Supergirl took a week off. Which was fine by me; the start of the year in general hit like a truck. And there’s the added bonus that it tends to come back from little hiatuses like the Ironborn.
I figured that I’d start with the fallout from the previous episode. Alex wants to tell Kara that she killed Astra, not Hank. This is interrupted by Non showing up under truce to have Kara give Astra the traditional Kryptonian funeral. It really just reminds me of Spock’s funeral from The Wrath of Khan, which may or may not have been varying degrees of intentional. Non flat out tells her that he’ll observe the traditional period of mourning, but after that, he’ll be out for her head. Alex has at least one conversation with Hank about telling Kara the truth, which he vetoes. He can live with Kara hating him, but he knows she needs Alex, and the truth would destroy her. Kara pretty much tells him later that she’s having difficulty working with him, knowing that he killed Astra. So good on the writers for not immediately resolving this, like they do with things on The Flash from time to time.
Another bit of fallout from the last episode is that Cat hired a second assistant. And relegated Kara to the position of assistant 2. Her name is Siobahn Smythe and, here at least, she’s a disrupter. They do a few clever things with her; people close doors when they realize that she’s eavesdropping (not that it matters since all of the offices are constructed with a crazy amount of glass, among other reasons) and people avoid her. Regardless, it’s made obvious she passes on at least some of what she finds out to Cat. She also has every intention of being the next Cat Grant, as she tells Kara, and she has every reason to believe that as she rises through the ranks, Kara will be left as a coffee jockey. They don’t do much else with her here, and they won’t next week either. But soon…
The main body of the episode concerns someone going around and abducting Fort Rozz escapees.The DEO’s first run in with this guy is when they’re trying to hunt down and alien that lives off of rotting flesh. Just when they surround the alien, some guy in armor swoops in and poaches their catch, taking out several red shirts non-Alex DEO agents as he does so. Hank and Alex pose as FBI agents to see if the local police know anything about the guy. One of them is fairly unhelpful, doing the usual thing cops do in these situations in films and TV. The other guy lets them know that several aliens have shown up dead on the shore of a nearby lake, decapitated.
They figure out that the dead aliens follow a pattern; they were abducted and killed in the numerical order of their prisoner I.D. They send Kara to stop the next abduction, but she gets blindsided by the guy’s weaponry, which allows him to chain people to things. It keeps her occupied long enough for him to get away with a prisoner that had been passing himself off as a human professor of astronomy.
They realize that the guy isn’t human, clearly based on the weapons used. He did, however, leave behind an Earth weapon; a baton covered in grumpy cop’s prints and DNA. Kara goes to intercept them on patrol with Alex in tow, but it turns out that grumpy cop was a patsy. The helpful guy was the one abducting and killing prisoners,and he shoots both his partner and Alex. Kara’s concern for Alex allows him to capture her and imprison her in a cell that replicates Krypton’s red sun.
Alex got hit in her vest, but grumpy cop wasn’t so lucky, though we never find out what happened to him. Alex immediately begins looking for Kara, and hank finds that this guy, who they begin referring to as the Master Jailer, was a guard in Fort Rozz. Kara gets some time to speak to the professor. He was imprisoned for drug running to support his ailing wife, and he was caught the first time out. Basically, imagine if Walter White got caught in the first episode. Prison actually changed him for the better, and he decided that he’d actually do something worthwhile with his newfound freedom: teach astronomy, since he knew it so well.
Alex shows up just in time, saving the professor as he was on the block, and providing Kara with the sunlight she needed to break out of her cell. Kara delivers a beatdown on the Master Jailer (satisfying, since despite his respect for her mother, he realized that he’d have to kill her as well), and they decide to let the professor go, since he hadn’t been a violent offender in the first place, less so after being set free. The ordeal (along with a speech from Jimmy) help Kara realize that it’s against her morals to continue to keep Lord locked away in a DEO cell. Alex lets him know, however, that mutually assured destruction will be the order of the day if he steps out of line again.
Next up on Supergirl is a trip to the Fortress of Solitude. Which really just stands as a reminder of just how beneficial being a baby is in regards to storage in your space pod.
Final Thoughts:
- I have no idea if they’re going off script with Jimmy and Lucy soon.
- For a guy passing as a human professor for years, that guy really didn’t pick up on all that many idioms.
- Nothing says justice like space guillotine.
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