After a few weeks of good episodes, this one was kind of a mixed bag.
The major thing here is dealing with Winn’s father, “The Toyman”. As is usual for the DC shows they took a different tack with him. No jester suit (though that version does make an appearance as a pullstring doll), no crazy wigs or suits of any kind. Just a pair of round glasses that give him a definite “deranged Geppetto” sort of look. He winds up murdering all of the guards with a bladed yo-yo and just… walks out of a supermax prison. I can’t explain how he did it, but he did.
Admit it, though; you want one.
His first order of business is to get in touch with his son,and does so by leaving the Toyman doll on his doorstep. Winn is naturally hesitant to tell the feds this, since he’d be much happier if all of this could go away. It takes Kara’s encouragement for him to do so. And it turns out poorly. The message on the doll tells him to go to a place that they both loved when he was a kid, so the FBI sends him in with a wire. Unfortunately, the version of the Toyman that speaks with him is a remote controlled fake, and when the FBI close in, he activates a poison gas trap that Supergirl winds up stopping.
this is a recurring theme in the episode. Senior repeatedly states that Junior is his greatest creation… then sends his son into a dangerous situation that he himself engineered. He also preys on his son’s worries of becoming like his father by saying they’re alike. And this is all for the sake of fairly petty revenge. The Toyman is also really fond of plans (or backup plans) that have ridiculously large amounts of collateral damage, pretty much ensuring that people will wind up viewing him in the same light in which he sees his old boss.
The really sad part of this one is how terrible some of the effects shots are. When Supergirl sucks up all of the poison gas mentioned above, it doesn’t look great, but it’s at least passable. Her solution to stopping the toy bombs in the convention hall is far worse, possibly the worst in the show thus far. So much so, it makes you wonder why they wrote it that way. She uses the fire sprinklers combined with her arctic breath to create a wall of ice to protect the people in the hall from the blast. First off, the wall would be too thin, and second, the pressure wave would send tiny bits of ice out as shrapnel. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any damage from the bombs themselves. I just would’ve argued that cutting away or taking a different path or angle to the shot would’ve made that scene look better.
On the other side of things, Alex convinces J’onn to use his powers to infiltrate Maxwell Lord’s super secret research lab while she distracts Lord by wining and dining him. This is after, earlier in the episode, he resisted both Alex and Kara’s insistence that he use his powers to help people more after a bit of flight training with Kara. Consequentially, just as he’s getting around to figuring out what Lord’s up to with his brain-dead patient, one of the security guys comes in and figures out he isn’t the real Maxwell Lord through conversation. At which point J’onn does something he swore he would never do again and completely wipes the guy’s memory. It’s something, judging by his conversation with Alex afterwards, that really conflicts him; likely what he considers to be the horrible price of using his powers.
Lucy has a lunch meeting with Cat, which serves to be somewhat illuminating. Cat is genuinely surprised to find that the Lane sisters don’t exactly get along. Cat also offers Lucy a job as the head of her legal department, which causes a bit of friction between her and Jimmy. Total honesty? I would not want Cat Grant as my boss. She’s business savvy, sure, but she’s also kind of awful in a lot of ways that have been demonstrated time and again. Add to it the fact that Cat makes it into the sort of situation where Lucy can’t really refuse. It doesn’t exactly resolve so much as end with Jimmy expressing a desire to return to field work as the reason that he was odd about Lucy asking his opinion.
Also, Maxwell Lord is spying on Kara and Alex. Alex thought she put one over on Lord, but he stuck a camera onto her bag before she left their dinner. Is that not super creepy?
Final Thoughts:
- There’s one part at the convention where you can clearly see a large guy dressed as Link. They clearly couldn’t get away with pumping the room full of Spider-Men, Harley Quinns and Deadpools.
- Proper flying technique: low profile to reduce drag. I have no idea why it was necessary.
- Nowadays, there are so many synthetic materials in toys that apparently explosions don’t really do much to them.
About Author
