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Supergirl S05E02 Review: Cain and Abel

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 2: Stranger Beside Me

This episode was... pretty neat. A lot of the storylines introduced in the season premiere are still being built up in the background while a majority of the episode focused on some martian drama, and... I'm of two opinions about it? On one hand, Kara having to juggle her journalistic civilian life with superheroing is something that hits quite home as a classic Super-family story. On the other hand. I just really don't feel invested with the screentime we spent in any of the CatCo scenes we go through in this episode. Like, okay, so Kara disappearing and being asked to balance her workload, while Andrea Rojas acts like a class-A bitch boss and William Dey is apparently going around stalking Kara (and will inevitably discover her secret identity), who is built up as this massive shady douchebag, but in a (-gasp!-) huge plot twist turns out that he's a nice dude because he serves in a soup kitchen or whatever... it's all sufficient, manages to tell a story and thankfully doesn't take up too much of the episode runtime, but it's also so bland and I really don't care about any of the CatCo scenes other than the fact that Andrea Rojas is trying to be like a rival mogul for Lena Luthor. 

Lena, meanwhile, gets a couple of neat scenes in this episode, but it's mostly done in her isolated basement as she interacts with Eve Tessmacher, who she has captured and apparently is trying to figure out how to make her tick. Perhaps in a move that sort of cements Lena Luthor as being more villainous than heroic (actions speak louder than ambiguous speeches, after all), Lena ends up shoving the A.I. Hope into Eve through some kooky floating swarm of metallic orbs, making her essentially some kind of a Brainiac-style cyborg creature. It's interesting for sure, and while the introduction of Hope the AI is sort of out of nowhere, I am actually somewhat interested in seeing where this goes, particularly since we get reminded that Eve's working for the mysterious organization Leviathan. Lena rants a lot about how she wants to reprogram humanity and aliens to basically all "do no harm", and it's a pretty neat well-intentioned but ultimately extremely villainous plot. 

But the big storyline in this episode, of course, is the huge Martian lore dump! As J'onn and the rest of the Super-Friends try to figure out whatever the hell's going on with Midnight in the season premiere, they quickly figure out that J'onn's brother Ma'alefa'ak (or, as he's better-known in the comics, Malefic) exists, and a good chunk of the episode is sort of devoted into a little mind-delve as the Super-Friends make use of some technobabble (Q-waves and the Obsidian tech, the latter being a pretty terrible idea) to get J'onn to walk around a visual representation of his mind, allowing him to discover that his brother unleashed H'ronmeer's Curse, a plague that wiped out so many of the green martians that caused him to be imprisoned in the Phantom Zone. There are a lot of holes in this story, like why J'onn doesn't even remember his brother at all. He doesn't get that many answers at the end of the episode because he got interrupted a couple of times by fight scenes, but apparently we're going to delve deeper into J'onn's backstory. Okay. The exposition really could've been better, and I kinda wished that it was Alex or Kara or someone who have actually interacted with J'onn more than a couple of generic dialogue exchanges that had gone with him into the mind-zone, though. 

The bizarre way that Martian telepathic mind works means that Malefic ends up learning and influencing J'onn's mind journey a couple of times throughout the episode, eventually seemingly getting the idea to reset either his or J'onn's mind at the end of the episode. We do get a couple of action scenes starring Malefic and his random White Martian stooge (which didn't last through the episode), but ultimately the action scenes in this episode aren't super-spectacular. It's a pretty neat (and certainly cost-saving!) way to have Malefic sort of cycle through Alex and Kelly as he shapeshifts through forms, which both allows the actresses to act outside their normal range, and also to play up the sheer creepiness of a shapeshifting enemy. Also, we get the confirmation hat James Olsen still runs around in his Guardian outfit

Speaking of James, hilariously, I think the show's poking fun at how they really have no idea what to do with the character for four seasons, noting that James got offered random jobs like becoming a senator or whatever. 

There's also a couple of romantic plotlines, with the Alex/Kelly one being... extremely identikit to the Alex/Maggie storyline in previous episodes. I'm really not trying to complain, but man, Kelly does really feel like she's just there as an accessory, to be the perfect girlfriend, with very little distinguishing traits other than "she's nice". There's the whole "I know which one of these is the impostor" bit at the climax that really felt underwhelming. Just because she's not straight doesn't mean that she can't fall into the same bucket of "bland, generic love interest" tropes. Brainiac's love life with Nia is... a lot more sparsely spread throughout the episode and I think it's dragged on a bit too long, but it's at least kind of a gag-a-minute. Admittedly, love storylines in superhero shows tended to not be my thing, and I might be a grouch about these -- it's just kind of not the most interesting thing when you shove this into an episode that's already pretty slow and consisting mostly of set-up. 

Overall, a somewhat clumsy episode that has a bunch of B-plots I'm not the biggest fan of, but sort of makes up for it by having a decent J'onn storyline, and promising for something huge with Malefic and Lena, at the very least. Otherwise, though, it's pretty run-of-the-mill. Part of it might have to do with my own apathy for some of the B-plot storylines, though. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We've talked about Ma'alefa'ak/Malefic a couple of times in other shows, but we get the revelation that, just like his comic-book counterpart, Malefic is the one responsible for unleashing H'ronmeer's Curse, the telepathic plague that wiped out all of the green martians and left J'onn and Ma'alefa'ak as some of the only survivors. 
• Brainy mentions "Q-Waves", which is a frequency that apparently Obsidian tech has discovered a bit ahead of schedule (I think?), but the only reference I can find for Q-waves is the Q-Energy, a Kryptonite-like energy that appears for a single issue of Silver-Age-era Superman. 

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