DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Midvale' and 'Wake Up'; The Flash - 'When Harry Met Harry' and 'Therefore I Am'; Legends of Tomorrow - 'Helen Hunt' and 'Welcome to the Jungle'; Crisis on Earth-X - Parts 1-4

So, apparently a three-week DC catchup was in order.

It's like they traveled back in time to kidnap Chyler Leigh and Melissa
Benoist's younger selves; only presumably way less illegal and space-time
destroying.

We begin with Supergirl and the bucolic flashback episode 'Midvale', apparently Smallville's slightly larger sister community(1) and home to Kara's foster family. The plan is to wallow in family and help Alex recover from her narratively jarring break-up with Maggie, but the immediate result seems more to be that Alex descends into semi-sanctioned alcohol abuse and gets pissy with Kara for being all 'plenty more fish in the sea' after her own dark night of the soul following the loss of Mon-el.

The bulk of the episode, however, takes us back to when the girls were both teenagers, Kara the overachieving newbie and Alex an aspiring bitch queen. The death of a fellow student - a close friend of Kara's - leads the two girls into their own investigation, revealing an affair between Alex's queen bee BFF and a teacher and the dead boy's penchant for... Well, blackmail is an ugly word, and it's not actually made clear if he spies on the town for fun and profit, or if his motivation was to try to make the world a better place by pressuring teachers not to sleep with their students or corrupt law enforcement officers to come clean(2). The loss and the investigation bring Alex and Kara together for the first time, and the flashback works the same magic in the present, although it's not entirely clear how given that they don't really talk about it and there isn't a lot of parallel plot intercutting to link then and now.

 

Right! The telescope. That was the link.

'Midvale' gives us a fairly strong tale of the young Danvers sisters, but the world they inhabit is too isolated for the events to have much interest. Kenny Li is a sweetheart - or a blackmailing perv, but I'm pretty sure the idea is that he just sees things and wants to change that which he feels to be wrong - but we have little time to invest in him before his death, and conversely it's just too obvious that the nice-guy sheriff is the real killer because there is literally no-one else it could be. On the other hand, the young versions of our leads are on point.

Also, J'onn talks Kara out of being too powers-usey by pretending to be an FBI agent who happens to look like her mother, which is a touch creepy, and still confusing because her mother doesn't look like her mother anymore.

 

"Well, wherever he's been, he's clearly had access to grooming accessories
and a gym."

But anyway, that leaves Kara feeling a little more composed about the loss of Mon-el, just in time for 'Wake Up', in which a mysterious ship is disturbed by geology. The DEO investigate and find Mon-el and a bunch of peeps in suspended animation, including - as it turns out - a Saturnian space babe named Imra. Has Mon-el relapsed to his pre-Kara ways? Well, no; actually for him he's been away for seven years, living in the 31^st century, recovering from his lead vulnerability, and getting married. Oops.

Elsewhere, J'onn struggles to connect with his father, having been kind of closed off for a while and not knowing how to show his dad the world outside the DEO. In arc-land, Sam goes on a quest to discover who she really is. She presses her foster mother and discovers that there is a spaceship in her barn, which leads her to the 'Fortress of Sanctuary'. A hologram tells her she was designed to be an instrument of punitive judgement before having a kid messed up the timeline, but now her personality can be overwritten(3) and she can get with the tyranny.

This is a lot of variety for a total of 52 Earths, on all of which Barry and Iris
gravitate together.

On to The Flash, and a two-episode mini-arc in which Team Flash try to track down DeVoe. In an attempt to expand his working capacity and, as advised by Cisco, make friends, Harry assembles 'the Council of Wells', a collective of his alternate selves from various dimensions. In the meantime, Barry takes Ralph out on his first case, where the Ductile Detective's drive to get the job done at any cost - the same thing that got him fired when he planted evidence to get someone he knew to be guilty sent down - clashes with Barry's focus on defending the innocent. We also get some stock business with Barry and Iris asking their couples' therapist to hypnotise Ralph and get some sort of lead on who was on the bus.

As Black Bison's whole deal is getting objects to do things, there aren't many
action clips of her.

Our meta of the week is a Native American activist with the ability to bring effigies to life, hell bent on retrieving a tribal relic and punishing those who have sought to keep it in private hands. She goes by the self-appointed moniker 'Black Bison', to save the cringe of having Team Flash try to name a Native American themed villain. The abuse of power in the name of a worthy and even righteous cause is somewhat underused as a theme - perhaps because ultimately this ends up being a B-plot to the Council of Wells - although part of Ralph's ongoing development(4) lies in ultimately swiping the relic from the scene of capture and returning it to the tribe to whom it belongs on the downlow.

"There. Sure glad I don't look stupid in this."

The Council of Wells eventually overcome their collective supermass of ego and provide an address for one Clifford DeVoe, a wheelchair-bound college professor. In 'Therefore I am', we alternate between his start of darkness story - in which he designs a 'thinking cap' which his wife makes for him, and gets his brain lightly poached into a hyer-brilliant but slightly megalomaniacal state while trying to steal energy from the particle accelerator to make it work - with Barry's increasingly lonely attempts to uncover his secret identity, while others come to believe that he might just be an innocent professor and Captain Singh fields complaints against Barry for his actions, because once more we see that Barry Allen is terrible at not getting caught by obvious traps like a few home security cameras.

In the end, DeVoe comes clean, not because Barry catches him out, but because - so it seems - he can't bear to have no-one but his wife understand just how overwhelming his intellect is(5), and challenges Team Flash, who traditionally approach big bads by outthinking them, to marvel at how completely he has them figured out.

DeVoe is a real dick.

Still awkward.

We're still stalled on Arrow, so on to Legends of Tomorrow. In 'Helen Hunt' the Legends detect an anachronism in the golden age of Hollywood. Hedy Lamarr - siren of the silver screen, brilliant inventor and Professor Stein's 'hall pass' - has been bumped from the career-making role of Helen of Troy by, well, the actual Helen of Troy. Helen's mere presence seems set to escalate studio rivalry to gang warfare, while the truncating of Lamarr's career interferes with her work on spread spectrum frequency hopping, which begins to unravel future wifi technology, including the team's comms. Oh, and Stein and Jax get body-swapped by an experimental untangling formula, leading to a bit of Freaky Friday business even as Stein (played here by Franz Drameh) gushes over Hedy Lamarr.

Things take a turn for the serious when Damien Darhk appears in the role of a Hollywood agent. He agrees to a straight fight with Sara, but when she wins the medium steps in, and is revealed as Darhk's daughter, all grown up and unwilling to see her Dad killed by another vigilante. In addition, Amaya learns that water-witch Kuasa is her granddaughter, and while the Legends ultimately win the day, Mallus' anti-Legends are an increasingly sinister and looming presence, as well as being far less of a sausage fest than the Legion of Doom.

Oh, and Zari decides that taking Helen back to Troy would be cruel, so as her ongoing impact on the timeline is limited she instead drops her of on Themiscyra.

Like father, like son.

'Welcome to the Jungle' takes the team to Vietnam, where a mysterious and charismatic figure is recruiting people on both sides to some sort of new tribe and a monster is stalking US patrols. The two turn out to be one and the same, when the Colonel Kurtz figure proves to be none other than an anachronistic Gorilla Grodd. Grodd wants to assassinate a president and take over the world, which obviously the Legends are against, but Mick has problems of his own, most particularly his own father, a gruff non-com with a flamethrower and a familiar attitude.

Grodd is stopped, Jax saves the President(6) from an ambush and Mick saves his father from committing a massacre in revenge for Grodd's crimes, and begins to open up just a little as a result. Grodd seems to fall to his death, but instead is snatched through time and greeted by Damien Darhk.

And all of this leads us at last to the four part crossover event Crisis on Earth-X(7).

I've got a good feeling about this ceremony.

Heroes from all four series assemble in Central City for the wedding of Iris and Barry. Alex comes as Kara's plus one, despite the fact that this is not the wedding she was planning to be at, gets drunk at the rehearsal dinner and wakes up in bed with Sara, because of course Sara hit that. Cue a major existential crisis for Alex, who has had precious few relationships, and never a one-night stand. Fortunately for Alex - less so for everyone else - the wedding is soon interrupted when a mystery Kryponian vapourises the reverend as the opening act of a Nazi invasion from the 'fifty-third, but it's so bleak and horrible we don't even give it a number' Earth-X.

 

In the CW-verse, doubting conservative parents ask their newly-out
daughters: 'How can you be a lesbian if you haven't slept with Sara Lance?'

The attack is led by the Kryptonian and a brace of archers, one of whom is captured and revealed to be Tommy Merlyn. He mocks Olvier's attempts to relate to him as weakness, before taking poison. Meanwhile the other archer - parallel Oliver Queen, the Fuhrer of Earth-X - and 'Overgirl' - Kara's opposite number - rally their forces with the aid of transtemporal cockroach Eobard Thawne, but are once more pressed to retreat by Oliver's kryptonite arrows. The assembled teams are able to track the Nazis based on radiation leaking from Overgirl as a result of absorbing too much yellow sunlight, but are ultimately overwhelmed and everyone but Iris and Felicity gets captured. The sidekicks are imprisoned in the pipeline, the heroes are taken to Earth-X and thrown into Commandant Quentin Lance's concentration camp, and Kara is exposed to red sun radiation to soften her up, so that her heart can be transplanted into Overgirl.

Not sure about the masks, but the use of the SS logo in place of the S of House
El is horribly inspired.

Iris and Felicity delay things long enough for the rest of the Legends to stop Thawne killing Kara and to break out the other sidekicks. The heroes break out of the camp with the help of Leo Snart, Earth-X's Captain Cold, a touchy-feely, plan-oriented, openly gay hero in a relationship with Ray 'the Ray' Terrill, and join up with a group of freedom fighters led by Earth-X's Winn Schott(8). Schott is committed to the destruction of the Reich, and intends to use his world's Red Tornado to destroy the portal linking the worlds. He offers the teams time to get through, but then sends Tornado anyway, leaving the Flash and the Ray to hold off the android while the rest of the team storm the portal (a plan which involves Oliver disguising himself as the Fuhrer before blowing his cover to protect Earth-X Felicity, who is of course interned for being Jewish.)

It's that man again.

The heroes break back through and take down the bad guys, even managing to bring down the Nazi version of the Waverider, but not without cost. Professor Stein takes a bullet activating the portal, and although briefly stabilised by the fusion of Firestorm, ultimately persuades Jax to take the formulae developed to separate them, so that he will not take Jax with him. Massive props to the series for skipping the tediousness of Stein's family blaming Jax to create unnecessary conflict. Instead, they embrace him as a member of their grieving family, because the loss of Stein is painful enough for Jax, who has spent much of the mini-series coming to terms with the father-son relationship he and Stein share.

In the end, Overgirl explodes, Oliver shoots his Nazi doppelganger, and John Diggle - who was ordained as a minister to marry his brother, back before he killed him - is brought in to do the honours for Barry and Iris, and for Oliver and Felicity(9). Sara tells Alex to fly and be free. It's all pretty uplifting and then everyone goes home for what I expect to be a brutally painful round of mis-season finales.

Phew.

Oh, and Snart stays on Earth-1.

So, that was an exciting batch of episodes. Supergirl is doing pretty well at the moment, and Legends of Tomorrow has never been as much fun. Ralph Dibney is taking The Flash to some odd places. He's being played with what seems to be a lot of Plastic Man in his characterisation, and I don't know if that plus the wackiness of the Council of Wells(10) is doing the tone any favours when set alongside the scheming of the Thinker. Crisis on Earth-X was an outstanding crossover, avoiding the segmentation of Invasion while keeping its strengths, and expanding to a full, four-episode arc. Also, punching Nazis really plays to the crowd.

(1) In many ways it's remarkable that such deliberately generic place names as Smallville and Metropolis have survived to the present day.

(2) Given the lack of condemnation of his actions, I assume the latter.

(3) I really hope this isn't as total as it seemed, because otherwise the character's whole set up seems likely to have been background for a pat resolution where she either recognises her daughter and lets herself be taken down, or doesn't and kills poor Ruby for dramah.

(4) On this note, I'm glad to see that the writers aren't playing with some of the creepier 'jokes' about stretching powers, despite Ralph's slightly sleazy persona.

(5) Although in classic form, he is physically crippled and needs a life-support wheelchair from House of Davros to survive.

(6) LBJ.

(7) Italicised, because it was basically presented as a four-part miniseries, complete with its own titles.

(8) As if to cement his position as 'character the writers have least idea what to do with' James 'Guardian' Olsen was killed in the cold open of Part 1.

(9) A character plot has Felicity refusing to get engaged to Oliver, because that was where everything when to shit last time.

(10) Even excluding 'Wells the Grey', a wizard.

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.

DC Roundup: Supergirl – 'Nevertheless, She Persisted', The Flash – 'Finishing Line', and Arrow – 'Lian Yu'

Not good.

In a continuing finale vein, we wrapped the three 'long' DC series this week, in the usual apocalyptic style.

'Nevertheless She Persisted' – once more, Supergirl wearing its politics on its sleeve – opened with Supergirl forced to fight her cousin, Superman having been dosed with silver kryptonite which makes him see her as his greatest enemy (Zod.) It's an epic smackdown, but she prevails and Superman recovers in the Fortress of Solitude, where they come up with a potential plan. Supergirl, as champion of Earth, challenges Rhea to single combat for the fate of the planet. Meanwhile, Lillian Luthor reveals an unfinished prototype of Lex's which would impregnate the atmosphere with kryptonite. Lena and Winn can adapt it to fill the air with a fine lead mist (apparently) which would be harmless to humans (they say,) but render the planet Daxamite-proof. This is plan B.

Kara fights Rhea and is doing well until it is revealed that, thanks to the destruction of Daxam by pieces of Krypton, Rhea literally bleeds kryptonite. When Kara still kicks her arse, she unleashes the army. The rest of the DEO – including J'onn, who has been woken by a vision of M'gann – battle Daxamites in the street, eventually joined by M'gann and a cadre of other liberal White Martians. Lillian tries to activate the device as soon as it is ready, but Lena reveals that she gave the remote to Supergirl. Sadly, Rhea's determination to destroy Earth outweighs her commitment to Daxamite convention and Supergirl is forced to activate the device. Rhea dies as Mon-el refuses her any more help than she gave his father (as he now knows that she killed him,) and the other Daxamites flee.

 

No. I don't even like this ship. You're crying!

Kara sends Mon-el away in his pod, which is pretty moving even for those of us who were never aboard that ship. Cue sad montages. Lillian claims credit for driving off the invasion. Lena doesn't learn Kara's true identity, but the reveal that Cat Grant has always known makes it less likely that she'll turn out to have been aware. This means that after being pretty much in the thick of the season, Lena still hasn't had her big choice moment. This is a shame.

Also, Mon-el falls into a wormhole and we see a flashback to a group of black robed Kryptonian cultists launching a baby called 'it' towards Earth, where they predict it will reign.

'Nevertheless She Persisted' is a barnstorming conclusion to a sometimes patchy sophomore season, but lags when it's away from the epic. Henshaw vanishes and James is sidelined in which ought to be an ensemble piece, and the arrival of the White Martians really needed to be more significant, rather than just dropping into a random street brawl. When it's good, however, it's excellent, and one of the highlights is Superman's reaction to getting his butt kicked by Kara (albeit in a very close fight.) He makes no excuses, offers no platitudes, and instead insists that the silver kryptonite didn't weaken him, and that Kara is the legit champion of Earth. He even allows that he doesn't think he could have made the tough call if it meant losing Lois. This guy is like the least toxic man on TV, and that's awesome.

So, hey; Speedster punch up. That's new.

Meanwhile, in The Flash, Iris turns out not to be dead, just dying, and also not Iris. To make up for revealing her location, HR swapped places with her using his holographic projector and thus was stabbed not in the heart, but merely heart adjacent. Thus, Barry rushes him to hospital where emergency medical treatment no, wait, they all just sit there as he dies. I wouldn't mind if they'd suggested it and ruled it out because he was too hurt to go that fast.

Anyway, Savitar realises what's up, although at this stage his existence is uncertain enough that memories are taking time to catch up with him(1), and kidnaps Cisco to create a Speed Force godmaker out of the Bazooka. Barry distracts him for a time by inviting him to come back to Team Flash and be healed, since they did kind of make him what he was by kicking him out in the future. He is not reformed, however, and runs back to make his final push – after getting Killer Frost to deep-freeze Black Flash – only for the modified Bazooka to release Jay Garrick to join the other speedsters in giving Savitar a shoeing. It's hardly a curb stomp, but eventually Barry phases through his armour, pushes Savitar out and shakes the armour to pieces, and the time remnant fades as his paradox is resolved.

 

So, if Caitlin's powers don't make her Killer Frost, is she actually a homicidal
maniac?

All seems happy and well - apart from Caitlin, who shakes off the Killer Frost persona, but opts to keep her powers and seek to discover who she really is, leaving Julian looking as if she's frozen his puppy - but then the Speed Force starts to destroy bits of the city now that the prison is empty. Barry accepts that it is time for him to take his place in the Speed Force, which in the form of his mother assures him that he won't be in hell. He has reached his 'Finish Line', and it is time to rest.

Damn.

Finally, Arrow brings us full circle. Digger Harkness betrays team Barry, but the mirakuru-free Wilson seems solid. They rescue most of the hostages, but Dinah, Rene and William are still missing. Malcolm Merlyn takes Thea's place on a landmine and is apparently blown up, which is a touching but unlikely way for the Magician to go. Wilson turns Oliver over, but this turns out to be a ruse to get Curtis' new sonic device to Dinah, who is then able to bust herself and Rene free. She then clashes with Black Siren, with Quentin popping in to deck his not-daughter, and giving his blessing for her to be the new Black Canary. Nissa defeats Talia and all seems to be going well, until Chase makes a run for it and Felicity realises that a) his plane doesn't work and b) he's wired the entire island with explosives with his own heartbeat as a deadman's switch.

...

Chase's revenge is thwarted when Oliver refuses to kill him, even rescuing William with a leg shot, but then he cuts his own throat and the island explodes with everyone but Oliver and William still on it.

D. Amn.

So, yeah… That was a round of downers. My predictions for the future include something Doomsdayish for Kara (because we've already had a Braniac), a return for Barry under circumstances I haven't yet put together in my head, but probably involving some negative manipulation of the Speed Force which needs Barry to sort it out, and an early Season 6 in which Olly is called on to rescue his team from probably Talia and her fringe Leaguers. Or possibly Hell. Not ruling that one out, given the shit we know to have been on or under that island.

(1) I'm assuming, as previously he was always ahead of the curve.

DC Roundup:Supergirl - 'City of Lost Children' and 'Resist'; The Flash - 'Cause and Effect' and 'Infantino Street'; ' Arrow - Honor Thy Fathers' and 'Missing'

Oof. I almost forgot I had this one to do. My bad. Okay, this will be quickish then (although not so quickish as to not add a second episode to each series before publishing.

Resistance HQ is a coffee shop entirely distinct from CC Jitters.

The DEO faces a series of seeming random attacks by alien psychics, which turn out to be triggered by the matter transmission tech that Lena is developing in partnership with Rhea, who claims to be seeking a way home and is clearly working Lena's mummy issues like a goddamn boss. Mon-el sees Rhea in the street and thinks he's going mad. James has a wibble when he realises that people are scared of the steel-clad colossus in gun-metal grey (no shit), but gets his mojo back when he is able to connect with a telepathic child when no-one else can, which leads him to rediscover his reasons for being a hero. Lena completes her work and Rhea brings in a Daxamite fleet to create 'New Daxam'. Mon-el isn't able to plug his own mother, so she nicks off with him and Lena, having told him that his father died of grief rather than of wife-related stabbing.

 

Because of course Daxamite wedding dresses are red and plungy.

In 'Resist', Supergirl joins up with the rest of the DEO to form a Resistance against the Daxamite invasion, and Lillian Luthor shows up to offer her help. She and Henshaw have a means to board the mothership and blind its sensors, while Supergirl can fight past their defences. Meanwhile, Rhea wants to cement power on Earth by marrying Mon-el to Lena, on pain of orphanage incineration(1). After much umming and ahing, and Cat Grant(2) and the President getting shot down in Air Force 1, Kara agrees to the deal in order to rescue Lena and Mon-el before Alex can gain control of a supergun on the DEO's roof and shoot down the mothership. Winn and Cat broadcast a message of resistance as a diversion and Guardian saves them from goons, using lead dust to strip the Daxamites of their powers while he punches them. Lena and Mon-el are rescued and Kara pulls off a switcheroo by having Winnset up a counter to Lillian and Henshaw's sudden yet inevitable betrayal. Alas, Supergirl has to give Rhea one last chance to surrender, and the cannon is unfired long enough for it to be destroyed by… Superman!

What!?

 

"Science, bitches."

Barry realises that Savitar is actually one of the time remnants that he will one day make to fight against the past version of Savitar in the future(3), who got monumentally pissed off at being treated like a shabby copy after he wasn't killed in the battle. Barry tries to smack him down while he's unarmoured, but the Savitar suit turns out to do its own fighting and is much easier to put on than to take off. To try to eliminate Savitar's future memory advantage, Cisco and Julian suggest knocking out the connection between Barry's short and long-term memories, so that he can't make new memories for Savitar to recall. Unfortunately, they end up frying all of his non-procedural memories in time for a vital trial presentation, although on the upside he is happier for not knowing his own history and Savitar also loses his memory, pushing Killer Frost to team up with Team Flash to restore them both.

Zap!

Elsewhere, HR and Tracy flirt awkwardly and create the Speedforce bazooka, thanks to her smarts and his naming skills and Dadaist pep talk talents.

In 'Infantino Street', with the very literal deadline approaching, Barry tries desperately to find a way to save Iris. In order to power the Speedforce bazooka, he recruits Legends Season 1-era Leonard Snart to help him steal a Dominator power source from ARGUS, leading to a clash with King Shark and a couple of tough conversations with Lyla about responsibility. This enables the team – less Cisco, who is drawn into his woodland confrontation with Killer Frost - to confront Savitar at Infantino Street, only to discover that the Philosopher's Stone makes him immune to the bazooka.

And Savitar kills Iris, thus setting in motion the chain of events which will result in his own creation and apotheosis.

 

"Well, balls."

Finally, in Arrow, Felicity does some mad pep talking herself and gets Oliver back in the suit. The team comes together to thwart Chase's attempt to gas most of the city. Oliver is unable to take Chase in a fight, but thanks to the family lawyer is able to hit him with the revelation that his dad was planning to completely disown him as a freewheeling nutjob, causing him to surrender. Thea comes back to Star City, Rene blows his court appearance for fear of failing, and Chase is all happy about being in company, presumably because he has Oliver's son and an evil endgame in mind. Oh, and in flashback Oliver returns to the island, pins up Deathstroke's original mask and gets captured by Kovar. SURPRISE!

Lance takes the fact that they hid Black Siren's existence from him
surprisingly well, considering.

In 'Missing', nuTA assemble for Oliver's birthday, but first Rene and Dinah, then Curtis, Thea and Lance, and finally Diggle and Felicity are kidnapped by Artemis – who clearly just wanted to work for a plain-dealing villain, because Prometheus is no better than Olly at his worst – Black Siren – who has some wobbles of conscience over abducting her father's doppelganger – and Talia al Gul – who kills Diggle's SUV with a sword. Oliver refuses to release Chase, but then he gets sent video of his son and so he has to team up with Malcolm Merlyn to save his friends and his former arch enemy's daughter. Realising that they are all being taken to Lian Yu, Olly also recruits Nyssa al Gul and, on arriving at the island, opts to bring in a real wildcard by springing Slade Wilson from the ARGUS blacksite.

In what may prove to be the penultimate Arrow flashback, Kovar spiked him with a Chinese torture drug that brings all of his pain back into the present. Given a gun with one bullet, Yao Fei appeared and urged him to kill himself, but Laurel Lance told him not too and instead he shot out the lock on the door, symbolically choosing a path into the future instead of letting the past define him, a lesson which - in true Arrow style - would not truly be realised for five years.

We're in the downhill stretch now, with just the finales to go, and so of course everything is fear, pain and confusion (albeit a little lighter in The Flash.) Arrow is all child endanger-y again (never like that,) and that never makes me happy. Supergirl is setting Lena up to go full villain when she learns that Kara has been lying to her about being Supergirl. I hope that she will be revealed to have worked it out on her own, but I'm not sure. I'm glad we're catching up to season 1 of Arrow in the flashbacks, however, because I for one am heartily sick of the things. We're also getting a shit-tonne of returning characters for this wrap up, of which my favourite is Snart. This version of Captain Cold has a way of messing with Barry's self-image that is always prime value for money. Olly's own version of the Suicide Squad is interesting - especially Manu Bennett's Deathstroke - but not quite as cool(4). Cat Grant... Much as I liked her in season 1, and felt her spiky presence was missed in this season, she felt somewhat extraneous (although her effortless piercing of Guardian's identity was, fair play, hilarious.)

(1) And I thought Arrow would be heavy on child endangerment.

(2) Contract fulfilled.

(3) I know, right.

(4) If you will.

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."