The CW kicks off its second half of the 2016-2017 DCTV season with an episode of Supergirl directed by the guy who wrote SUPERMAN Lives about 20 years ago – Kevin Smith.
I just made myself feel old acknowledging that the whole Superman Lives fiasco happened that long ago. This might be a rough recap….
It’s another episode pushed along by Kara’s new-found reporting job, as she starts investigating a missing teenaged girl. The missing girl leads to a whole bunch of missing people, and that leads to aliens kidnapping people and selling them into slavery on a different planet.
And that’s a job for Supergirl. Only not really, because Slaver’s Moon – where the people are being sent to – has a red sun, which strips both Kara and Mon-El of their powers. Mon-El came through the Stargate, for lack of a better term, despite Kara telling him to go tell Kara’s sister, Alex, and the DEO about her whereabouts, so the rescue took a little longer than it would have without Mon-El being a screw-up.
But the extra time on Slaver’s Moon gives Kara and Mon-El the chance to find the missing people and who is behind their kidnapping: Roulette, the fight ring leader Supergirl encountered earlier this season.
Hey, who’s that girl on the right? Oh yeah, it’s Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith.
Amazingly, Slaver’s Moon has an atmosphere that’s totally fine for the humans to be held there without getting sick or dying, but Martian Manhunter can’t go because of things put into the atmosphere to keep Martians out, in an obvious attempt to keep CGI costs down for the episode.
Back on Earth, we have some strained relationships between Winn and James Olsen and between Alex and her girlfriend Maggie Sawyer, with both conflicts coming to an end before the final credits ran. Winn questions whether he wants to continue getting beat up after nearly dying on a mission with Olsen’s alter ego of The Guardian, while Alex breaks up with Maggie while working to rescue her sister. While it makes sense for Winn to wince at near-death experiences, Alex’s break-up with Maggie seemed to just be there to give some drama to the relationship when it wasn’t necessary.
As a result of the Alex-Maggie drama, Maggie now realizes that Kara is Supergirl, a new wrinkle I’m sure everyone will be thrilled with…
Once Alex and Winn rescue everyone, Kara and Mon-El have a heart-to-heart and Mon-El reveals that he wants Kara to help him to be a superhero, just like she is. Which means we’re likely to see the classic Mon-El costume (above) on Supergirl sooner rather than later. I still don’t know why they went with Mon-El (the name Superman gave him to make him part of the family) instead of the comic book-accurate Lar Gand, but I should probably let that little nitpick go.
Overall, I thought it was a disappointing episode to come back to, but unlike the other CW DC shows, they still haven’t really tipped their hands about what the back half of the season is going to be about. Flash has Savitar; Arrow has Prometheus. Supergirl, I guess, has Cadmus and the search for Jeremiah, but they’ve been dragging that out for a long time already. I guess we’ll see what the show has to offer.