Supergirl Season 3 Episode 11
Supergirl headed out to a place poisonous to men while the show made some character adjustments. Livewire vacated the role of mean girl with a heart of gold so that Psi could take her place, while it seems Reign is moving away from current baddie so that Purity can take the mantle. It might take an episode or two for the dust to settle on those changes, but things have certainly shifted on Supergirl, even if all the same roles are still being filled. Of course the story is also propelling us further into the mythology of Reign – we met another priestess who knew her, and learned that two of her fellow world-killers are Purity and Pestilence. I hope that the priestess’s murky predictions will come true, though preferably in a very slanted, Wyrd Sisters-esque way. And Purity seems to have been awakened at the tail end of this episode, once again in a traumatic moment of adrenaline. Pestilence can’t be too far behind, although they may space them out so that these world killers last all season. I’m sorry to see Leslie/Livewire go, and while I’m glad she finally owned up to the goodness inside of her and her friendship with Supergirl, it feels like they could have found more uses for her alive than dead. Her death felt a bit like paint by numbers of something that was meant to evoke emotion, but never really landed. It had been so long since we last saw Leslie, we got so few moments of connection between Leslie and Kara, and the ones that were shown this episode felt more like the status quo than anything new or earned. The overall effect was that Leslie’s storyline and death felt like they were going through the motions. Keeping her around and developing her friendship with Supergirl, especially at a time when Kara could use a friend and is questioning her alien nature, would have been fertile ground, from a story perspective. Also puzzling, is the right turn Brainiac-5 took this week into the much less endearing side of intelligence: being a goddamn know-it-all. The characterization itself isn’t surprising, so much as the juxtaposition with how impressively emotionally intelligence he was when it came to coaxing Kara out of her self-imposed coma. How does someone that empathetically dexterous not only become a complete nincompoop so soon after, but show none of that side up until now? Either way, Winn got to prove his whatever-level intellect – not that anyone other than Brainy and Winn himself needed to be reminded – and save the day with a combination of his usual tech stuff, and being a space history nerd. Yay nerds! In other Legion of Superheroes news, Mon-El keeps trying to find his way out of his issues with Kara by being nice. One helpful aspect of his time traveling shenanigans is that the writers can reboot any aspects that his personality that the audience hated (and depending on who you ask, there were many) and explain it away with the longer passage for time for him. Suddenly, a guy who we all thought would never mature in a million years…well, did.
