What would Kara do to save her sister?
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
Supergirl has improved quite a bit this season, but the show still isn’t very consistent when it comes to featuring compelling, fleshed-out villains. That’s been the general trend at least. But looking at last week’s handling of Biomax, the introduction of a dark new threat this week and the ongoing threat posed by Queen Rhea, it really does feel like the show is improving on one of its recurring weak points.
“Alex” shifted the season in a surprisingly dark direction. The trailer for this episode had a distinct Saw quality to it. The end result wasn’t quite as gruesome as that, but certainly more tense and unsettling than your average episode of the show. The key is that it never felt needlessly dark. In the end, the takeaway was once again that Kara was able to use her inspirational might to succeed where her fists failed.
It was a nice change of pace seeing Team Supergirl going up against a perfectly ordinary, non-metahuman villain in the form of Rick Malverne (Crossbones’ David Hoflin). Rick’s only weapon was his Batman-worthy ability to spend months constructing a foolproof plan and accounting for every possible angle. In other words, exactly the sort of villain Kara is least equipped to handle.
Admittedly, Malverne’s role here did require a lot of suspension of disbelief. Viewers were asked to accept that this seemingly innocuous young man is so psychologically damaged that he’d spend an entire year stalking the Danvers sisters and hatching an incredibly elaborate plot against them. We were also asked to accept that Malverne had the resources to block J’onn’s telepathy (not to mention the ability to deduce J’onn’s Martian heritage in the first place) and design an incredibly elaborate death trap for Alex. If he’s capable of all this, why didn’t he just bust his father out of jail himself?
All that aside, Malverne did establish himself as one of the show’s better villains to date. Hoflin channeled his inner pain and instability nicely, playing him as a man who seems calm and collected on the outside but is secretly driven by a childhood of abuse and torment. As unbelievable as this character is in some ways, Hoflin made him believable regardless.
Malverne’s demented plan also seemed to bring out the best in Melissa benoist and Floriana Lima. It was great watching their characters butt heads this week over their mutual love of Alex. They’ve clearly passed the point of polite friendship and grown close enough that they feel more comfortable airing their grievances to one another. Perhaps Maggie’s early anger at Kara felt a little overblown, but it did play nicely into the idea that Kara, for however well-meaning she might be, causes more problems than she solves by rushing headlong into danger.
Both Benoist and Lima delivered some of their best performances of the season tonight. We see Benoist explore Kara’s charming side every week. This was a rare opportunity to see Kara as a simultaneously vulnerable and vengeful person. Benoist’s strongest moment in this episode was actually one of the more subtle. The scene where J’onn approached her and Kara quietly admitted that she was listening for Alex’s voice said everything that needed to be said about the pain and grief Kara was experiencing. Likewise, Lima did a great job in the tearful reunion between Maggie and Alex near the end.
While all this drama was unfolding, the writers also continued laying the groundwork for the end of Season 2 in terms of the alliance between Lena Luthor and Queen Rhea. Barring any last minute developments, it’s pretty clear that Lillian Luthor, Jeremiah Danvers, Hank Henshaw and all the other Cadmus business are being shuffled off until a later season. The lack of focus this season has been bizarre, but at this point I’m just glad to see a more clear endgame developing.
It helps that the Lena/Rhea partnership is so entertaining. As fun as it’s been seeing Teri Hatcher in a Superman show again, there was something a little stiff and restrained about her performance in past episodes. But here, we saw Rhea doing her best to blend in among humanity (and doing a surprisingly good job of it). That allowed Hatcher to bring a little more charm and deadly allure to the role, which paid off nicely. I also appreciate the ambiguous way Lena is being handled. She’s precariously close to falling victim to the Luthor family curse and becoming the villain in Supergirl’s story. But it’s clear she’s still trying to do what she believes is right. She simply lacks the foresight to know what kind of woman she’s getting into bed with, and one could argue that’s partly on Kara for not being there for Lena at a critical time.
My concern with this alliance of femme fatales is that the Season 2 finale will rehash too many beats from Season 1. The idea of another alien monarch building a doomsday weapon on Earth is worryingly similar to what we saw last year. And recent announcements about other characters joining the cast in the weeks ahead don’t do anything to dispel that notion. Hopefully the execution, at least, will be different enough to avoid “been there, done that” territory.
The Verdict
"Alex" served as an unexpected but very welcome change of pace for the series this week. It was much darker than the average Supergirl episode, but not in a way that felt gratuitous or unnecessary. Strong performances made the tense, unsettling conflict all the more engaging. And as an added bonus, the Lena/Rhea alliance finally shed light on where the show is headed in the final stretch of Season 2.
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