can say that while the events of this episode is nice enough for him, I really am uninvested with Zor-El as a character and I'm genuinely not sure what reviving him brings. Oh, there's also a CatCo subplot with them trying to make an expose about Luthor. Kara clashes with her boss, and her love interest (?) has moved on in the intervening time. I like the threads being built up that CatCo is going to matter to the Super Friends' legacy, but I also don't particularly find it delivered in a particularly interesting way.
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And I think that's a nice place to stop for now. Tune in next time for the next batch of episodes!
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