I figured that this weeks Supergirl couldn’t possibly hold a candle to last week. I was wrong. It’s like they’re finally finding the groove.
So things left off with Astra and the Sprockets crew showing up to menace Kara. She tries to get Kara to see things her way by pointing the kryptonite knife she got off of Hank at her. Kara runs away by jumping off the building they’re on, and despite their X-ray vision her henchmen just can’t seem to follow her.
A large part of the episode concerns no superheroics, however. Cat Grant has her email hacked, and all of her dirty laundry aired all over the place. Insane spending habits, quirks of vanity, raw egotism, the whole nine yards. It is a PR disaster, and it makes the board of her company nervous; if anything really bad shows up, they want her to leave to protect the brand. She, at one point, tries to get her lawyers to suppress the whole thing, and they caution against it. Kara, on the other hand, can’t understand why she won’t fight it. Well, there’s a precedent for this sort of thing, and it never turns out well.
Cat, for some reason, has Kara form a team of people she trusts to look into her emails and try to find out who did it, and figure out if there’s anything there to sink her ability to remain CEO of her own company. They get their big break when Kara overhears one of the board members practically incriminate himself after a meeting. This leads to an industrial espionage scene where Jimmy goes to plant a device on the guy’s computer to Winn can go through it remotely.
In the meantime, Kara and co. turned up information that could sink Cat, and Kara asks her about it. She’s been sending a fairly large amount of money to a young man in Opal City. It turns out to be her son from a first marriage, and a point of remorse for the fairly self-obsessed Cat Grant. She decided to step away to focus on her career, as she felt it wasn’t fair to him to win custody and not be around.
In between all of this, Astra shows up floating in the middle of the city, challenging Kara to meet her. Which she does. Kara is pissed, and pretty much starts the whole fight off by heat-visioning her aunt. the rest of the fight is clearly where most of the budget went for this one. It holds a number of parallels to the fight near the end of Man of Steel, with them crashing through buildings and the like. It’s much shorter, though, and isn’t quite at the same level of “DBZ balls to the wall” battle as that. It also features color; you know, that thing Zack Snyder routinely forgets exists. Thanks to a weak, gloating stance from her aunt, Kara comes out on top, knocking Astra out and dragging her unconscious body into the DEO.
When Astra wakes up, she tells them she’ll only talk to Kara. Which takes some doing, but it eventually happens. And Astra uses the opportunity to drive a wedge between Kara and her late mother. Astra tells her that the only reason she was caught was because Alura used Kara to sucker her in. After all, she couldn’t resist seeing her niece. Kara has a good, old fashioned meltdown in the Alura chamber after the holographic AI can’t answer her question in regards to Alura using her.
After the board drama is resolved, thanks in part (and to Cat’s surprise) to Lucy Lane, Cat and Kara have a discussion on the balcony. Cat finally thanks Kara for all of the shit she deals with, but there’s an ulterior motive. She figured out Kara’s horribly kept secret thanks to her constant slips of the tongue and absence in the proximity of Supergirl. The whole thing is interrupted when Astra’s husband and subordinates crash Lord Technologies.
There’s a bunch of aliens and Kryptonians, and then the DEO shows up and J’onn starts covertly kicking ass. It’s probably the second best fight scene in the series thus far, after the one earlier in the episode. They then decide to cliffhang on Kara showing up and fighting her uncle.
Final Thoughts:
- I like how “Hank” was still interested in the knife. Almost more so than in what happened to Kara.
- Cat Grant calls Lois Lane something standards and practices won’t let her say on the air.
- Winn takes a potshot at Jimmy Olsen’s rippling abs. It’s like the writers have heard me.
- Superman thinks it’s funny that J’onn’s telepathy doesn’t work on Kryptonians.
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