Wow. This was an amazingly good episode on almost every level. Terrific writing, directing, and acting. David Harewood did some amazing work as J'onn. And the VFX work was astonishing, especially the extended Mars flashbacks. They outdid themselves on this one.
I'm particularly pleased to see them making a statement about bigotry, with Tawny Cypress playing a Trump-like race-baiting politician. I've surely mentioned how the post-WWII Superman radio series featured villains like that on a regular basis and made overt statements of racial and religious tolerance, so I'm proud to see
Supergirl telling such a forceful and topical allegory about racism and its exploitation by politicians -- with the inclusion of death camps in the Martian flashbacks serving as an illustration of where that mentality can lead. This is bold stuff. As someone who cut my genre teeth on
Star Trek, I'm always pleased to see science fiction tackling social commentary and being about something more than just adventure and spectacle. Although I think Senator Crane came around with implausible ease at the end. It's a nice happy ending, but it's a bit too pat a resolution. And in reality, even if her mind were changed, she'd still be under a lot of pressure to pander to what "the base" wanted to hear.
The Cat/Adam story was effective as well, with some great interplay between Cat and Kara and between Cat and Adam. I was stunned to see Cat actually
soften when Adam appeared -- we've never seen that in her before. And we really got to see the complexity of the Cat/Kara relationship, though maybe there was a bit too much of Kara putting it into words rather than just letting it speak for itself as it's done so eloquently all along. The one part that was underwhelming was the boy-meets-girl stuff with Adam and Kara. It seemed so ordinary in the midst of all this great stuff.
Imagine how crazy BvS Batman would be in Supergirl's world...
A lot less crazy, I think, because in that world, Superman and Supergirl haven't been implicated in the destruction of half a city.
I'm not sure if it's unique to the TV series or not but MM's fear of fire makes a lot of sense after this.
It's not just fear -- fire is Green Martians' weakness, like kryptonite for Kryptonians. So it's the other way around -- the White Martians burned them because fire is the one thing that can kill them (or at least the most effective way).