DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Girl of Steel'; The Flash - 'The Flash Reborn'; Legends of Tomorrow - 'Aruba-Con'; and Arrow - 'Fallout'

Random in a cornfield (possibly replacement Supermom.)

Okay then, here we go. DC is back.

We begin with Supergirl, and the 'Girl of Steel' is feeling the aftereffects of making her adopted planet a lethal toxin to her honey, and I don't mean the fact that filling the atmosphere with lead is likely going to give a lot of apex predators a really bad few days down the line. Heartsick, she's avoiding people and, it turns out, basically burying herself in Supergirl so she doesn't have to be Kara Danvers, the one who feels things.

Meanwhile, Douchey McSuit - he has a name, no doubt I'll learn it - a capitalist vulture of the first water, is intent on profiting on the damage done to Capital City by forcing through a waterfront development. He seems willing to hire goons to attack the unveiling of a Supergirl statue to do it, and going after alien tech as well (including a Daxamite ship held against protocol by the army without telling the DEO.) He also sets out to buy Catco, with the company being held in blind trust while Cat Grant acts as White House Press Secretary(1), but is pipped to the post by Lena Luthor, who continues to be pretty damned awesome and I really, really don't want her to heel turn.

Douchey McSuit (real name Morgan Edge, but he's a douche in a suit) is the
poor man's Max Lord.

Kara starts to come through by the end of the episode, and thankfully Alex and Maggie get past a bump in the road when Alex admits she's wobbling about their upcoming wedding because her dad isn't there to give her away, having become the cyborg henchman of a human supremacist hate group. Once she's opened up about that, however, she's able to move past it and ask J'onn to walk her down the aisle. Also, a random woman at the ceremony which gets attacked hefts a beam off her daughter, and may be sharing dreams with Kara, or dreaming about Kara's mother, or something.

Designer hobo.

Having been called on to enter the Speed Force at the end of last season, Barry Allen is recalled after a mysterious samurai appears in Central City and knocks all the other superheroes around, demanding they produce the Flash or else the city will be destroyed. Cisco calls on Caitlin to come home - finding her working in a bar and dark of hair and eye - and they modify the Speed Force Bazooka to release Barry while at the same time stabilising the Speed Force. Barry returns, but is all kind of grungy and amnesiac, until Iris lets herself be captured, believing - correctly - that Barry will find a away to rescue her, even if that means overcoming some massive psychic trauma.

Barry saves Iris by running at unprecedented speed, up and down collapsing wind turbines, and takes out the samurai, which proves to be a robot someone sent in as a test of sorts. Barry recovers his memory, and Caitlin quits from what appears to be some sort of mob bar. When the boss's heavy tries to muscle her, she goes all Killer Frost and at this point seems to have two largely separate personalities going on.

Look, Rip; you're just lucky I've already assigned 'Douchey McSuit.'

In Legends of Tomorrow, the whole dinosaur mess from last season's finale is cleaned up by Rip Hunter and the Time Bureau, a bunch of prissy, suit-wearing transtemporal bureaucrats who relieve the Legends of their duty and confiscate the Waverider. Some time later, the Legends are going stir crazy trying to live normal - ish; Nate is pursuing the rather thankless task of being the third string hero of Central City - lives when Mick gets into a fight with Julius Caesar in Aruba. Having located an anachronism that the Bureau missed, Sara and the others try to get reinstated, only to be snarked at and generally put down. Thus they steal the Waverider, currently locked down as a training station(2), and try to set things right themselves.

The Legends capture Caesar and recruit Jaxx (and a rather more reluctant Stein, who is about to become a grandfather,) to get the Waverider back to fighting trim. They drop off Caesar and wipe his memory, but he deftly steals Nate's book on 'how the Empire fell' and determines that Brutus and Cassius are going down the first chance he gets. Gideon reports that the timeline is fooked, and the Bureau turn out to straighten up. Unfortunately for the Time Bureau's rep, they walk right into a trap, forcing the Legends into action to rescue them in their classic, low-profile style.

Reluctantly, Rip allows the Legends to keep operating because, as he tells Lead Agent Stick-Up-Her-Butt, sometimes you need a scalpel, and sometimes you need a chainsaw. The lead field agent is so snarky at Sara over her team's 'abilities', and yet so in tune with her in combat, that I would be very surprised if they didn't sleep together by the end of the series (on which front, a keycadr boosted from a male Time Agent 'in the morning' confirms Sara still bi and still keeping her hand in, in more ways than one.)

Tough episode to image search.

Last, but not least, Arrow reveals that almost everyone survived the bombing of Lian Yu. The al Ghul sisters have vanished, so are probably alive, but other than that no-one named seems to have bought it on the good side, apart from Will's mother, and Thea, who is in a coma. Not all is rosy, however, as Quentin is suffering from PTS after having to shoot his daughter's double to protect Dinah, only for her to turn up again at the precinct - having been retrieved by an unseen rando in a helicopter - and blow it up. This in turn seems to be a means to an end; luring the team out of the bunker to break in and steal a prototype T-sphere. Other fallout in the episode 'Fallout' includes Diggle suffering an injury that has affected his ability to shoot and Rene getting a new suit and a new custody hearing. Will is living with Olly, as per Samantha's dying wish, but blames Oliver for his mother's death. Finally, someone leaks a photo of Olly in costume and sans hood and the world knows who the Green Arrow is.

The three Arrowverse shows have so far made a fairly weak showing off strong season finale, with Supergirl the only one of the four to really carry the impact of its closer forward. Arrow in particular, while I don't want any of the characters to be dead, feels like a soft-pedal after threatening a TPK. There's a lot of work to do to match those wrap ups, and we're slow out of the blocks.

(1) Another pop at POTUS, I think.
(2) While many of Rip's criticisms of the Legends are fair, I find it hard to forgive him for allowing Gideon to be put in indefinite sleep mode after making out with her virtual avatar last series. Dick move, Hunter.