In this episode of Supergirl, we begin with a real world cross-promotional guest spot on CBS’ The Talk where the hosts welcome Cat as the most powerful woman — or, person, for that matter, as Cat corrects — in National City. When they press her about her friendship with Supergirl, Cat boasts that she’s the kindest and most honorable person she’s ever known. Even if you didn’t know this was a red kryptonite episode, Cat offering such glowing praise of anyone should raise some flags and acts as a heavy-handed foreshadowing that rainbows and puppy dogs aren’t likely to follow.
Picking up from their brief kiss, Winn and Siobhan have escalated to full on broom closet hook-ups. This show is fairly PG with the sex, so far, but it’s definitely implied that they’re getting pretty hot and heavy — something Winn still isn’t sure how to process — but Kara doesn’t want to hear or x-ray any more visuals of them together than she already has. The duo is back to their platonic best friend vibes and it’s downright charming. The entire first half of the episode serves as a reminder that Kara, despite some obvious hiccups, lives a very gentle life.
Even as she speaks with James about the fallout from Lucy’s dumping him, laying the “Kara’s in love with you” bombshell on him, and apparently resigning from CatCo hat trick — there’s no real darkness — just a cheerful well-wishing that with some time things will get better. The presence of the reformed anti-alien Senator Crane is also not enough to bring the first few scenes down. She’s there to help the DEO increase spending; after Kara saved her life earlier that year, she feels she owes them the aid.
Before we can settle into more of the charming life of Kara Danvers, however, she breezes off to a routine fire rescue and in the process stumbles across some out-of-the-way red kryptonite. Although the effects are sudden and aggressive, she doesn’t recognize there’s been a shift until much later. It starts out as a simple costume change — like most red kryptonite iterations across the DC Superman/Supergirl universe — with Kara wearing a form-fitting dress and sharp updos. She’s sassier and even more on her game — throwing Siobhan off hers in the process — which comes across more as boredom than anything else. Even when being briefed on a Fort Rozz escapee at the DEO later on, she isn’t necessarily against the idea of intervening, but bothered that she’s being tasked with what, to her, is the equivalent of desk duty.
Things come to a head, however, when her apathy reaches new levels and she is insulted by the entire concept of bringing in this armored car robbing alien at all and lets him walk. This is where things take a swift left towards full-on malevolence that comes from the full-bodied bitch-mode that Melissa Benoist seems to be drawing powerful parallels to the late Astra in portraying. She is never outright evil per se but she’s already reached a place of ambivalence towards humanity that strikes as the opposite of how Kara normally comports herself.
Escalating even further, Kara takes Cat’s elevator up to present her coffee — warmer for having Kara logic out that it shortened the trip upstairs, which is honestly true and brilliant — which Cat initially enjoys. The brazenness comes across more as cut throat acumen at first, but once this redirects to a specific target — Siobhan — becomes a lot less competitive and more spiteful. Siobhan found security footage of Supergirl allowing the alien to walk and presents it to Cat for a quick and easy way to break a huge story and keep control of the narrative — a good catch, really, journalistically — but Cat is still completely on Supergirl’s side. She just staked her good name on The Talk speaking about how great a role model they both are. Cat pushes it off to be further researched before going public and inciting a panic. She tells Siobhan that it could simply be another Bizarro — a story they probably should’ve all chosen to latched onto and used as an excuse — but Siobhan isn’t so easily sated. She seeks out Perry White — Cat’s competitor and former mentor — and starts to write an email offering the huge scoop for a place on his staff. When Kara overhears, she tricks Siobhan into leaving her station, prints out a copy of the email, and gets her fired in the span of an hour. Cat has also gotten her blackballed from working with White — given her background with him and the circumstances of the attempted disloyal jumping of ship — and Kara all but struts around laughing.
Things have already felt somewhat off, but she entices the boys with tickets she was given by Cat for a job well done to go dancing downtown at a nightclub. They take her up on the offer and things fully spiral out of control. Winn has been trying and failing to get a hold of Siobhan to find out exactly what happened that got her fired and make sure she’s okay — not trying that hard since he’s hanging out at the club downtown, but trying — when Kara arrives in another skin-tight dress with an even sharper attitude than earlier. She all but drags James out onto the dance floor and almost flings her glasses off into the club to expose her true identity. James insists she wear them and when she starts to get aggressive in her dancing with him and the thoughts she’s been supposedly withholding about what really went down with Lucy. She calls Lucy all types of names and settles on the fact that she didn’t deserve James like Kara did and moves to kiss him but James is appalled — both by her words and the actions that clearly indicate to him that something is wrong with Kara — and takes Winn down to the DEO to figure out exactly what’s going on.
There’s a nice bit of meta commentary in this conversation, too: Supergirl is boring since her whole persona is being the ultimate ideal for all that’s good and powerful — both on a physical and a moral level. Supergirl and Superman are often critiqued for being the wholesome superhero. According to many people, including this version of Kara, that’s boring; although some of the criticisms she makes are debatable, it’s refreshing to see the show openly acknowledge the character’s core flaws are by using Kara’s own words.
After Winn and James show up at the DEO, they find out that J’onn and Alex are also on to something being up with Kara. They were thrown by her nonchalant behavior following the prisoner getting away, but when they catch him on their own, he brags that Supergirl let him walk. Alex is furious at the implication but quickly comes to the same conclusion that things are amiss after they find out that Kara has also thrown Cat off a building.
To get back at Cat for embodying the thing she was railing against while dancing with James earlier, Kara visits her at CatCo and threatens her to stop helping her reputation be so spotless. Cat doesn’t really do threats and tries to push back the insistence but ends up tossed off the balcony forty stories until Kara casually zooms down to grab her at the last moment, proof that she is the one in charge, lest Cat forget.
Max Lord arrives at the DEO shortly after to take the blame for the red kryptonite that caused all of this in the first place. He was attempting to set up a trap for Non and crew by recreating the kryptonite that makes Kryptonians powerless, but tried to do so by creating his own version of kryptonite — a synthetic blend — that ended up only altering the personality of Kara in the interim and causing the fire that brought her there to intervene. He is working on an antidote to stop things from getting worse, but he’s firm that he didn’t even really mean to cause Kara harm — this time.
Across town, Cat addresses the city and warns that Supergirl has essentially gone rogue. Rather than pin this on Bizarro — which would probably have been a safer bet — the show does not shy away from making the hard decision to publicly shame their titular hero. Cat explains that the situation is still unfolding but to be on guard for sightings of Supergirl across the city since there is no telling how bad things may get.
Alex shows up at Kara’s apartment to try and track her down, and is thrown when her sister is indeed there but acting like a clone of her late aunt and crew, down to the skin-tight body suit. She threatens Alex directly for having killed Astra and has some choice words about how meaningless her sister’s life would even be without Kara in it. The darkest part of the entire scene — aside from the grim lighting and Kara’s dark laughter after lighting her infamous sweater rack ablaze — is how true a lot of what she says really is. Although it’s twisted and delivered in the cruelest way possible, most of what she says to Alex are the worst things Kara’s ever thought about her sister but never dared even imply to her in conversation. Alex breaks down crying and Kara cackles at her tears. Things have officially reached breaking point.
Senator Crane is equally worried about what this all means for the safety of National City and not so subtly for the DEO as well — having a rogue alien on staff doesn’t make them look good to the rest of the government either — which J’onn also tries to play close to his chest given his own situation. She wants Kara captured and for them all to worry about what’s going on with the red kryptonite later — better that she doesn’t get to the point where she endangers people — than risk waiting to be sure what exactly is causing it.
Max hands Alex what he promises to be the best shot at curing Kara — a gun with a synthetic mixture that should counteract and force out the chemicals causing the change — with a smile that makes his allegiances even more convoluted.
Kara is messing with local bar patrons at their normal take-out place when Alex and J’onn lure her out into public and try to intervene as she mocks the pair of them in front of a gathered crowd. She breaks Alex’s arm for trying to shoot her with the antidote and it’s only after J’onn reveals himself as a Martian that she’s restrained at all in a public skybrawl across the street. Eventually, he pins her to the ground and Alex gets a shot off to get Kara back to normal. In the process, J’onn morphs back to “Hank” and exposes himself as an alien. Instead of fleeing, he kneels and voluntarily goes into custody with the DEO while Alex tearfully sits with an unconscious Kara, off to the side.
When Kara finally comes to, the first thing she asks is if she killed anyone. Alex assures her no, but Kara still breaks down and cries in one of the most moving reaction shots of Melissa Benoist on the show to date. She keeps outdoing herself when it comes to these powerful, emotional beats and it’s tremendously entertaining to watch. Alex tries to calm Kara down, knowing how devastated her sister is to have said those things to her even while under the influence of the synthetic kryptonite. Alex acknowledges that to some degree, they weren’t lies, and perhaps they need to work on communicating better so that they don’t have any built up resentments to deal with in the future. She worries about what’s going to happen to J’onn and that’s a problem that seems yet to be resolved.
Senator Crane is holding Hank in a cell at the DEO and asks him a few invasive questions — to try and figure out what his game was and to find out what happened to the real Hank Henshaw — which Hank provides. Alex stops by afterwards to get an update on what’s going on and to be sadly mad at him for turning himself in when she tried to get him to flee. He assures her that he promised to protect both the Danvers sisters and he couldn’t very well do that while he was on the run. They tearfully place their hands on either side of the glass and seem eager to get this fixed.
Kara stops off at James’ office at work the next day, clearly humiliated for whatever she said or did while under the influence. James shrugs off the actions as being not her own, but there were other things said that did in fact ring true — much like Alex’s conversation before — that left him reeling. Kara tells him that she didn’t say those terrible things about Lucy because she hated her, but because she was jealous of her as she would be anyone James loved. James, clearly recognizing where this conversation is going tries to steer things away; he needs time to process Lucy’s breakup before he starts letting Kara declare her intentions to him. They part ways solemnly with the promise to talk again when he’s had some time to deal.
Kara finishes making the rounds by talking to Cat, as Supergirl, about how much she loves this city and apologizes for her actions. Cat also attempts to shrug it off — which is much harder to do than James, given that she was ejected from the balcony to hundreds of feet below — telling Supergirl that she won’t hold it against her. The duality of Kara versus Supergirl has always been present in no space more directly than at work — the way that Cat encourages all the best things about Kara that come through when she’s acting as Supergirl versus the way she tries to reign in all her more glaring flaws while trying to be the meek and unassuming Kara Danvers. This episode does a great job of showcasing how real human beings have to meet in the middle — a bundle of flaws and feats simultaneously. Kara is lauded as the outspoken, if acerbic and ruthless, version of herself on red kryptonite but is shamed for those same actions as the bumbling and sorrowful Supergirl in the final moments of the episode.
Sometimes the higher in regard you hold a person, the more swift the backlash can be when they’re shown to be human … to be flawed. Ironically, it’s by Kara acting more inhuman that she’s found her greatest success yet, but at what cost? Cat still helps her to see herself as a wholly good person, alien or not, in those final moments and while she has not always been as forthcoming and caring towards Kara, it’s clear that in some ways she’s attempting to foster the same resilience and might that she expects of herself and Supergirl. She’s a lot more understanding of a powerful and confident woman — or person — who falters than one who plays it humble and safe and has never tried to be something greater at all. No one is perfect, certainly, but this show does a great job of showing that — as Cat broadcasts to the city — even heroes fall. That’s why it’s important to build a support system ready and willing to catch you.
- The chemistry shift as a result of Winn is hooking up with Siobhan is absolutely delightful. I’ve long been a bit put off by the way they wrote his pining for Kara — realistically, a drag — before this. The back and forth feels so intensely revitalized and bright, I’m already looking forward to more of their scenes. Please give us wall to wall scenes like the opening scene.
- “Only boring people get bored.” Confirmation that Kara has probably watched Mad Men, for anyone wondering.
- Cat lands on her feet.
- There’s something about Kara just hovering without the cape that is deeply creepy. I thought that Non, Astra, et al were creepy by default of being morally grey but it’s the jumpsuits, I think. They look so human and yet they’re walking on air. It’s a great decision to have Kara do the same because the image makes things all the more disturbing.
- “SHE KILLED MS. GRANT?!” Winn’s reaction was a little over the top but who can blame him. That’s a scary prospect to consider, even for a second.
- The firefighters hanging out with a teeny tiny puppy is the best.
- Thank you for not making her a skimpy outfit wearing version. She was literally peaking in a turtle-necked jumpsuit. Even Smallville’s Clark Kent was flashing more skin than she was. Inverting stereotypes!
- So, Max is a cool guy now? Surely I’ve said those words before, but here we are again. This isn’t just “I’m loyal to my own ends” or “I’m loyal to the safety of the city,” Max’s loyalty goes wherever the wind takes him. Or to Alex. That’s about as close to a through-thread as we’ve gotten with him, but he was useful here. Perhaps that’s a streak he’ll actually keep up more than three episodes for once?
- For Smallville, the red kryptonite episodes were usually a bit of a lark — with obvious exceptions — but if that’s what episodes we have to look forward to from Supergirl, it’s delightful. Like an Outlook reminder every few seasons that Melissa Benoist can act and she’s just waiting on the right situation to truly show off.
- “I’ve base jumped Mt. Kilimanjaro.” Cat’s LIFE, y’all.
Photo Courtesy of CBS
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