Supergirl - 'Luthors'

"When you're in the big house, you take the laughs were you can get 'em."

It's time for who do you trust? Hubba hubba hubba, money money money, who do ya trust?

As Lillian Luthor's trial for the attempted mass-murder of aliens (which I guess is a crime,) dominates the headlines, she reaches out to her adopted daughter for reconciliation. Metallo takes the stand and starts shooting green death out of his chest, and he and Lillian vanish after dropping a crane to force Supergirl to choose between capturing the bad guy and saving the innocent. Video evidence implicates the hell out of Lena Luthor, who is arrested over Kara's lone voice of protest. J'onn and Alex regretfully concede that she looks guilty AF, while James gets on his high horse about Kara trusting Lena not to commit cries more than she trusts him to run around in an armoured suit fighting superhumans without getting hurt.

He has a point about her being overprotective, but it's somewhat lost in his insistence that she trust him while absolutely shutting out her thoughts and opinions on Lena Luthor, whom she knows pretty much as well as anyone does. And indeed, she is right, and Lillian has framed Lena to try to coerce her into using her DNA (as she turns out to also be Lionel Luthor's illegitimate daughter,) to open Lex's secret armoury of anti-alien macuffinry.

"Personal space is just something that doesn't apply to other people in your
book, right?"

Metallo busts Lena out, knocking down Guardian to do so, but Winn is able to uncover proof that the real Hank Henshaw hacked the video feed to make Lena look guilty, and also to track Metallo via an instability in his synthetic kryptonite heart. Kara rescues Lena, but Hank and Lillian escape as Metallo explodes. Lena thanks Kara for her trust, before flashing back to a chess game as children to drop the hint that she might just be much, much better at this whole evil thing than anyone else in her family.

In personal subplot land, Alex introduces Maggie to her friends to a resounding chorus of routine acceptance (J'onn apparently knew all along that Alex was gay, but didn't feel it his place to say anything. Bloody telepaths.) Eve reveals that Mon-el spent their entire date talking about Kara and Kara decides to give things a shot with Mon-el, only for their kiss to be interrupted by the arrival, not as I had predicted of those alien bounty hunters, but by Mister Mxyzptlk, who declares his love for Kara.

Congratulations, Supergirl. You went there, to a there that I didn't even think of as an option you might reject(1).

This guy. Spoilers: He doesn't actually look like this in the show.

'Luthors' is a not uninteresting episode, but highlights a problem with the current arc plot, to whit that the friendship between Kara and Lena has only come up in episodes where shit happens to Lena. If we're going to buy it as an ongoing part of Kara's life, and a relationship that she'll butt heads with her other friends over, we really need to see it as an ongoing thing, even if Katie McGrath just pops in every so often to keep the connection live in our minds. Essentially, we shouldn't be kicking off each Lena Luthor episode with 'oh, yeah; they're mates.'

Other than that, and the total disinterest I have in the Kara/Mon-el relationship, this is another decent episode, with the more investigative slant and the instability issue setting it apart from previous clashes with Metallo.

Next week is going to be… weird.

(1) This shoves Arrow even more to the outliers of its own 'verse, although if we get an appearance by Arrow-Mite, they're not going to be able to deny that they really wanted Batman anymore.