My Favorite Martian
After tonight’s episode opens with Kara saving a family of campers from a forest fire, she then laments to Alex about her how friendship with Winn continues to be strained after last week, though Alex says the best thing she can do is give him some time to get over it (which thankfully keeps Winn out of most of the episode).
Meanwhile Senator Miranda Crane (Tawny Cypress) has come to National City to give a speech at an anti-alien rally with Hank and Alex among the audience members presumably for security. Crane’s speech has all the lack of subtlety that you might expect from Supergirl (the less said about the parallels to Donald Trump the better) and at one point even suggests building a dome to keep aliens out of the country. Um, she is aware that The Simpsons Movie was a cartoon right? Not surprisingly, an evil alien starts attacking the rally and the DEO spring into action. When Hank gets a good look at the alien however, he freezes up. Supergirl flies in to intervene but by the time she gets there, the alien appears to have already disappeared.
Hank has Senator Crane put under DEO protection, much to the Senator’s anger (who is naturally a friend of General Lane). Once Kara, Alex and Hank are alone, Hank tells them that the evil alien is a White Martian. As it turns out, the White Martians are the ones responsible for wiping out his people and forcing him to hide out on Earth. Hank also believes that the White Martian was tipped off to his existence when he used his powers against Maxwell Lord last week and has come to Earth with the sole purpose of killing him.
Back at CatCo, Kara looks at some pictures James took at the rally and thanks to some lazy writing, I mean a “special camera filter”, they realize the Senator Crane being held at the DEO is the White Martian in disguise. Kara is able to tip off Alex about the deception but that proves not to matter anyway since the White Martian escapes shortly afterwards, killing several DEO agents in the process.
Feeling a fresh wave of guilt over the White Martian’s destruction, Hank gives Alex a little more backstory about how his people went extinct. He says that the Green Martians tried fighting off the White Martians but were overwhelmed by their superior technology and brutal tactics. Afterwards, the Green Martians were herded off into camps where the men were used for labor and the women and children (including Hank’s wife and daughters) were burned to death before Hank was eventually able to escape.
Once the DEO resumes their search for the White Martian, Hank is determined to kill the alien once and for all. He uses his Martian powers to track the alien down and he and the DEO are able to find the real Senator Crane but are once again attacked by the White Martian and Alex is captured. Hank offers himself to the White Martian in exchange for Alex’s safety. The alien agrees and has Hank meet up with it in the desert. Initially, Hank decides to just let the White Martian kill him, though Kara flies in to save the day and with Kara and Hank’s combined efforts, they are able to defeat the alien. Hank is on the verge of killing it but Kara convinces him it would be better to to hold it prisoner at the DEO base instead. Once the White Martian is imprisoned, it vows that more of him will come to lay waste to Earth, to which Kara replies “Let them come.”
In the aftermath, Senator Crane has decided to revise her statements from earlier. While she admits to still feeling a level of distrust towards aliens (which given her recent experiences isn’t entirely unreasonable), she also admits that thanks to Supergirl she realized they shouldn’t automatically view aliens as the enemy.
Cat
Meanwhile, Kara also makes time to try fix Cat’s relationship with her estranged son Adam (played by Melissa Benoist’s real-life husband Blake Jenner). She does this by writing a letter to Adam pretending to be Cat asking him to give her a second chance. Adam decides to visit National City to take “Cat” up on her offer though he’s still skeptical about his mother’s apparent emotional 180. When he mentions the letter to Cat, it takes her all of two seconds to realize that Kara wrote it. Cat’s first (understandable) instinct is to fire Kara, though she ultimately decides against it since Kara’s meddling actually gave her an opportunity to have a relationship with Adam.
Cat and Adam have dinner together but it quickly goes south as Adam starts voicing his decades worth of built-up resentment towards his mother and eventually leaves in anger. When Kara notices how devastated Cat is about all of this, she once again takes it upon herself to fix things. When she tries to convince him to give Cat another chance, he also figures out that Kara wrote the letter but nevertheless eventually agrees to do so on the condition that Kara go with him.
When they meet up again, Cat finally admits to Adam just how much she regrets not being a part of his life and Adam in turn admits to his feelings of abandonment, though this time he appears to be more willing to forgive. Afterwards, Adam decides to stay in National City for a little while longer and also asks Kara out on a date, which she accepts. It’s also worth noting that seeing Cat give her not so enthusiastic approval might be the funniest thing about this episode.
Cliffhanger
At Kara’s apartment, she and Alex discuss her upcoming date with Adam, when they watch a news report showing someone looking very similar to Supergirl flying towards a car accident.
Analysis
While I’m not entirely sure Hank’s Holocaust-like backstory belongs in a relatively lightweight show like Supergirl, I will give the writers some credit for at least attempting to take the show into more dramatic territory. David Harewood got a little hammy at times but it was otherwise well done.
As much as I liked the Adam subplot, this felt like something that might have been better off in a different episode (even if Cat was once again one of the best parts of it). At one point, Kara even puts the White Martian search on pause to act like Cat and Adam’s personal therapists. It gives the episode an extremely inconsistent tone when you follow a scene where an alien talks about watching his family get burned alive with some family drama especially when we haven’t even met one of the characters involved before this episode. Now as for Blake Jenner, despite the obvious implications of nepotism he actually does a pretty good job as Adam. His cautious attitudes towards Cat feel natural and believable and he has good chemsitry with Kara, which of course is to be expected.
Tune in next week as Kara faces off against Maxwell Lord controlled Supergirl in ‘Bizarro.’