Supergirl - 'Homecoming'

Surely nothing bad can come of this!

So Supergirl and Mon-el are an item now. Better find some more emotional tension.

Winn picks up reports of a convoy leaving a former Cadmus facility. Kara and J'onn snag the convoy and find that it is transporting Jeremiah Danvers, which is a pretty turn up for the books. The Danvers family and J'onn are all delighted, but Mon-el smells a rat and is pretty blunt in saying so. With Kara already ticked off at him for blurting their change of the Facebook status and so dooming them both to a world of stares, whispers, HR paperwork and mandatory sexual harassment seminars, this is enough to get him kicked out of family dinner.

Mon-el asks Winn to help him monitor Jeremiah, who seems to be up to something. When confronted, it turns out he was just looking at Kara and Alex's mission reports to catch up on their lives, and Alex rounds on Kara for even raising the matter. Naturally, it's at this point and with most of the DEO decoyed to look for a bomb which he claimed had been created using the energy of Kara's solar flare, that Jeremiah turns out to be a telepathy-proof, cyborg-armed bad un. He hacks the DEO mainframe and puts both Winn and J'onn in the infirmary. Winn is able to bug him, but when Kara and Alex confront him, he is with Lillian and Cyborg Superman, who blow up a train track to distract Kara(1) and escape. Alex is able to corner Jeremiah, who insists that he has done everything he has done for her and that if she wants to take him back, she'll have to kill him, which of course he can't do.

 

I'm not wild for romance in Supergirl, but... It's only as I'm writing this that I
realise that Kara and Mon-el went straight through first kiss to first nookie and
no-one tried to slut shame her; not even a little bit. That's pretty huge.

Winn discovers that what Jeremiah took was the alien registration database, which means that Cadmus now has access to the names and locations of every alien in the United States; or at least all of the harmless refugees. Presumably the hardcore alien supervillains are withholding their details from the registry. Maggie comforts Alex, who is gutted by her father's betrayal, while Mon-el makes things up with Kara after taking advice from Winn(2), having been impressed by the way he was with Lyra. Winn suggests that Mon-el ask Kara what she wants from him, and listen to what she says, which is apparently revolutionary talk on Daxam(3).

'Homecoming' is a little predictable in its overall structure, but has some very strong beats. Having Mon-el go straight at the convenience of Jeremiah's rescue is better than ignoring it and pretending that the audience won't notice, and also allows Kara to walk a line between being the sensible one and the one who trusts, rather than immediately seeming cold for rejecting her father-figure, or dim for never spotting it at all. I'm not convinced that Jeremiah can have a good enough reason for me to ever forgive him for this betrayal(4). It's always hard to think well of anyone who makes Melissa Benoist cry, but once more it's Chyler Leigh who nails the emotion, both with Alex's anger at Kara's seeming betrayal and her utter devastation once Jeremiah proves himself a traitor.

(1) The self-proclaimed defenders of humanity rarely see the irony that the 'monsters' they seek to destroy are decoyed to save the lives of humans that they endanger.

(2) A slick reversal of Winn seeking words of wisdom from the player last week.

(3) Or would be if there were a Daxam left worth talking on. Too soon?

(4) The only mitigating argument is that if he didn't know J'onn had taken control of the DEO he might still have seen it as another version of Cadmus, but with a slightly hipper rap, but honestly I suspect that if he has a plan then it will be one of those that would have been improved immensely by talking to people.