5 Thoughts About Supergirl: "Nevertheless, She Persisted"

Half a year later and we're finally here at the season finale.  So, how do you repel an alien invasion when literally all of your friends aren't able to help you and your cousin with the exact same powers as you is now brainwashed and fighting on the side of the bad guys?



1.) From how Clark behaved this episode, I would love to know how Silver Kryptonite works.  Most of the other Kryptonites make sense in terms of how they could believably alter someone's mind or powers: Green weakens, Gold turns you human, Blue heals and sometimes even boosts powers, Red removes inhibitions--in a lot of cases, we have substances on Earth that affect humans the exact same way.

But the Silver Kryptonite...brainwashes?  It was one thing when Rhea said it made Clark see his greatest fear, but this goes beyond that.  He wasn't just seeing his greatest fear, he was hearing things too--it wrecked two of his Super-Senses, basically rendering any Kryptonian under its influences utterly useless.  I could understand if he was seeing Zod, but hearing Kara and fought because of that, but his brain was making up phrases Zod might say; that was just weird.

2.) As much as I love a good tournament for people's lives, this one didn't quite make sense.  For one thing, who gave Supergirl (or Superman, or the DEO) the right to fight for Earth's survival?  It makes sense, but it's not like it was given the "OK" by the U.N.  A scene of that would've been nice.

At the same time...holy crap Rhea was outmatched.  For one thing, Kara had already beaten Clark, meaning she was stronger than Superman (which...we'll get to later).  Then we established early on that Kryptonians are vastly stronger than Daxamites.  We also established that Mon-El's additional time under the yellow sun had made him stronger than most Daxamites.  So you take all that and combine it with the fact that Rhea shouldn't even know how to fight as a member of a very gluttonous, decadent royal family and honestly I can't understand why this fight lasted longer than the five seconds it took for Kara to zip over and gut-punch her. 

This wasn't even a hard fix--they were halfway there when Rhea revealed she had Kryptonite on her.  Just spray Kara with K-Dust and voila, instant "even" fight.   Also: while I totally get that the biggest fight needed to be on Kara, it felt so weird that the basic plot of this story was Mon-El hiding behind Kara so she could fight his mom, but...whatever.  Sci-Fi just takes everyday stuff and amplifies it, so I guess this makes as much sense as anything else.

3.) So the climax of the story is Lena Luthor, Winn, and Lena's mother working to change a device of Lex's over so that it seeds the air with lead dust.  Not enough to harm any humans, but enough to force all the Daxamites off Earth.

All of them meaning that Kara loses her beau, Mon-El, to the stars.  This bummed me out for two reasons--one, I was kinda hoping they'd put Mon-El in the Phantom Zone for Legion of Super-Heroes purposes, and two....    I just felt bad for Kara at the end: everyone else is all hooked up with a nice girl (even her sister!) and Kara just has to go home alone.   It was heroic of her to make that sacrifice, but she really got the business this episode.

4.) There's like two spots of dialogue in this episode that exist to elevate Kara above her cousin because she's the main character, and that just kinda bums me the fuck out.  I get the logic: no one wants to watch a show about a "second tier" character, but I've always felt like that's foolish.  The show's about Kara because she faces different challenges and lives a different life that Superman.  She doesn't have to be better than Superman because she's not Superman, she's different and awesome for her own set of reasons. 

But while it was awkward to have Clark just have to explain why Kara was stronger than him, that's not nearly as bad as having Clark outright say he couldn't make the same sacrifices Kara has.  If it were any other hero I wouldn't care.  Batman simply cannot be as good a hero as Kara, for instance.  But Superman's supposed to be the first and the greatest.  His whole point is that he's always going to make the right decision, no matter how hard that is.   When he's less than that then he's basically the same as all the Superman clones that have been created over the past century.

5.)  We set up for our third season by flashing back to Krypton and showing a dark, cult-like atmosphere in which a third rocket ship was sent to Earth, after a weird but very PG blood ritual where the people there claimed the child would grow strong and "reign" on Earth.  I'll be honest and say I have no idea who that is, but I'm assuming it's not Doomsday so it's possibly a character made up for the television series? 


At any rate, that wraps up Supergirl until this October.   This season had some pretty cool cameos, an awesome crossover, and some great development of Supergirl's supporting cast.  But between some cringeworthy moments during just about everyone's romance scenes and some specious, head scratching logic for some of the scenes this season (lead's...everywhere you say?) keep this show from being excellent.  But that doesn't mean this show wasn't good, oftentimes even better than The Flash.  So I'm going to rate it as a B+.