Grass is Always Greener
This week’s episode opens with Kara waking up and surprised to find herself back on a now seemingly-not-destroyed Krypton. Alura then shows up to tell Kara that her entire life on Earth was merely an elaborate hallucination she experienced after suffering from something called Argo fever. Of course, this all naturally proves to be the actual hallucination as Alex, James and Winn find Kara in her apartment unconscious with the face-hugger looking alien from last week’s cliffhanger attached to her.
Kara is immediately taken into the care of the DEO and Alex informs Hank that despite Kara’s current condition, her brain activity is somehow still normal. Alex’s first instinct is to blame Maxwell Lord but when she confronts him in his cell, for once he has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about.
In the next scene, the culprit in actually revealed to be Non, who sent an alien called the Black Marcy on Kara to keep her from interfering in the Kryptonian’s master plan (which continues to be as vague as ever). Astra is horrified (and somehow surprised) to hear this and secretly meets with Alex to tip her off about the alien. She says the only way to wake Kara is if she rejects the fantasy herself.
Meanwhile, to Kara’s credit she doesn’t completely buy into the dreamworld right away but like a kid in Neverland, she has been gradually forgetting about her old life. She also begins to relish being able to talk her parents again (I think this is the first time in the entire series her father has any lines) and also no longer butting heads with Astra. She even gets to meet an adolescent Clark/Kal-El, which I found to be a little weird since Kara never knew Clark as a kid but whatever.
Alex comes up with the idea to use the DEO’s virtual reality technology to get inside of Kara’s fantasy and recognizing that it could be a traumatizing experience for Kara, suggests letting James and Winn into the DEO so they can be by her side when she wakes up. Unfortunately, the plan also involves asking for Lord’s help in setting it up. Hank’s not crazy about the idea but agrees to it since he can’t really come up with anything better.
Meanwhile, the Krpytonians are planning out the next step in their plan. They have apparently arranged for the Earth to be hit by a solar flare, making the planet’s satellites go haywire, so they can carry it out undetected. Whatever it is entails attacking six different places at the same time and that once it’s complete, humanity will be brought to it’s knees.
Alex gets ready for to go inside Kara’s head but before she does she asks James for a favor. She tells him to make sure Hank doesn’t pull the plug before she has freed Kara under any circumstances and he agrees.
Shortly after Alex has gone under, Hank gets to work trying to figure out Astra and Non’s next move and Winn suggests that it might have something to do with the satellite’s being down (it’s actually kind of sad that he’s the first person to think of this) so Hank has him work with the DEO to look into it.
Alex’s efforts to bring Kara back get off to a rocky start and sure enough Hank quickly wants to pull the plug but James is able to talk him out of it. Alex is eventually able to persuade Kara to come back and they both wake up. Once Kara comes to she demands to know who’s responsible for the Black Mercy and when they tell her it was Non, she has a look in her eyes that basically says she wants to beat the crap out of him.
The Myriad
Winn’s research at the DEO pays off and he realizes they are targeting Lord’s satellite farms in National City. This also makes our heroes realize that the reason the Kryptonians broke into Lord Tech in the first place was to plant a computer virus though they still don’t know what the virus will do. The DEO rolls out to Lord’s buildings but Kara makes it clear that she wants to be the one to fight Non.
While Kara is busy fighting Non, Alex and Hank go up against Astra. Neither fight goes very well though as Non is quickly able to escape but not before telling Kara that “Humanity is a disease and the Myriad is the cure.” Astra meanwhile has defeated Hank rather convincingly and is just about to kill him when Alex stabs her from behind with a sword made of kyptonite. Okay, I’ll give the writers this, I certainly didn’t see that coming. Kara flies in to see her aunt has been mortally wounded, which Hank claims responsibility for. Astra warns Kara not to get in Non’s way or he will kill her and when Kara begs her to tell her about the Myriad before it’s too late, Astra tells her it already is as she dies in Kara’s arms.
In the aftermath, Kara meets up with Alex, James and Winn at her apartment, who all do the best they can to console her, which they do by eating ice cream and Chinese food with her. On the plus side at least, it seems that Winn has finally and genuinely made peace with his feelings for Kara, so at least that subplot’s finally over.
CatCo
Kara’s absence hasn’t gone unnoticed by Cat so Hank uses his shapeshifting powers to try and cover for her. Unfortunately, this doesn’t go over all that well since Cat is clearly still angry at Kara over what happened with Adam and as a result she has reverted back to the Devil Wears Prada-lite boss from hell she was in the first few episodes. Sadly, this issue never gets resolved so we presumably have at least another episode of this to look forward to.
Analysis
I certainly don’t blame for writers for wanting to adapt Superman’s For the Man Who Has Everything story given it’s popularity among fans but the execution felt like a missed opportunity. For starters, Kara’s fantasy seems less like a fantasy and more like a sci-fi Norman Rockwell painting. It also probably would’ve worked better if instead of having this story split time with multiple subplots, they made into more of a bottle episode with most of it taking place inside Kara’s head. That way, we could finally get some decent backstory into Kara’s Krpytonian life and finally get some kind of development on the relationship between Kara and Astra. Normally it would also bug me that Kara wasn’t able to snap out of the dream on her own but on the other hand this is first time that Alex has done anything remotely interesting in weeks and it also ended up being a good way to explore their relationship as sisters, which the show hasn’t really done since episode 4.
Astra’s death brought in plenty of shock value but her lack of development made it hard for me to care. By my count, Astra appeared in six episodes, two of which were only to serve as cliffhangers for the next episode. The rest of her appearances were a lot of tell and no show. We’re told that she and Kara were really close on Krypton but we’re not given any evidence of it which in turn made Astra a frustratingly boring character.
Supergirl will be taking a break next week but come back in two weeks for ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way’. I guess it was only a matter of time before they used that title.