DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Alex'; The Flash - 'I Know Who You Are'; Arrow - 'Underneath'

"I've got a great idea! Let's name the episode after a character to fuck with
anyone trying to find screen shots!"

Okay, so it makes sense in my freaky head to combine each week's DC Arrowverse reviews into a single post. It may not last; I guess we'll see.

Mad season spoilers in the review of The Flash, by the way; you have been warned.

First up is Supergirl, and in the episode entitled 'Alex' one of the people closest to Kara is kidnapped. Hint: Not Winn. After the tension that has never really existed at all between Kara and Maggie regarding the role of the superhero in routine crime erupts, Alex goes missing. Kara receives a call from a man telling her that he has Alex and knows that she is Supergirl, and threatening to kill Alex if she doesn't bust a certain inmate out of prison. Hank refuses to play ball, knowing that the revelation that Supergirl can be leaned on would bring more danger on her loved ones, leaving thirty-six hours to find Alex.

The kidnapper turns out to be one Rick Malverne, a student at Midvale High with Kara and Alex. He wants his father, Peter Thompson, broken out of prison, believing his sentence for murder – he insists it was manslaughter – to be unjust. Malverne is a weird character. His motivation is his utter devotion to the father who rescued him from an abusive mother, but no-one ever really addresses this from a psychological angle. They to trick him, and appeal to his childhood good nature, but never offer a shred of sympathy for someone whose path was set by brutal circumstance. I'm not saying he's a right guy, just that the episode is fairly black and white on a grey subject.

It's also kind of hard to swallow, even in a superhero show, that this random kid from Hicksville went on to become a better hacker than Winn, capable of shadowing Kara and Alex for a good year without either the alien with superhuman senses or the trained spy (or her cop girlfriend, or her superhumanly alert, mind-reading boss) noticing, devising a strategy to defeat the entire DEO, and find time to develop a means to resist Martian mind-reading(1). We are looking at Christopher Pellant levels of frickwizardry(2) here.

Of course they rescue Alex, with minutes to spare, and Malverne is mind wiped to protect Supergirl's identity. Unfortunately, all of this means that Kara isn't in the emotional place to take a call from Lena Luthor to ask if she should team up with an alien named Rhea. This is presumably setting up the finale, but what's really interesting about it is that Lena makes what we know to be a bad decision in absence of Kara's advice, but is not motivated by spite at Kara blowing her off. In fact, she picks up on how upset Kara is and actually calls back later to check she's okay. One of the reasons that I want Lena not to end up villained is that, actually, she and Kara share a rare instance of a really healthy friendship between two women(3).

I like this character. I hope she doesn't die.

On then to The Flash, and an episode which begins with Barry confronting Savitar with the episode's title: 'I Know Who You Are', before flashing back to establish this knowledge.

Team Flash move to contact grad student Tracy Brand, whose academic career is in freefall thanks to the rejection of her theoretical derivation of the existence of the Speed Force, but who will one day be a Nobel-winning physicist and inventor of the speed trap. As the team struggles to protect her from Killer Frost, who has been dispatched to fulfil the first part of her name, they are increasingly confronted with the fact that Savitar seems to know all of their plans in advance, as if he were present for everything that has and will happened(4). When Cisco overcomes his fear of killing Caitlin sufficiently to incapacitate Frost, Savitar appears to rescue her.

Well, someone's been shopping.

Tracy hypothesises that they could use the energy which Savitar's suit was made to protect him from against him, while the team ponders the source of Savitar's knowledge and the fact that he didn't kill Tracy himself. This tips Barry off and he runs off for a confrontation with Savitar, who of course knows that he is waiting, because the obvious answer, and the answer to the question I asked last week – 'Who would have such a profound effect on both Caitlin and Wally?' – is that Savitar is Barry Allen. I'm so ashamed I didn't realise earlier; it's not like the theme of the season from 'Flashpoint' onwards has been about how Barry is his own worst enemy.

Finally, Arrow picked up directly from last week as 'Underground' began with the Arrow Cave in lockdown after Prometheus hit it with an EMP. This leaves Oliver and Felicity trapped, Felicity paralysed from the waist down as the EMP took out her spinal implant, and oxygen rapidly running out, but on the upside gives them a chance to hammer out their grievances, in particular that Oliver doesn't trust Felicity: or anyone else for that matter. In the end, he always feels that it's up to him to get the job done, even if that means calling in a mob hit.

"To sum up the situation, we're blue, ba-ba-dee baba-doo."

Outside the bunker, John and Lila get frosty over ARGOS' activities: Mostly running that illegal black site for the detention of US citizens without warrant, indictment or trial, but also – as it turns out – knocking off, and indeed sprucing up, Curtis' T-sphere design, which comes in handy as his original spheres are down and out in the bunker(5). The team works together to rescue Oliver and Felicity before their sanctum turns into even more of a death-trap, but this gives Chase the time he needs to find Oliver's son.

So, this all feels as if we're ramping up to some finales (as indeed we are.) We've got Kara vs. Rhea, Barry vs. Barry, and Oliver vs. Chase, with the usual stakes of global domination, cosmic destruction and… Star City? William? Oliver's feels? Yeah, Arrow always feels a bit… meh when it comes to the stakes. I mean, I'm not insensitive to the peril to Oliver's son, but for all he's actually been in the series, I will ultimately be less pissed if they kill him than I am about Sara Diggle(6).

(1) Hell, that he even knows that Martians can read minds. I'm assuming that's not in any of the press releases that the DEO doesn't make.

(2) Frickwizardry – Allegedly mundane abilities that reveal the fact that the possessor is in fact a fricking wizard.

(3) They never fight over boys, never get pointlessly bitchy at each other, have each other's backs, occasionally argue about stuff that matters to them in different ways. I mean, okay, Kara is lying about a few things, as is Lena's other bestie Supergirl…

(4) To the point of briefing Frost on Barry's script.

(5) He calls them Koto and Poto after The Beastmaster's ferrets, and he and Dinah both turn out to have had some revelatory moments over Marc Singer in a loincloth. Thankfully neither of them saw Singer's appearance in Season 2 as a grizzled, genocidal general, or they'd never be having sex again.

(6) Join in with the chorus: "No, not letting it go."