Spoilers Supergirl - Season 1

[Grendelsbayne]

But what I mean is that this is a situation where it would've made sense to bring Superman in. There's a world-threatening villain on the loose with Kryptonian ties, and the answers about her may lie in Superman's house. At the very least, if you plan to visit your cousin's residence, it's polite to ask them to escort you. Not to mention that Clark has been inviting Kara to the Fortress for years, so purely from a family standpoint, this would've been a big deal to him and he would've wanted to be there. I wish that, on this occasion, they had at least mentioned that he'd been contacted but had been unable to attend in person because, I dunno, giant robots were invading Metropolis and he couldn't get away.

I agree with all of that, I just think the show has been pretty consistent with the idea that Kara is determined not to involve him, even when it would make sense to do so. It's not exactly her most noble trait, but I think we've seen it often enough now that the show doesn't need to waste time explaining it anymore. It would just be redundant.

 

[Christopher]

I agree with all of that, I just think the show has been pretty consistent with the idea that Kara is determined not to involve him, even when it would make sense to do so. It's not exactly her most noble trait, but I think we've seen it often enough now that the show doesn't need to waste time explaining it anymore. It would just be redundant.

In general, sure. But like I said -- this is his house. It's a place that's very personal to Superman. So it's not the same as the other instances. It makes his absence stand out more than usual.

 

[dahj]

Another decent episode overall, though I was a bit disappointed by Indigo, they made her shtick too similar to Livewire, and the whole kill all humans angle was a bit too broad, I'd have preferred a more nuanced motivation.

 

[tomalak301]

It was a decent episode, but every time I saw Indigo, I was thinking about Mystique and couldn't help but compare this actress to Jennifer Lawrence and the other actress who played in her in the Original X-Men movies. This actress could have been a little more intimidating. Also, some of this melodrama is starting to remind me of Glee, so I'm glad some of it is starting to come to an end. With only, what, 6 episodes left, I'm hoping we start getting into the home stretch of the season and maybe even find out what this Mariyad is.

The things I loved was seeing the Fortress of Solitude, the effects of the Nuclear bomb chase, which I thought was really well done, and the end with Kara, Alex, and Hank. That ending made the entire episode worth it.

I guess no new episode next week? That means no Flash or Supergirl at all? That's a bummer.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Wouldn't you rather not see Invisible Kid?

Har har!

I've felt for a while that Mon-El -- in particular, the story of his arrival on Earth -- would work really well as a Supergirl story. His capsule crashes outside National City, Supergirl finds him the way Superman found her, she assumes that Mon-El is Kryptonian, they have a whirlwind romance, and then the whole lead thing happens. It would work.

I wpuld not want to see a romance with Mon-El; the series has been building the James/Kara relationship steadily, with Bizarro Supergirl revealing "Supergirl loves you," and now Lucy admitting Kara loves James as much as he loves her.

Kara's refusing to work with the DEO was a nice excuse to get her to the Fortress of Solitude and to really focus on her relationship with James.

Agreed; she's so open to him--probably in ways she's not with Alex.

I really liked this version of the Fortress, and I got a kick out of the robot helper. During the commercials and in the promo pics I thought it looked like Donner style crystal, but it actually looked like it was just formed out of the ice. I got a big kick out of the Legion ring.

The design for the fortress was a combination of Donner and comic versions.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Winn and Siobhan yet.

I have the suspicion that she's using him, and when she goes dark, he will either be hurt and finally turn into a villain, or kill her, thus fulfilling his destiny to be just like his father.

Interesting that James' own secret proved to be his undoing.

Well, its not a bad undoing, if James and Kara reach the point where they acknowledge their true connection (which is more than just being in love), feelings and desire.

Oh man, don't tell me they're going to make me rewatch that damn movie! At least Helen Slater is easy on the eyes, sigh.

Yes, Helen Slater was beautiful--a perfect Supergirl in appearance.

 

[Arrrrgggh]

...the effects of the Nuclear bomb chase, which I thought was really well done...

Really? I thought it was remarkably bad. Not for the effects, but for everything else about that scene. Earlier in the very same episode we learned that 1) Kara was apparently faster than Superman and regularly made sharper turns while flying, implying very nimble flying capabilities, and 2) she was strong enough to lift the key to the Fortress with ease. Fair enough, though the latter part was questionable given her struggling with other lesser feats of strength during the show already.

Yet a handful of minutes later, she's struggling to catch up with a subsonic (at least it certainly looked subsonic, not that it matters too much either way) missile and had trouble ripping open a thin piece of sheet metal to get the control panel. Hell, she had trouble lifting her own weight as she climbed up the missile (and again, why did she need to do that in the first place? Literally seconds before that she was seen traveling faster than the missile, hence her actually catching up to it.)

Just... what?

 

[dahj]

Just... what?

Basically, because a 2 second scene where Supergirl zooms to the rocket and punches in the deactivation code where you don't even see her or the danger of the missile properly isn't exactly exciting television...

 

[Christopher]

It was a decent episode, but every time I saw Indigo, I was thinking about Mystique and couldn't help but compare this actress to Jennifer Lawrence and the other actress who played in her in the Original X-Men movies.

I wasn't too reminded of Mystique, because, well, she had clothes on. And her forehead symbol tended to catch my eye, and it was a strong signifier of her connection to Brainiac.

Speaking of which... When she told Non that she'd changed her name from Brainiac-8 to Indigo, it was news to him, and since she'd been laying low for the past dozen years, that may have been the first time she revealed her name to anyone. Yet Kelex (the robot at the Fortress) was already aware that she was called Indigo. How did it know that?

With only, what, 6 episodes left, I'm hoping we start getting into the home stretch of the season and maybe even find out what this Mariyad is.

The word is Myriad, though that doesn't tell us much, since it's just a word meaning "an indefinitely large number" (or, sometimes, the number 10,000). There's an obscure DC character named Myriad, a shapechanging, mind-controlling killer who was one of the many new characters DC introduced in their 1993 Bloodlines annuals (where a bunch of alien parasites went around feeding on people and either killed them or gave them superpowers), and though she debuted in a Superman annual, I'd be surprised if the Myriad Project involved her in any way. Most of the Bloodlines characters were forgettable and quickly forgotten, with the one enduring creation being Garth Ennis's Hitman. More likely Supergirl's Myriad Project is just something involving a large number of things or people.

The things I loved was seeing the Fortress of Solitude, the effects of the Nuclear bomb chase, which I thought was really well done, and the end with Kara, Alex, and Hank.

The missile sequence was suspenseful and all, and somewhat evocative of Superman: The Movie ("My mother lives in Hackensack!"), but it seemed a bit inconsistent. James had said earlier that Supergirl flies faster than Superman, and yet here she had trouble catching up to the missile. Does that mean Superman is too slow to catch a runaway nuclear missile? That's hard to believe. He seemed to be able to fly cross-country pretty fast in the Reactron episode.

 

[Arrrrgggh]

Basically, because a 2 second scene where Supergirl zooms to the rocket and punches in the deactivation code where you don't even see her or the danger of the missile properly isn't exactly exciting television...

It is when you actually write the whole scenario better, such as having to worry about, say, two or more missiles and still dealing with Indigo at the same time. Or anything else you wish. Alternatively, they could have simply not have intentionally and directly told the audience how fast and nimble she was, or show how effortlessly she could lift hundreds of tons only to completely throw it away a few minutes later.

Sorry, but it was just shitty writing all around, even if you just keep to the episode itself.

 

[dahj]

^^
In Superman he lifts an entire tectonic plate and flies around the Earth several times per second, yet he can't fly the length of continental US and stop two tiny missiles in several minutes.

It's not really that much different...

 

[Allyn Gibson]

The word is Myriad, though that doesn't tell us much, since it's just a word meaning "an indefinitely large number" (or, sometimes, the number 10,000). There's an obscure DC character named Myriad, a shapechanging, mind-controlling killer who was one of the many new characters DC introduced in their 1993 Bloodlines annuals (where a bunch of alien parasites went around feeding on people and either killed them or gave them superpowers), and though she debuted in a Superman annual, I'd be surprised if the Myriad Project involved her in any way. Most of the Bloodlines characters were forgettable and quickly forgotten, with the one enduring creation being Garth Ennis's Hitman. More likely Supergirl's Myriad Project is just something involving a large number of things or people.

I was hoping Kara would ask the Fortress robot what Myriad was, much as she recently asked the Alura hologram. If the hologram's programming knew what it was and couldn't say, I had to wonder if other Kryptonian tech knew.

As the Astra/Non/Myriad plot has moved forward, Superman's complete absence as his people are attempting something big and threatening to Earth hasn't made a lot of in-universe sense to me. Unless he's aware of what they're doing because Myriad isn't actually a bad thing.

 

[tomalak301]

Yes the sequence did seem inconsistent, but at least something happened. Leading up to it, this episode was kind of boring, and like I said I'm getting tired of all the melodrama stuff. This scene, as poorly written as it was, at least held my attention. Can't really say why I enjoyed the scene other than that. This was probably the worst episode of the series run so far, minus the ending.

 

[Romulan_spy]

As the Astra/Non/Myriad plot has moved forward, Superman's complete absence as his people are attempting something big and threatening to Earth hasn't made a lot of in-universe sense to me. Unless he's aware of what they're doing because Myriad isn't actually a bad thing.

In-story, I agree that it does not make sense for Superman not to be involved. But I can see how the producers want the show to be about Supergirl and don't want Superman to "steal the show". The first couple episodes even dealt with that by having Superman swoop in and save Supergirl at one point and have Supergirl give a speech about how she wants to be her own woman. But I would love for an epic season finale where Supergirl and Superman team up to stop Myriad.

 

[Dick Whitman]

I figured Jimmy was either teasing and/or flirting with Kara that she flies faster than Superman. More about the speed she was carrying him that than about who would win in a race between the two. How could he really judge that from flying with her? Traveling at her top speed would have killed him.

 

[Christopher]

I figured Jimmy was either teasing and/or flirting with Kara that she flies father than Superman. More about the speed she was carrying him that than about who would win in a race between the two. How could he really judge that from flying with her? Traveling at her top speed would have killed him.

Good point. Maybe it's just that Superman has more practice carrying Jimmy/James and a better idea of what speed he can comfortably tolerate, while Supergirl was doing it for the first time so she flew too fast for him.

 

[davejames]

Thought it was a pretty strong episode myself. Unlike others I thought Indigo made for a very effective villain, having a dark and nasty edge and coming across as a much more serious and believable threat to Kara than Livewire, Bizarro, or Astra ever did on this show.

Seeing the Fortress of course was a lot of fun, and the missile chase effects were impressive as hell as well (and I had no trouble accepting the challenge it might have presented to Kara, since we've seen Supes having the same difficulty several times as well).

And while the melodrama surrounding Alex's killing of Astra had always felt a bit forced and contrived before, I have to admit it did make for a pretty powerful and emotional scene when the truth was finally revealed here.

 

[JD]

I forgot to mention it in my other post, but the missile thing did bug me too.
Their backstory for the Coluans seemed pretty different from the comics version. I read through the entries for Colu it sounds like they were pretty much normal aliens. They seem to have taken the whole Kryptonian supercomputer concept for Braniac from Superman: The Animated Series, and applied it to all of the Coluans .

 

[Arrrrgggh]

I figured Jimmy was either teasing and/or flirting with Kara that she flies faster than Superman. More about the speed she was carrying him that than about who would win in a race between the two. How could he really judge that from flying with her? Traveling at her top speed would have killed him.

Nah, while he was teasing her a little, Kara has on more than a few occasions been noted as being a better flier than Clark in other media. Sometimes she's even been noted as being stronger than him, too. Some arguments for that is simply because Clark has always held back due to his "world of cardboard" fears. Not that it really matters, as regardless of whether its a physical limitation or psychological one, it still results in Kara being faster and stronger than her cousin.

And then again, it doesn't really matter much here since if they really wanted Kara to struggle with a single subsonic missile, they really shouldn't have told us how fast she was or show us how strong she was... because it completely rendered that scene nonsensical. Either they should have left those comments/demonstrations out, or made the challenge something worthy of her abilities.

Hell, it would have made more sense if Indigo had just jumped into the missile itself and overridden the launch systems, forcing Kara to fight her on the missile itself as it zoomed towards its target.

(And let's just completely ignore that that's not how ICBMs work. Nor would the US firing a missile at one of its own cities a few miles away result in the world-destroying war Indigo seemed to think would occur. Seriously, just some really shitty writing all around.)

 

[davejames]

It's a comic book show. I'm not really expecting it to accurately reflect how real ICBMs work, and the vast majority of people watching wouldn't know any differently anyway.

If Flash can constantly take liberties with Barry's powers (and not have him immediately disarming people before they can even have a chance to act, for instance), then we should be fine with Supergirl doing the same thing as well.

 

[Admiral2]

(And let's just completely ignore that that's not how ICBMs work. Nor would the US firing a missile at one of its own cities a few miles away result in the world-destroying war Indigo seemed to think would occur. Seriously, just some really shitty writing all around.)

Dude...beat me to it! Thanks! Saved me a bunch of ranting...

The biggest problem with the whole missile chase concept (here and in the Superman film) is that if the ICBMs' operation had been portrayed accurately there would be no chase scene, because 1)Superman and -girl are faster than a speeding bullet - and therefore faster than any rocket ever constructed by man and 2)ICBMs don't evade obstacles the way cruise missiles do, making the pursuit ridiculously simple. They go straight up. Supergirl could have hovered over the launch site and just thrown a rock at it.

A missile chase adds suspense, sure...but is, as Arrrgggh said, nonsensical and shitty writing.