Everyone has a dark side.
What They Say:
Falling – After being exposed to red kryptonite, Kara turns malicious and becomes a danger to her friends and to the people of National City.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As Supergirl gets back underway to move towards the end of its run with just four more episodes after this one, there’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of truly finding itself. There’s still that wonky aspect that’s off-putting to fans of the comics (and well-written TV in general) but these are also some of the traits that simply delights the fans of the show itself that aren’t tied to those other areas. I can look past these pieces to some degree because I watch the rest of my family so totally enjoying the fun of this show that it’s infectious. And they see me enjoying the little nods to various comic book history and events, which they crazily enough seem to like hearing me ramble about. So, faults and all, Supergirl manages to be a delight here in this household for reasons like that.
With a nice opening prologue piece that sets up some very positive image material for Supergirl as Cat Grant spends some time on The Talk (where Flockhart was on recently for an appearance as herself as well), it’s definitely fun to see the way that plays out as it’s pure Cat. She makes it about herself even when it’s about Supergirl, which when Kara sees it broadcast she gets really positive about in how she feels about Cat. Of course, Cat makes it difficult to be around her with the way she’s dismissive toward Kara but that’s just business as normal. Not business as normal is when she finds Siobhan and Winn fooling around in the storage closet and gets completely wigged out with some poor use of her X-ray vision abilities. All of it is some decent fun before things get serious with Kara learning about Lucy’s quitting and booking it out of National City. It’s a complicated piece when it hits since James isn’t telling her the truth about what happened and she’s placing her own views about it.
With some of the baseline story pieces in place, the show takes its turn toward what it wants to do when Kara helps out some firefighters on a rooftop where things have gone bad. It goes well enough with what she does, but she’s exposed to some red kryptonite there. Comic fans have seen a lot of various kryptonite types over the years and red certainly is fun with how it twists Kryptonian personalities into something a little darker. For Kara, we see the confidence side of her personality pick up as she becomes more outgoing as her secret identity with a change of clothes that are more grown up and a different kind of confidence in dealing with Cat. They’re changes that catch everyone off guard and are fun to watch because it shakes up the dynamic a bit. Similarly, she’s like the bored cool kid at school when in full Supergirl mode at the DEO and when dealing with the opponents she comes across. The empathy is gone and she’s just about doing the job, though there are quirks about it to be sure when she lets a Khund alien get away.
The dark thing that Kara does here is in regards to Siobhan as she discovers that she had video of Supergirl letting the Khund get away. Cat wasn’t going to run it until they had more info so Siobhan opted to try and send it to Perry White in order to get a better job there. Kara slips that out into Cat’s hand and it works to bring Siobhan down entirely, allowing Cat to really play strong yet understated in firing her. All this does is add to Kara’s confidence and intent to play a stronger version of herself, hence going out dancing with James and Winn in order to make James her own. She ends up even more aggressive here, physically and with what she says, that it just turns James off pretty hard considering how she’s acting. It’s a rough sequence but it lets James figure out that there’s something really wrong here.
What the episode serves to do is to put a proper picture on what it is that Kara’s capable of. Because she’s a symbol of positive energy and hope, shifting her to being someone that revels in her power and accepts it for what it is and what it can do means that she’s bordering on the supervillain side here. Kara gets to have a pretty good moment in talking to Cat about it in that she’s more than the two-dimensional girl scout that Cat has created in the media whereas Cat makes it clear that Supergirl is a superhero and can’t have things like bad days because of what she represents. Kara definitely makes it clear that she has real power here and that her position is that of a god striding the earth, which has always been a big appeal in the Superman family for me because they have to keep themselves in check. So when she goes on about how she has the power to choose who lives and who dies, it makes a big impact.
So working through the concept of idols and heroes that fall and how it impacts their supporters is a good thing to do – and it fits thematically with the Superman mythos and newer films a bit as well. It goes pretty hard and fast as you’d expect from a TV show, so it lacks some of the resonance it needs and instead asks that you fill it in yourself. What hits the right notes throughout this before it hits the expect fix and final act is that we get Melissa Benoist really owning it here. She’s gotten to show a few sides in the series so far but this one lets her really go all out in this form with the confidence. She’s not exactly supervillain as I said, but she’s straddling it hard and is ready to cross that line. Benoist has a certain confidence as Supergirl in general, especially in contrast to the “meek” Kara personality, but this red kryptonite Supergirl lets her really shine in a great way here, showing the range in how the character can be presented.
The big change here that I’m curious to see unfold is Hank’s going public with what he is as he goes to stop Kara. That has a couple of ways it can go and hopefully it means a little more Martian Manhunter than we’ve had. He can provide such an interesting contrast to the more visually acceptable Kara and what she is for the general populace that there’s plenty of options to be had in exploring that.
In Summary:
Supergirl lives and dies by Melissa Benoist’s work and she does some great stuff here in playing this incarnation of the character. There’s even a great sequence toward the end where she does the whole flicking of peanuts at the mirror in a bar scene from the old Reeve movies. While she doesn’t get to go as bad as she has in the comics at times, simply because of budgetary limitations, they have a lot of fun here and Benoist certainly handles this harder version well – and fills out the Non-style costume well. The final fight between her and Hank in Martian Manhunter mode is worth the episode alone since you know they’re being cautious in really going big with him in this form. It’s a very fun episode overall and delivers in spades for me because of Benoist.
Grade: B+
