This episode of Supergirl begins picking up on several stories that were still unresolved, but from much earlier this half of the first season. We learn a lot about the dual mysterious backgrounds of both J’onn J’onzz and Cat’s estranged son, Adam.
The alien side of things deals with an alien that is in town because Alex convinced J’onn to use his powers in the disaster that was last week’s spy games at Lord Technologies. Apparently, besides leaving a security guard without any memories, J’onn using his powers acts as an energy source that draws White Martians to National City in an effort to finally exterminate his race once and for all. We see — in a series of grisly and expensive-looking CGI flashbacks to life on Mars — J’onn and family being rounded up as the Green Martians are overtaken by beastly looking “White Martians” which came from underground and now dominate the smaller population of Green Martians.
At a political rally downtown where an anti-alien senator, Miranda Crane (played by the fantastic Tawny Cypress), is trying to convince the public that they are in danger because of these unearthly visitors and must band together and build a dome if we have to. It’s a delightfully bonkers escalation to an already realistic amount of bigoted rhetoric out there, currently, with building fences or walls to keep “aliens” out of our country. This is taking it one further and trying to keep them off the entire planet, which despite being insane, garners a pretty full rally. Of course in the middle of the anti-alien rally an alien attacks — making their platform all the stronger — but James, tasked with taking photos for CatCo and getting a quote that’ll serve as the clickbait Cat needs for her website, hits a nifty little Supergirl button on his watch that alerts her to the crisis. Kara arrives in time to break up the fight before too many people are hurt or killed and she finds a banged up senator wandering in a parking garage having escaped the alien.
J’onn, for his part in things, is frozen in place in fear when the alien storms the rally — which is where we first learn about the terrible history he shares with the monster — and is embarrassed that he didn’t jump into action and help in the moment. Alex insists he’s just keeping his cover sound, but he’s suddenly less interested in keeping a lid on his secret life. What’s a little confusing here is that J’onn doesn’t have to expose himself as being anyone other than Hank Henshaw. It’s what Kara’s currently doing over at CatCo. In fact, he could more easily do this since all he’d need to do is shift into someone else before shifting into his natural visage. Instead of taking random vacation time as Hank, he starts to consider if killing this Martian is worth his exposure as an alien running the DEO. Regardless, he is eager to reign vengeance as he explains that not only did the White Martians take over the planet, they began death camps that put the men to work, leaving the women and children to be burned alive. It’s a grisly flashback and an even grimmer reality when Alex sees that he’s very close to losing control altogether and tries desperately to keep him from getting more blood on his hands.
Meanwhile, Kara sends the senator to DEO protection, which leaves her furious given how much she hates aliens. She changes her tune soon after, however, and tells “Hank” that she knows he has a mole here because there’s no other reason that a White Martian would be hunting down just some random human being. At the same time that Hank works out that he never said anything about what kind of alien is hunting them — meaning the senator is the alien shifted — Kara gets word to Alex that she and James see the senator’s eyes glowing in photos. Alex and J’onn both team up in an attempt to take the “senator” down before she can escape, but after laying waste to a lot of the DEO staff, she rockets through the ceiling of the compound and is off through the night sky. Remembering the death camps and the shame he felt at being the lone escapee from his people’s internment, J’onn seems ready to kill the Martian or die trying, no matter what Alex says. Though she does remind him tearily that, “There’s no shame in surviving.” Kara loses the alien and the stakes continue to rise for J’onn. Alex worried that she may not have gotten through to him and worrying if the rage he’s radiating is a dangerous precursor to the ensuing fight.
They use a finger that was blown off in the battle to track the Martian and when they go hunting for it one last time. J’onn and his rage over the situation appears to be peaking as he becomes angry at everything and can barely hold a conversation in a natural voice. He splits from Alex to find where the Martian is hiding out having been exposed to not be the real senator and hopefully find the alive senator there to be rescued. Alex arrives on the “senator” first and moves to help the woman when J’onn informs her that can’t be her because he’s looking at the senator in the tunnels under the city where she’s cocooned by the Martian’s restraints. The first “senator” jumps up and attacks the DEO agents, wounding Alex in the fight, and uses her as bait to trade for the real Green Martian she knows is at the DEO under the guise of a non-alien.
J’onn agrees to the terms and is willing to die to get Alex out safely one last time. He hopes to take down the White Martian in the process but at this point, having relived so much of his past over the last twenty-four hours, he seems ready to give up and join his family in death just to let go of the grief he has for losing them. It’s a pretty sudden downturn in his outlook, but he seems understandably distraught every time he’s near the White Martian seeing flashbacks and experiencing the PTSD like terror one could expect of any war survivor. Kara tells him to stick it out, however, since she knows something about surviving an exterminated race. As she puts it, “Dying is a lot easier than getting back up when the world ended.” It’s easy to forget that Kara carries a similar weight on her all the time because her inherent goodness resonates more supremely than her darker thoughts.
When they arrive, shortly after an intense brawl through the night sky as Kara and J’onn team up against the shifted senator that eventually switches back to the natural, gargantuan body, they get Alex away. She crawls away from the battle as the trio takes off into the air again and again, Kara and J’onn trying to best the White Martian into submission. Eventually, they get it down and limping but before Kara can help bring it into the DEO as a prisoner, J’onn slams a pair of Kryptonite cuffs on her wrists, stopping her from stopping him. Kara begs him to reconsider.
The sisters plead with J’onn not to let this change him and in turn eliminate the only good remaining of Mars. He relents, finally and takes the White Martian in as a captive without killing it. When it’s seen later still in the guise of the senator it rages against the cage it’s put in threatening that millions will come to get her and J’onn has doomed himself. They dare them to come because it seems like the battle, while ending in the bloodshed he expected, will never be over for him. He welcomes the vengeance.
Later, after he’s put the alien away and the girls are walking away, he tells them that they remind him of his two daughters. It’s a very touching scene, considering they themselves are missing a father, and the three warmly get back to work after some much-needed hugging. The real senator gets on TV to retract her prior stance on aliens, citing Supergirl specifically as her savior, and clarifying that while there are bad aliens they should count themselves lucky to have the others on their side.
The human half of the episode centers around Cat and Adam. Last we saw of Cat’s relationship with her son was through a series of letters that she writes every so often apologizing and taking responsibility for his abandonment. Although when Kara first meets Adam, he playfully flirts with her at their normal breakfast spot where she’s getting coffee with Alex. He hears her talking about the “infamous” Cat Grant — who is later revealed to be his mother — and tries to get her to admit Cat’s The Worst, as he sees her. When she defends Cat, Adam is impressed that maybe he’s wrong about his mother. Later, however, when he shows up in Cat’s office unannounced, Cat has an all out meltdown. She is mortified by the unexpected drop-in from Adam and is more or less speechless over the entire tense exchange. She does her best to go along with the ruse that she’d sent him a letter apologizing that convinced him to come out and visit. They agree to have dinner and sort things out.
The tension is the room is electric and the moment Adam leaves, Kara is promptly fired by Cat for overstepping. It’s revealed that of the many discarded drafts of letters that Cat writes to Adam, Kara finished one and sent it off to him. She makes an excuse that she knows life from the child’s point of view — being unable to talk to her mother — thus she was only trying to get them closer. It’s a rightfully berated mistake and a betrayal of Cat’s confidence in many ways, especially since she was made unaware of the situation, and it puts the viewers — albeit sympathetic to Kara, as always — on the side of Cat. Kara didn’t think Adam would simply show up, letter in hand, so she thought it would be a step by step process, but things go about as fully awry as they could.
Kara talks herself back into a job somehow — Cat is in such shock, she’s happy to have her assistant’s help and it seems enough that the initial blowback is tabled to deal with the crisis. Too busy to meet with Adam immediately, they spend as much of the next few hours prepping Cat for how to deal with the conversation. When it does happen, however, things go about as poorly as Cat expects them to. She talks about herself, over the course of which she shares an anecdote that implies she invented the iPhone, among other things — generally alienating her further from Adam by talking about the glamorous life she’s been able to lead because he wasn’t in it. She stumbles for words when he finally brings up the situation of his abandonment and Adam storms off in a huff, skeptical that Cat wrote the letter that got him to come after all.
Cat is understandably torn up over the events and Kara races to begin damage control. She intercepts Adam at his hotel as he leaves for his flight out of town. She tries to reschedule another dinner and although Adam seems uninterested at first, his first shining to Kara wins out, and he agrees to see Cat once more if Kara joins. She spends a few minutes translating the cold, aloof Grant-speak for “I missed you” and “I’m sorry” which they both need help with getting out. Once they have and it’s clear that despite their gruff demeanor, they’re both very damaged and lonely people, they warm to one another and Kara leaves them to talk.
Later, when Adam arrives at Catco to tell them that he’s decided to stick around and continue to work on his relationship with Cat — which Cat seems both thrilled and terrified to undertake — he asks Kara out on a date. Kara agrees after some bumbling and later, when she’s having ice cream with Alex — proud that she’d called the flirtation earlier when Kara was oblivious — catches up on things. Their conversation is cut short when a news report cuts to “Supergirl” saving a bus downtown which is pretty weird, since Kara is eating ice cream in her pajamas. The sister gawk in shock at the imposter on screen.
Stray Observations:
- “You better get us a quote that will offend virtually everyone.” Cat remains the ruthless businesswoman we all know and love. By the end she’s still thinking about her bottom line by taking the senator’s reversal as a reason to get a one-on-one interview about why she’s pro-alien now. It’s pretty great.
- Kara’s rewriting of the letter, albeit a gross overstep of Cat’s confidence, marks the first time that she’s written anything for anyone. Maybe this will come into play in the future and she’ll lead a similar path to her cousin in the newspaper industry? Cat, harshest critic of all and going in with more than a little bias to what’s said in it, still found it pretty good.
- Winn was in the shadows this episode, still stung from his interaction with Kara last episode. It’s a nice turn, however, because it lets him get over things and warm back up to Kara through small elevator small talk by the episode’s end without having to make the plot anything more than human beings dealing with pain. Winn for Most Improved Character 2016 Award, please.
- The pay at the DEO must be stellar because people die there by the handfuls every week. Alex is lucky to escape such a fate, but surely people must know the risks of half the staff being wiped out at any given moment before signing on? That bonus must be big if you survive the year!
- Calista Flockhart is a good actress who is good at acting. Cat in this episode is a non-stop roller coaster of emotions, good and bad.
- Speaking of, Adam is a little … much. He’s got the same rough edges that Cat does without the same earned respect we have for her. Hopefully he’s not the creep he comes across as being. Example: “Have your cheerleader call me.”
- “If it takes a dome, let’s build a dome!” for worst campaign slogan since “Make America Great Again.”
- “It’s Kee-rah to your mom, Kara to literally everyone else on the planet … and beyond.” Kara, play your cards close, girl. That’s practically a confession!
- Kara making date plans with Adam and wondering to herself if she’ll be free according to Cat’s schedule earning a “SHE’S AVAILABLE” from the other room via Cat was terrific.
- Smallish note: the sisters eating ice cream pints and switching when they get bored of the flavor they’re eating is really cute.
- It is, however, hard to take Kara slacking off that easily when they cut to bizarro Supergirl saving a bus from going off a bridge. So we’re to take it that if that wasn’t happening, those people would have died because Kara wanted some Rocky Road? Could probably been dealt with better than reminding us that when Kara’s not saving people: normally they don’t get saved.
Photo Courtesy of CBS
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