The Flash and Supergirl - Season wrap-ups

"You're sure this is a normal obstetric procedure?"

Okay, so I know I haven’t been posting much lately, but I have watched a thing or two, including wrapping up the seasons of The Flash and Supergirl.

When last I left the Scarlet Speedster, DeVoe had stolen Ralph’s body and assumed his original appearance. With just one bus meta left, the radioactive Neil Borman, Team Flash decide to secure him, recruiting Citizen Cold from Earth-X to assist in the 24 hours before his wedding to Ray Terrill. They have to fight not just DeVoe, but also the hardcore Nazi Earth-X Laurel Lance, while Barry is mired in guilt and his annual existential angst. Snart helps Barry accept that it is okay to grieve for those you have lost and move on in their memory, instead of wallowing, and the good guys actually win for once.

DeVoe starts building his ‘Enlightenment Machine’, stealing tech to do so. To Marlize’s horror, he kills anyone who gets in his way, having elevated his purpose to near-divine status in his own mind. As Harry’s mind begins to deteriorate as a result of using his dark matter boosted Thinking Cap, Team Flash realise that DeVoe plans to do this to the entire world, thus ending the perceived tyranny of technology that he believes to be destroying the human race. Marlize, revealed in flashback to have come around to his way of thinking after African warlords murdered a village to steal a water purifier she made for humanitarian purposes, finally turns on her husband as she sees his descent into murderous zealotry.

Team Flash create a bomb made of Amunet’s metal and use it to take out one of the satellites vital to DeVoe’s plan, but he uses Star Labs’ satellite as a back-up. Marlize joins the team, and they use Cecile’s powers – boosted by being in labour – to send Barry into DeVoe’s mind to rescue the good part of him via a psychic nexus. Finding Ralph’s psyche still ‘alive’, but DeVoe’s goodness dead by his own psychic hand, Barry instead brings Ralph to the nexus, restoring him to his body and leaving DeVoe a helpless hologram-ghost as Marlize destroys his chair.

At this point, Barry was wondering how drunk he'd been for how long.

Harry is stabilised and goes home, Caitlin learns that Killer Frost was part of her before the particle accelerator explosion, and the mysterious girl reveals herself to be the speedster daughter of Barry and Iris, FROM THE FU-CHAH!

Lena tries to help Sam rid herself of Reign, containing her with kryptonite, which naturally leads to tensions with Supergirl when this comes to light. Meanwhile the third Worldkiller emerges, a doctor named Grace Parker who is completely into this whole Pestilence thing. She and Purity rescue Reign, although Imra is able to get a blood sample to engineer a cure to Pestilence’s plague. James refuses to spy on Lena to see if she has more kryptonite, but the fact that Supergirl asked breaks her friendship with Lena.

In the episode called 'Trinity', I had failed to realise that the Worldkillers
weren't the only trinity.

Grace succumbs entirely to Pestilence, while the consciousnesses of Sam and Julia try to hold onto their identities in the Valley of Juru, apparently both a place on Krypton and a state of mind, where the victims of the Worldkillers persist as spirits of some kind. Brainiac 5 projects Supergirl, Alex and Lena into the Valley, where they remind Sam of Ruby, allowing her to break free and signal the location of the Fortress of Badassitude. Julia breaks free, and Purity and Pestilence kill one another, but Reign takes over again and absorbs the power of the dead Worldkillers, before setting out to remove Sam’s distraction by killing Ruby.

Reign is captured, but Colville’s former Supergirl cult attempts to use a form of black kryptonite called Harun-el to create a new Worldkiller. The cult leader, Tonya, also learns Guardian’s secret identity when she shoots his mask off, and James is faced with the fact that the police would rather point guns at a black man with a shield than the heavily armed white doomsday cultists. Kara and Mon-el – having stayed behind, with Imra’s blessing, to work through his feelings about Kara – interrupt the ritual, and Kara talks Tonya down from becoming a Worldkiller.

Believing that they can use it to cure Sam, Winn and Lena locate a large source of Harun-el, which turns out to be a meteor housing a Kryptonian city, Argo, which survived the destruction and is now powered by the Harun-el. Reunited with her mother, Alura, Kara must argue for the release of a sample of Harun-el to save Sam, just in time to exorcise Reign before she can escape her containment cell. They then go back to Argo, to see if they have a place there, only for the dark priests of the Worldkillers to steal their ship and fly to Earth to regenerate Reign and begin Kryptoforming the planet. They steal Reign’s blood and send her into the Earth with the Sword of Juru to cause catastrophic earthquakes.

Throughout the season, J’onn’s father M’yrnn has been suffering from Martian Alzheimer’s. Having made preparations for death and passed many of his memories – including those of his ancestral line – to J’onn, he sacrifices himself by merging with the Earth and using his shapeshifting ability to counter the terraforming. Winn and Mon-el repair a pair of portals to get Kara, Mon-el and Alura to Earth, and Sam travels into Juru to find the fountain which is the source of Reign’s strength. Sam kills Reign, but nearly everyone dies,  so Kara somehow goes back in time using the Legion’s tech and instead of the fatal option uses the Harun-el to transport herself, Sam and Reign to Juru, where a companion fountain robs her strength until she fades into nothing.

For identification purposes, I am not the bottle city of Kandor.

Mon-el goes back to the future, which apparently needs his leadership, and also Winn’s technical skills. Since another Brainiac is wiping out other AIs, Brainiac-5 stays in the present. After looking after Ruby for several episodes and almost being killed by someone she sent down, Alex decides to quit the DEO and adopt, but J’onn instead promotes her as his successor, suggesting that she instead stick to desk work while starting her family, as he plans to walk the Earth, like Kane in Kung-Fu. Alura takes the dark priestesses to stand trial on Argo, and James comes out as Guardian, while Lena recruits the surprisingly cerebral Eve Tessmacher to work on experiments with the Harun-el.

I’ll be honest; after a strong opening, The Flash is decidedly off the boil for me. The Thinker was always going to be a tough one – super-intelligence is the hardest power to pull off well, especially in an antagonist, and a few too many times it works by having Team Flash be, well, idiots. Supergirl, on the other hand, goes from strength to strength, continuing to be fun and engaging and exciting as needed. Now, Arrow I haven’t caught up on, and I think that might not change. The Flash might go the same way next season, while Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow remain definite fixtures.