The DEO
Once again, things pick up right where they left off in the last episode with Kara and Non fighting each other. Not surprisingly, Non wins the fight pretty easily but rather than kill Kara, decides to take Hank hostage and flies away.
With Hank now MIA, Alex is given temporary command of the DEO, much to Alex’s surprise but not my own. Kara tries to interrogate Hank’s location out of Astra but of course that goes nowhere. Shortly afterwards, Non contacts the DEO and his demands are fairly simple. He’ll hand over Hank in exchange for the safe return of Astra.
Alex’s temporary promotion proves to be moot point since in the next scene, General Lane shows up the assume command for the duration of Hank’s absence (oh joy). Naturally, Lane takes a radically different approach to interrogating Astra. After referencing The Day the Earth Stood Still to justify his xenophobia, he injects her with liquid kyptonite to get her to talk.
Astra gives up Hank’s alleged location to Lane and the DEO immediately roll out with Supergirl providing backup much to the annoyance of Lane. Oh so shockingly, this turns out to be a trap and a bomb goes off killing several soldiers despite Kara’s best efforts.
Since Lane’s brilliant torture method proved to be useless, Kara decides to make one last attempt at getting through to Astra. Kara tells her that shes finally ready to hear the whole truth from her about her mother. Astra then tells her that Alura also believed Krypton to be doomed but was still left with no choice but to imprison Astra since she chose to use extreme violence to get her message across (um wow what a horrible secret).
Choosing to believe that there’s still some good in Astra, Kara takes a leap of faith and decides to make the trade for Henshaw. Kara and Alex prepare to walk Astra out of the compound but Lane has some pretty big objections to that. His threats prove to be pretty empty though since his men flat out refuse to shoot Supergirl (while apparently glossing over the fact that Kara and Astra are bulletproof).
The exchange itself goes relatively smoothly but once Astra is back in the hands of Non, a bunch of Kryptonians fly in and prepare to kill all the DEO agents present. At the last minute however, Astra orders them all to stand down and the evil Kryptonians fly away to presumably spend another five episodes sitting on their ass.
Back at the DEO base, Lane says they’ve only delayed the inevitable and that their idealism will get them all killed. Thankfully, Hank states that he believes that same idealism will actually save them. He also points out that Lane’s approach once again accomplished jack squat and basically tells him to piss off since he’s now back to assume command of the DEO.
Once all of Lane’s personel have left the room, Hank decides to let Kara on his secret of being a Martian. Kara is rightfully annoyed that Alex and Hank kept this from her though they remind her she kind of sucks at keeping other people’s secrets.
Maxwell Lord
Lord’s behavior in the aftermath of the Kryptonian attack is even more suspicious than usual. The odd behavior starts when he refuses to let the DEO inspect Lord Technologies to figure out why the Kryptonians attacked in the first place. Even more suspicious is that when he reports the attack on the news the next day, he writes it off as a simple case of corporate espionage.
James takes his suspicions a step further and takes some photographs of the wreckage at Lord Tech. Lord doesn’t take too kindly to this and goes on a rant about how corrupt the media is (this coming from the guy who has shamelessly used the media for his own agenda all season) before promptly kicking James off his property.
Now that James is further convinced that Lord is hiding something, he enlists Winn’s help in breaking into Lord Tech, while keeping Kara in the dark about it for some stupid reason. Thanks to Winn’s magical hacking powers, James is able to wonder around the facility unencumbered for a little while until he comes across a door with a fingerprint scanner. Before James has much time to ponder what’s behind the door though, he gets captured by Lord. Lord smashes James’ camera and punches him a few times and warns him that next he won’t go so easy on him.
Afterwards, Lord opens the door and inside is an unknown woman who appears to be in a coma and also bears a strong resemblance to Kara. Lord states that he’s going to help her.
Cat
In the last episode Cat correctly deduced that Kara is in fact Supergirl and in this episode Kara responds by trying to deny everything. This pretty much goes about as well as you might expect and only serves to to reinforce Cat’s suspicions. Cat also comes to the realization that every minute Kara spends working for her could be better spent helping National City so she gives Kara an ultimatum, prove she isn’t Supergirl or she’s fired. Luckily, now that she knows about Hank, she decides to use his shape shifting powers to her advantage. She has Hank fly in disguised as Supergirl so Cat can see both Kara and Supergirl at same the time, thus protecting her identity. I get the feeling though it’ll only be a matter of time before Cat picks up Kara’s scent again, especially given how irrelevant secrets have been on this show so far.
Analysis
This wasn’t as bad as the Red Tornado episode but it was still an absolute chore to sit through. Not only did it feel like nothing was accomplished but it actually regressed. We’re now likely back to the Kryptonians planning evilly from the shadows like in the pilot and since it’s taken half a season to get even the smallest amount of development on this plot, I’m not optimistic with the show’s future pacing. The Cat plot line was better but not by much and the fact that she went back to not knowing Supergirl’s identity felt like an annoying cop out. This was especially frustrating since I believed Kara and Cat’s relationship would be far more interesting if she does know.
I get that the episode was trying to prove that the humans are just as capable of committing evil as the Kryptonians but they picked the worst two characters possible to showcase that. Maxwell Lord (who continues to be a poor man’s Lex Luthor) and General Lane are both far too cliched, one dimensional, mustache twirling villains to be taken all that seriously. Personally, I thought the point would be made better if Alex had been the one to torture Astra instead. It would show what she’s capable of when the life of someone she cares about is at stake and it would better sell the moral ambiguity message the episode is trying to get across.
Supergirl will once again return in two weeks in ‘Childish Things.’ Stay tuned.