THOMAS LENNON RETURNS AS MR. MXYZPTLK - Supergirl and team must stop Nyxly from vanquishing a familiar face from Supergirl’s past - Mr. Mxyzptlk (guest star Thomas Lennon). Mxy returns and explains Nyxly’s dark history to the super team in the best way he knows how - in song form. Meanwhile, Lena visits her mother’s birthplace in Newfoundland, eager to dig into her past but is shocked by the small town’s icy reception towards her.
And so the writers introduce yet another new storyline – Lena getting magic. This, in the same episode with Mxyzptlk and Nyxlygsptlnz battling it out, not to mention Dreamer coming into her own. Amidst a dragon and a giant kitten attacking National City, the biggest WTF moment was discovering everyone in Newfoundland speaks with an Irish accent.
Yes. The gratuitous Irish was weird (and the “Bad Day at Black Rock” stuff was a little over the top (for one thing, if the inn-keeper finds out that the black sheep’s daughter is in town, the rest of the small town will know in a very short time).
Distracting the giant kitten with laser vision was delightful, though.
(P.S. What’s wrong with Mxy’s duplicate plan - the duplicate lasts for a few minutes, and that’s all the time that’s needed)
And, in the event, would have lasted longer than their alt-dupe plan did. And…why did they have Dreamer use an image inducer? Why not just have J’onn shapeshift?
Yeah, I thought that was the highlight of the episode.
[David Ramsey guest stars so the CW finally is motivated enough to make a promo.]
“SUPERGIRL” STAR AZIE TESFAI CO-WROTE THE EPISODE DIRECTED BY DAVID RAMSEY - Kelly is horrified when the Ormfell building implodes, injuring many in the community, including Joey (guest star Aiden Stoxx). However, her horror quickly turns to frustration when she realizes that the hospital is overwhelmed, people are getting sicker, and no one is coming to help - including Supergirl who is busy fighting Nyxly. Knowing that she can make a difference, Kelly embraces her power and fully steps into her role as Guardian. Joined by Supergirl, Alex, Diggle (guest star David Ramsey) and team, Guardian leads the way to restoring justice to the fallen community.
I may be of a certain age, but my “Fifth Dimensional Energy” detector just listens for the faint songs of “Up, up and Away (in my beautiful balloon)”
Did Diggs just imply that he turned down the GL ring?
I really wanted to like this episode. It should have been a return to the social commentary that made Season 4 with Agent Liberty so good. But the antagonist was so cartoonishly evil that it was hard to take anything seriously.
Lena rushed home from Ireland/Newfoundland, forgetting her magic book in the process. When she got back to National City, the book was already waiting for her having been sent by mail. The Postal Service is really efficient in Earth Prime!
It seems to be that way. But at the end, he said, “Worlds await.” So… 
Also what happened to Diggle’s headaches? He spent Batwoman and The Flash complaining about his headaches and now it’s like they never happened.
I did like that bit where Kara said that she marched for alien rights, and Kelly reminded her that she is an alien.
SUPERGIRL MUST PASS THE TEST OF COURAGE - Supergirl and team race Nyxly for control of a magical totem that controls courage. Supergirl and Nyxly battle and each get a piece of the totem but learn the first person to pass the test of courage will gain control of the entire thing. Meanwhile, Lena is still struggling to make sense of her newfound gift.
I take it Lena has never heard of Arthur C. Clarke and his famous Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The best bit was seeing Kara’s befuddled expression as chaos unfolded all around her.
…
What in the heck was up with the dragon? Are Earth Prime iguanas actually shapeshifted dragons that are afraid to reveal their true forms or something?
I did think J’onn being emotionally open with the rampaging dragon was a good bit, though.
Also, and I realize that this was really minor, but…when the cafeteria brawl broke out, there were a pair of extras in the foreground who were just really distracting with how fake their fighting was. One throws a “punch” that’s visibly several inches away from the other’s face. You can see the gap between A’s fist and B’s face as B recoils. And the form and timing were awful. I’m assuming they couldn’t get fight-rated stunt performers for that bit, so they did super-safe stage fighting, but…then maybe don’t foreground them? And if you don’t realize at the time how prominent that bit is, maybe edit around it once you see the footage? Even by CW standards, it was just awful fight choreography, directing, blocking, and editing.
Back on the plus side, I enjoyed the call-back to the premiere episode and Supergirl’s “first flight”.
But back to the downside…it wound up bringing me down a bit, remembering how much I loved the series when it premiered, and how much less it seems to be now.
I revise my assessment of the best bit in the episode. It was the flashback to S01E01, which was so much better than anything we’ve seen recently.
The iguana has made an appearance previously, being the alien pet of a little alien girl. The wikis tell me that his name is Spike.
LENA MUST ACCEPT HER NEWFOUND POWERS IN ORDER TO HELP THE SUPER FRIENDS - Lena is uncertain about using her magical abilities to help Supergirl retrieve the second totem from Nyxly. William struggles to write a story on the Super Friends that makes both the heroes and Andrea happy. Meanwhile, Kelly is thrilled Esme (guest star Mila Jones) has found a new home, but things go awry and the little girl’s future is put in danger.
Thanks for that. I remember Spike from the Agent Liberty season.
Best scene of the episode: National City is going to shit and Kara has had quite enough of randos shooting at her.
Soooo…the Superfriends decided to drain the humanity from thousands of innocent people, and subject tens of thousands more to the subsequent violence and chaos? I’m pretty sure Lena was right the first time when she thought that was a monstrous idea. I honestly thought at first that the fact that Supergirl would even suggest such a thing was a clear tell that she had been affected by the totem herself and had lost some of her own humanity. But…nope. That was seriously the actual plan the “good guys” decided to go with.
And then I assumed that J’onn and Dreamer would use telepathy to sedate everyone. But…nope. They tried to “control” the chaos by beating up random innocent people who they themselves had caused to be become violent psychopaths.
Also, is it physically possible for Hollywood to depict foster parents positively? Ok, I know, that’s an exaggeration. The Danvers were effectively foster parents after all, and they did well by Kara. But they weren’t a formal part of the foster care system. Literally every formal foster parent/group home supervisor we’ve seen this season has been awful. Why does Kelly even try to place alien orphans with human foster families?
Separate but related: were there two drafts of the script for this episode or reshoots or something that got mixed together? Esme’s foster mom seemed to really care about her in the first couple of scenes, and seemed less freaked out by the fire breath than genuinely scared for Esme’s safety in that scene, but the next thing we know, she’s deploying Esme as a home defense system and forcing her to fight violent psychopaths. The hell?? (Which gets back the Superfriends’ “brilliant” plan of turning thousands of innocent people into violent psychopaths and letting them rampage throughout the city…)
Concur regarding Supergirl’s plan. At first I thought they were feeding the reporter fake information to deceive Nxyly.
Also what are the odds that 2 of the seven totems that could be anywhere on Earth are in National City?
I agree that was a good gag. But…it was Kara’s plan to turn people into violent psychopaths. I mean, I guess that could have been an actual random mugger who wasn’t affected by the totem, but Kara has no way to know that. By sheer numbers, it’s far more likely that was an innocent guy that she turned into a psychopath, and then took out her frustration on by giving him brain damage (I know, I know, comic book logic, a blow to the head that knocks someone out won’t cause brain damage by the rules of her world. Still). Also, how do you throw a bullet hard enough that it knocks someone off their feet and knocks them out, and it doesn’t even penetrate the skin? I actually think I’d give them that for the sake of a good gag, if it weren’t for it probably having been a result of Supergirl’s plan.
And I just can’t get over it. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. When the Superfriends figure out what the humanity totem is doing, did they even bother to let anyone know? How many innocent people got maimed or killed by National City Police who had no way of knowing those were innocent people suffering from magically-induced temporary insanity?
Did they let anyone know about their plan to make the whole thing worse, other than Handsome Reporter Guy, who just wrote about the whole thing well after the fact?
Getting back to Esme and her foster mom, I was again giving the show too much credit, and thought at first she had also been affected by the token, and that’s why she was forcing Esme to fight violent psychopaths. But…nope. She was just awful, because literally every caregiver in the National City foster care system is monstrously selfish, abusive, or bigoted, and unfit to care for children.
But that brings up a whole other can of worms. How many of the people who had their humanity drained, and then made worse by Lena’s botched spell, and then made worse on purpose by the Superfriends were parents? I really don’t want to think about the statistical probability of how many of them were primary caregivers for a baby. I can’t even imagine the trauma for a child of seeing their parent become a violent psychopath.
And, of course, even beyond the physical trauma all those innocent people suffered, what about the psychological trauma, both for the involuntary psychopaths and their victims? In these sorts of stories, there’s usually at least a handwave towards the victims not remembering the horror they lived through, but we didn’t get any indication of that. Are there now thousands of National City residents who consciously remember being violent psychopaths, at least some of whom tried to murder a child?
Honestly, I think I’m just going to pretend this episode never happened. I just can’t reconcile what the Superfriends did with viewing them as any sort of “good” people, much less heroes. I also can’t reconcile Handsome Repoter Guy revealing what happened in his story with anyone in-universe still viewing them as heroes. This episode should have ended with ARGUS and the DOD descending on National City in force to track down and arrest the Superfriends for literal Crimes Against Humanity, instead of Kara and Lena having a cute take-out meal.
With all that poorly thought-out moral horror (which just gets brushed aside in the coda), I seriously think it was the worst episode of any CW Arrowverse show, ever, by a mile.
Ugh.
NYXLY KIDNAPS WILLIAM - *Supergirl continues to fight Nyxly for the remaining totems but after Nyxly kidnaps William, Supergirl realizes she needs to take a more proactive stance to keep National City safe. Meanwhile, Alex faces the biggest challenge of her life.
No one has mentioned making Nyxly say her name backwards?
Brian