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.

DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Fort Rozz', 'For Good', 'Both Sides Now' and 'Schott Through the Heart'; The Flash - 'True Colours', 'Subject 9', 'Enter Flashtime', 'Run, Iris, Run', 'Null and Annoyed' and 'Lose Yourself'; Legends of Tomorrow - 'No Country for Old Dads', 'Amazing Grace', 'Necromancing the Stone', 'I, Ava', 'Guest Starring John Noble' and 'The Good, the Bad and the Cuddly'

Grrl power.

Okay; I've got a lot to get through on this one, so I'll probably be a little brief.

Aware that Reign is far from beaten, Supergirl plans a trip to 'Fort Rozz', which is now in orbit around a blue star that depowers Kryptonians and is lethal to males, because science, okay. In this highly specific set of circumstances, Kara recruits an unusual squad for this apparent suicide mission(1): Herself, despite her lack of powers, along with Imra, Livewire and Psi. Their goal: To find a Kryptonian heretic priestess and find out more about Reign. At the same time, Alex agrees to sit for Ruby while Sam is on a business trip - only for Sam to ditch the trip when Reign is activated to stop Supergirl's mission - and helps her to confront a cyberbully.

It's Sara Douglas, from Superman II.

Psi zaps Imra during a fight, confining both to the ship. The prison is almost pulled into the star, but Winn bounces superlight signals off Voyager 2(2) to save it. Meanwhile, Kara and Livewire locate the priestess and learn of the other two worldkillers, Purity and Pestilence(3). Reign - whose powers are not only Kryptonite resistant, but also not dependent on ongoing exposure to yellow solar radiation - shows up and kills the priestess. Livewire sacrifices herself to save Supergirl and Psi is able to drive Reign off, seemingly by creating a bridge between the Samantha and Reign personalities, which also causes Sam to seek help from Alex over her 'missing time' episodes. Kara is knocked by Livewire's death under her command; no Amanda Waller she.

Elsewhere, a second Worldkiller survives being hit with a car.

My favourite thing about this episode: That the Wicked reference in the title
suggests they aren't going to heel turn Lena.

In 'For Good', Lena's feud with Morgan Edge once more arises. Edge and Lena are both targeted by assassination attempts, causing Edge to go somewhat over the... well, the edge, and publicly both accuse and threaten Lena. James comes over all white knight and threatens Edge in his Guardian persona. While the DEO chase the assassin, Lena works out that the killers were contracted by her mother, Lillian, in an attempt to make her 'Luthor out' and embrace her inner diabolical mastermind. Kara and Lena crash Edge's party to warn him, just before Lillian launches an attack with hacked drones. Lena coerces a confession from Edge over the pool poisonings, then destroys the targeting tag in his VIP pass. Mon-el helps Kara to fight off the drones, and also Lillian in Lex's armoured battlesuit(4), with Winn throwing in some re-hacked drones for good measure. Edge tries to escape with the recording, but is stopped by Guardian.

The eyes have it.

Elsewhere, Alex tests Sam, but finds no sign of illness or tumour. Winn, J'onn and Mon-el work out that the Worldkillers are genetically modified, and deduce that they probably came to Earth with Superman and would have secret identities, identifying four possibilities, including one Julia Freeman, whom Kara has seen in dreams, leading the DEO to track her down in 'Both Sides Now'.

A raid on the home of one Julia Freeman turns up what seems a normal, scared woman. Kara tries to talk to her, but Alex steams in and triggers a shift to the Worldkiller persona. They are able to subdue her and take her in, where Kara's attempts to get through to her are constantly thwarted by Alex getting all aggro, despite her promise that they can 'try it your way'(5). Alex's bad cop routine is similarly ineffective, and the Worldkiller escapes. When surrounded, she briefly reverts to Julia and agrees to come back to the DEO, but then Reign shows up and drags her back to the Fortress of Sanctuary to be properly Worldkillerised.

During this whole business, Sam - who is on sick leave - abandons Ruby at an ice rink to go off and be Reign. Ruby calls Lena - which is the kind of employee relations few CEOs can boast, even with senior executives - who also briefly sees Sam turn into Reign. Also, Mon-el and Imra are having troubles because - as he admits to J'onn and then to Imra - he is still in love with Kara and, although he does love Imra, didn't marry her on his own terms but for diplomatic reasons. In return, she admits that she and Brainiac-5 have a secret agenda that they didn't share with him.

Also with karaoke.

Finally, in 'Schott Through the Heart', Winn's father, supervillain the Toyman, dies. At the funeral, Winn's mum shows up, and then the coffin explodes like a giant jack-in-the-box full of C4.  Winn is hostile to his mother for abandoning him, although she explains that she did it because his father ran them off the road when she tried to take him to an abuse shelter and told her that if she ever tried to see Winn again, he would kill Winn. Then mechanical flying monkeys bust into the DEO. Winn's mother recognises something about them and goes to confront a corrections officer who was in love with the Toyman and whom he groomed to be his instrument of revenge. Kara and Mon-el help Winn to rescue his mother and take down his father's protégé.

In character development land, Mon-el tells Kara what he has learned about the Legion's secret mission: that Imra and Brainiac were sent to stop the third Worldkiller, Pestilence, who will one day become the cosmic-level supervillain Blight, who caused the plague whose cure is concealed in their DNA. James is having some issues with his relationship with Lena, who seems to have vanished, but is in fact trying to help Sam by using one of L-Corp's evil labs for good. Also, Alex realises that J'onn's father has Martian dementia. He angrily tells her not to get involved in his relationship with J'onn, but comes around and confesses to his son in another of Supergirl's surprising flashes of really dealing well with real issues.

This season of Supergirl continues to run strong, with a good central cast(6) and making a lot of the opportunities presented by getting to use an enemy who is like Supergirl, but bad. Conversely, The Flash is really struggling with not having an enemy who is like the Flash, but bad, in part because it's using one of the most difficult of villains: the inhuman supergenius.

That's a striking range of heights.

In 'True Colours', Barry has to break out of the metahuman wing, along with fellow prisoners Kilgore, Black Bison, Hazard and Dwarfstar, in order to prevent the warden selling them all to Amaunet. Team Flash learn about the deal when Cecile reads the Warden's mind, then Ralph discovers the ability to shapeshift and tries to call the deal off, but loses control and screws the pooch. Barry gets to see what kind of people he is escaping with - Kilgore and Dwarfstar are gits, Black Bison is a zealot, and Becky 'Hazard' Sharpe is actually lovely - before they are cornered by Amaunet and the warden. They fight off this threat, only for DeVoe to pop out of nowhere, as he do, drain the powers from Hazard, Black Bison and Dwarfstar - killing them - and abandon the ailing form of telepath Dominic Lanse for that of Beck Sharpe. He also murders the warden, keeping Barry's identity safe, which is handy when Ralph shapeshifts into DeVoe in order to claim not to be dead and get Barry released.

A lot of work goes into establishing what are essentially sacrificial victims.

Team Flash realises that DeVoe is specifically targeting the bus metas, which will include Barry, while DeVoe uses the Weeper's narcotic tears on his wife to allay her growing doubts over the death toll of their plans.

DeVoe's next target is 'Subject 9', a country musician named Izzy who can control sound waves, especially in conjunction with her violin. Her abilities prove uniquely able to disrupt DeVoe's stolen powers, but despite training and support from Barry and Ralph - the latter forming a close bond with her - and the use of the cerebral dampener mentioned by Savitar, they are unable to stand up to DeVoe's battery of abilities, and he is able to steal Izzy's body to escape the deterioration of Sharpe's form. With Barry on indefinite leave from the police due to ongoing questions over his case, and Ralph mourning the loss of Izzy, the two bond and Ralph gets Barry a PI license.

All the speedsters (well, a good number.)

A bit of a side track in 'Enter Flashtime', as an eco-terrorist sets off a nuclear bomb nicked from ARGUS(7). Barry manages to accelerate to the point that the world seems to stop around him, but the bomb is already detonating. He and Jesse - on Earth-1 to talk to her father - bring people into this 'flashtime' one at a time to try to solve the problem, but even with help from Jay Garrick they cannot seem to find a way to prevent the detonation, until Iris gives Barry the idea to retrieve a quark sphere designed to make the Speed Force believe he is still within it, thus drawing down a storm of Speed lightning able to refuse the nuclei in the bomb.

Caitlin and Harry briefly encounter the mysterious girl at Jitters.

It's a new colour for a speedster.

A flamethrowing metahuman bank robber brings to light another bus meta, Matthew Kim, whose ability is transferring powers from one person to another. When they try to capture him, the Flash's speed is passed to Iris, who must learn to act as a speedster while Barry takes over as man in the van, in the episode 'Run Iris, Run'. To help out where Iris's lack of experience calls for more novel uses of speed, and to fight the Thinker, Harry devises his own thinking cap. Cisco has doubts about this plan, especially nixing Harry's attempts to persuade the group that he should charge the cap with dark matter. This enables him to provide a plan to defeat a meta empowered by Kim and - with Kim secured in the pipeline for his own protection, and Barry's powers returned - also locates the last two bus metas.

Also, Breacher returns and seeks help with his failing powers, but I had
literally forgotten that.

In 'Null and Annoyed', Ralph's irreverence wears on Barry as they track down another bus meta, Janet Petty, who can control gravity. Ralph admits he jokes because he is afraid of being abandoned, which honestly Barry would have picked up on if he wasn't so self-centred. They are able to stop Petty, and Ralph becomes an airbag to catch Barry when he is degravitised and falls from high altitude. DeVoe's wife, Marlize, discovers that he has been drugging her, but when leaving a recording to remind herself that he is doing so discovers that she had done so many times before, while Harry works on charging his Thinking Cap with dark matter.

In 'Lose Yourself', the team looks for the last bus meta, Edwin Gauss, a dropout who is able to enter pocket dimensions. A Samuroid comes after Gauss, injuring Caitlin, and Harry develops a tuning fork weapon to stop DeVoe. Barry argues with Ralph, who is intent on killing DeVoe to protect his new family, Team Flash, while Joe tries to help Harry with an addiction to the thinking cap's effects. Barry and Ralph use Edwin's power to open a door to DeVoe's pocket dimension base, but he outplans them again and uses their absence to hit Star Labs, taking the remaining bus meta powers. Ralph is able to capture him, but he uses his powers to prevent the power dampening cuffs activating, allowing him to steal Ralph's body and escape back to his lair, after draining Caitlin's powers and the Killer Frost personality, and before shifting into his original shape using Ralph's powers.

The problem of course is that a) DeVoe is now simply too monstrous for me to give a flying fuck about his Utopian vision. They keep referring to their plans, and I just blank them, because on top of the villains he has murdered good, kind, innocent people to get to this point, and repeatedly brainwashed his wife so that she never questions him, so I literally care less about his diabolical masterplan than I did about Damien Darhk's back in Arrow season 4, and b) in order to sell his supergenius you have to both stretch credibility - Sherlock Holmes is capable of insane leaps of logic, but we get to follow his purported process and that means that we're not left thinking 'nope, he's just a wizard' - and allow that the good guys are gripless incompetents who can't think to build a power dampner into the cerebral inhibitor 2.0.

I'm not crying. You're crying. Shut up.

Also, either they just spent a good third of a season growing Ralph Dibney from a complete douchebag into a character the audience could respect, even like, just so they could kill off a recurring character(8), or they're going to somehow bring him back, which means his death is meaningless. Either way, it's pretty cheap, and as with so many things in The Flash, fundamentally Barry's fault; not that I'm advocating superhero rough justice, but Barry's ability to adapt to the new paradigm is significantly poor.

Also, just how is DeVoe's battery of abilities any barrier to a hero who is established in Flashtime to now be basically able to move and act faster than thought? For a while now I've been of the opinion that with superhero shows, half-season arcs are the wave of the future. It keeps a single nemesis from outstaying their welcome, and allows for tighter storytelling.

Which brings us to Legends of Tomorrow, which does full-season arcs, but with a shorter season, and which uses its time travel premise to continually play with its look and keep things fresh.

"No one can know about my haircut."

We begin this final set with 'No Country for Old Dads', in which Darhk sends Nora and Ray to 1962 Berlin to retrieve the secret of cold fusion - needed to power the repair of the broken fire totem - from a defecting scientist who is about to be murdered by... Damien Darhk. Naturally, shit goes sideways and Nora and Ray bond a little as they struggle to extract the scientist the old-fashioned way. Ray believes that there is good in Nora, and despite her own determination that she is Mallus' creature through and through, there is something there that he reaches, in part because of that Pollyanna willingness to accept the good in everyone that Zari protected back in 'Phone Home'. There is no defection here, however. Damien shows up to save Nora from his younger self, and in the ensuing conflict Ray blows a hole in the Berlin Wall, creating another anachronism, while Nora's desire to save her father is - despite her general evilness - selfless enough to allow her to bond with the stolen spirit totem, corrupting it.

Rip and Wally contact the Legends and they learn that the prison in which Mallus was bound is time itself, hence as the anachronisms create cracks in time, his cage weakens. Wally rescues Ray and steals back the fire totem, and the dying scientist - shot by the older Darhk to preserve his record as an assassin - gives Ray the formula for cold fusion. The director of the Time Bureau is killed by Grodd while attempting to prevent Alexander Hamilton seeing Hamilton, making Ava acting director and allowing Rip back to work. Wally stays on the Waverider, and Rip deletes a file in the ship's directories to prevent Sara learning Ava's secret.

Well... okay.

In 'Amazing Grace', Nate loses his hair game as rock and roll vanishes from time, thanks to an anachronism caused by a mass panic at Elvis Presley's first big performance which prevented the style going mainstream. The team realise that Presley's guitar contains the death totem, which is summoning ghosts, but when the swap it for a replica find that Presley can't play, having previously been inspired by the presence of his late brother's spirit. In addition, a ghostly presence tries to take the guitar from the Waverider and return it to Presley, while his uncle, the local pastor, has him arrested to try to free him from the 'devil's music.'

Amaya persuades Elvis's uncle to allow his record to be played on the radio, which causes the dead to walk in numbers, but then Elvis is able to use the real guitar to send them back to their rest, before surrendering the death token and returning to his destiny. Amaya plays Nate music from Zambesi, having listened to him rant on about rock and roll all episode, and the death totem tries to escape from its bonds.

Even her t-shirt has veins.

In 'Necromancing the Stone', the totem calls to Sara due to her affinity with death, and she falls under the control of Mallus, her physical form stalking the Waverider and taking out the Legends one at a time, even Wally with his oh-so-annoying superspeed. Meanwhile, Ava and Gary track down John Constantine for help, and in Mallus' realm Nora tries to persuade Sara to willingly join Team Mallus. The surviving Legends try to access the other totems to fight Sara and Mallus, but are unable to do so, and Constantine cannot enter Mallus' realm to help Sara. He is able to block Mallus for a time, and engage him in battle-banter, where Mallus offers to trade: If Constantine gives up Sara, Mallus will release Astra(9) from Hell. Constantine does not fall for this, although he admits that he would have gone with it if he thought it might have worked.

Finally, Mick is able to bond with the fire totem to stun Sara, and Constantine and Ava release her from Mallus' control. Sara breaks up with Ava, fearing that she brings destruction on everyone she loves, and Constantine joins Gary's D&D campaign.

A post-break up nightmare made real?

Learning that Ava hasn't been to work for a few days, Sara and Ray accompany Gary to her parents' home in 'I, Ava', and soon realise that her parents are actors, hired to play the roles in perpetuity. They then learn that Ava's first mission for the Time Bureau is also her first recorded act, and travel to the mission's location in the temporal no-fly zone of 2213. They learn that in 2213, most of society's service industry needs - including civil protection - are met by AVA, a mass-produced 'perfect woman'(10). The three are captured, then rescued by Ava, who is both literally and figuratively beside herself in shock, clearly having had no idea where she actually came from. She and Sara figure out that it was Rip who hid her history. In the next episode, Ava learns that she is the 12^th AVA clone Rip has snagged to use as an agent, which is pretty cold soup to lay on someone's plate.

Fantasy or nightmare? How much of a lechy sleaze is Nate?

Back in plot-land, Amaya and Nate have to try to keep Mari McCabe(11) from getting killed trying to vigilante now that the spirit totem is in the hands of the Darhks. Amaya forms a temporary truce with Kuasa, who also wants to protect Mari, only for her to sort-of double cross Nate when he suggests pretending to hand him over in exchange for the spirit totem. She does return the totem, but in the meantime Nate is tortured by the Darhks. In fact, he realises that while Nora is now entirely Mallus' creature, and half-possessed already, the seeds of doubt that Ray sowed have taken root, as Nora's brief outpouring of daughterly love has cracked Darhk Snr's shell and what he now wants is to save Nora from Mallus.

I... literally don't know what to make of this. On the one hand, as a father I sympathise with his desire to save his child from a mess in large part of his own making, and on the other it's taking away a female character's agency, although you could say that Mallus already did that.

Nora/Mallus catches Damien fake torturing Nate (which is hilarious.) Amaya, Wally and Kuasa rescue Nate, but Nora rips the water totem out of Kuasa, killing her - although Wally is able to retrieve the totem itself - driving Amaya to return to Zambesi in 1992 and try to save her village from the attack that wiped it out.

And yes, John Noble is the voice of Mallus.

The Legends next defend future president Barack Obama from Gorilla Grodd in the 1980s, and in so doing both prevent further anachronism and get a few licks in at the current administration. Damien offer an alliance with the Legends to prevent Mallus' ascension, having realised that it will mean Nora's destruction, but admits he has no more influence over her since she realised he had gone soft. Since the only person she listens to is Mallus, they decide to trick her into thinking that her master is giving her instructions, by getting actor John Noble to imitate Mallus' voice in the weirdly meta episode 'Guest Starring John Noble'(12). They achieve this by getting him to run lines from a doctored script to The Return of the King, then Ray plays them through external speakers while basically sitting in her ear, and thus lures her into the Waverider to be captured.

With Amaya - and Nate - poised to create another anachronism by saving Zambesi, Sara decides that they let this happen, then job Mallus with the six totems when he emerges, having learned that it was only the defection of the sixth tribe - the creators of the death totem - that prevented the ancestors gacking him in the first place. Damien wields the death totem, due to Sara's prior issues, but as Nora is still alive inside her possessed form is duped into turning on the Legends with the sliver of hope that she might survive, and releases Grodd to rampage in Zambesi, thus preventing the demon's release; until Nate uses the Earth totem to stop Grodd and it's Mallus o'clock.

Ultimate evil...

Moving into the finale, 'The Good, the Bad and the Cuddly', the Legends try to whip Mallus with their individual totems and it all goes tits up. Rip sacrifices himself to buy time for the Legends to escape(13), fleeing to the temporal blindspot of Salvation in the Old West, where they catch up with Jonah Hex while they lick their wounds and woe about how they weren't worthy of the totems. Ultimately, they realise that the problem was that they used the totems individually, where in fact they needed to be combined, their joined power bringing forth an ultimate warrior of light. Ray, however, goes his own way, releasing Damien and planning to secure Nora in Zambesi before Mallus can emerge.

Apparently Mallus can see more than the Time Masters(14), because it isn't long before he sends an army of Romans, Vikings and pirates, commanded by old foes Julius Caesar, Freydís Eiríksdóttir and Blackbeard, descends on Salvation demanding the totems. Ray and Damien fail to contain Nora, but Damien never intended to. He uses Ray's nanogun to kill Nora, forcing Mallus to abandon her and take him as a host, while Ray gets Nora away and treated. They then rejoin the team, along with Hex, and a band of unlikely allies: Jax, a Kuasa who grew up without the shadow of her village's destruction, and Helen of Troy after a few years Amazon training on Themyscira. The Legends try to pass off the totems - apart from spirit and air - to those more worthy, but are in turn told to step the fuck up. They defeat the army, and when Mallus turns up Sara (death), Mick (fire), Amaya (spirit), Nate (earth), Zari (air) and Wally (water) combine the totems to create the most powerful warrior for good since Captain Planet:

...vs Ultimate good.

Words literally cannot describe how awesome this is. A giant demon is piledrivered by a cuddly toy, that's really all you need to know.

Mallus is destroyed, and Damien Darhk is killed(15). Ray slips Nora a time stone as she is taken away by the Time Bureau. Amaya returns to Zambesi, but with her memory intact. The rest of the team take a well-earned break in Aruba... until John Constantine (and Gary) turn up to tell them that a bunch of other demons escaped when Mallus was released.

Another very strong outing from the Legends then, as the junior show moves out of the shadow of Arrow and The Flash to become its own thing, with its own villains and whacky time travel shenanigans. I don't mind admitting that this show has really grown on me. I'm sorry to see Jax and Stein go - I mind less about Firestorm - but I hope that Wally can find the place he never found on The Flash, and Zari is a huge pile of fun; her training session with Mick, which ends with her spinning him around in a whirlwind until he promises to learn to use the fire totem properly, is a high point in this set. I also like that Ray is getting some love, without betraying the brilliant, loveable, well-meaning dope that he is, and that his attempts to save Nora pay dividends, not because she falls for him(16), but because he manages to revive enough of the genuine love at the base of her relationship with her father for him to rebel at her consumption by Mallus.

(1) There must be a name for something like that...

(2) The sort of feat that only gets more impressive the more that you think about it.

(3) Reign is 'Power'.

(4) A comics and DCAU favourite.

(5) Alex is being a real dick in this episode, and I'm not sure why exactly.

(6) It still really doesn't know what it's doing with James, but that's not the actor's fault by any means.

(7) Seriously; what do ARGUS pay their people for?

(8) Which was a cheap trick when Voyager did it.

(9) The little girl he accidentally sent to Hell in his own backstory.

(10) They call her a clone, but there are strong robotic elements, especially tied to the original Rossum's Universal Robots.

(11) The modern day Vixen.

(12) I just thought the Sky box has mislabelled the episode here.

(13) Gone for reals this time; probably.

(14) Or perhaps someone forgot how quickly they were tracked last time they were in this particular 'blind spot.'

(15) Gone for reals this time; probably.

(16) Aside from anything else, that dynamic hit peak with Blackarachnia and Silverbolt in Beast Wars.

DC Roundup: The Flash - 'The Trial of The Flash', 'The Elongated Knight Rises' and 'Honey I Shrunk Team Flash'; Legends of Tomorrow - 'Daddy Darhkest', 'Here I Go Again' and 'The Curse of the Earth Totem'; and Supergirl - 'Legion of Super-Heroes'

Barry gets his day in court, and for a major murder trial, it really doesn't feel
like it's more than a day.

Back to the Arrowverse (and Earths west,) as we come back after the mid-season break for The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and, eventually, Supergirl.

'The Trial of The Flash(1)' follows from the midseason cliffhanger, as Barry faces trial for the murder of Clifford De Voe and the series faces the greatest challenge of a super-intelligent villain; the pitfall of simulating super-intelligence by having everyone else be incredibly stupid. Seriously, the trial of Barry Allen is about as fair and convincing as the trial in Paddington 2, but that was supposed to be a crock and featured in a critically lauded children's comedy, whereas The Flash occasionally aspires to aspects of police procedural. The prosecution simultaneously presents Barry as a diabolical mastermind and as a highly-skilled CSI completely incapable of even attempting to cover his tracks(2). Ultimately, that's because this episode is more about Barry refusing to use his superhero alter-ego to derail the trial than it is about the facts of the case, and thus we're just asked to accept that De Voe is capable of setting this whole thing up. It's also about Team Flash accepting his decision and not revealing the secret identity for him, and realising that they can't make right by doing wrong, as when Ralph Dibney of all people has to talk Joe down from planting evidence to clear Barry. It's played as an emotional moment of growth for Dibney, but it's also an important practical withdrawal, because Joe has apparently forgotten that the De Voe house is full of cameras.

 

Fallout. Not our best villain.

Also, the Flash helps to stop Fallout, a hapless metahuman who unknowingly pumps out radiation, and who is lucky enough to be sent off for treatment (because when Barry protests that he never killed anyone, this is rather disingenuous, his run-ins with Earth-2 metas in early Season 2 reaping a particularly bloody harvest.) This is an almost entirely insubstantial B-plot, except that it allows the show to parallel Captain Singh giving a citation for the Flash, alongside the judge sending Barry down for life without parole. 

Come for the life sentence, stay for the hats.

Thus, 'The Elongated Knight Rises' sees Dibney trying to step up as Central City's key hero, and while he does an okay job it's hard to see why no-one is asking 'where the heckins has the Flash got to?' Dibney's first case involves the second Trickster, who is broken out of jail by his mother, formerly known as Prank. She wants them to go straight, but is easily persuaded to drop her medication(3) and start kidnapping people. Trickster's new thing is acid-loaded squirt guns, which prove able to damage Dibney's polymerised cells, leading him to face the question of whether he wants to be a hero if he can be hurt. Meanwhile, Barry is treated to his inaugural shivving - Iron Heights is a traditional, orthodox prison - but saved by prison heavy 'Big Sir', whose life was saved by an emergency appendectomy performed by the late Henry Allen.

I miss Mark Hamill.

Dibney also runs into a girl at CC Jitters who is writing in a strange language. Apparently, this is the language Barry was writing in when he came out of the Speed Force, but my immediate assumption was that she was one of the Observers from Fringe.

Finally, 'Honey I Shrunk Team Flash' sets Team Flash against a meta with shrinking powers, who just happens to become active after (criminally speaking) after years on the QT, right after it turns out that he was responsible for the murder Big Sir was convicted of. Barry urges Team Flash to track him down and get a confession so that Big Sir can go free and travel to China, but the confession is not forthcoming, even after a whole bunch of high jinks involving Cisco and Dibney being shrunk and an attempted cure priming them to explode. With no way to get Big Sir's sentence overturned, Barry speedsters him to China(4) and then returns to his own cell, where he is drugged by the warden and taken to be sold to Amaunet.

That's a bad sign.

This is not a strong set of episodes for The Flash. There are a lot of great moments peppered throughout, but overall they are disappointing. The trial is too fast and hinges too heavily on the presumption that De Voe has not only created a sufficient wealth of evidence to hang - as it were - Barry, but that he can do so without needing to give any additional direction to the prosecution. Thereafter, Dibney is only a so-so fill in for the Flash, and the teams methods for evoking the Killer Frost persona in Caitlin are superficially funny, but in retrospect almost as creepy as the fact that members of the team have been hitting the clubs with Killer Frost while Caitlin has been sleeping.

I'm curious to see how the show prevents Barry's secret identity from becoming public knowledge once, inevitably, he escapes from Amaunet's 'employment', and am wondering if she won't be suffering another non-culpable, Flash-related fatal accidents.

It's that man again.

Legends of Tomorrow has been bringing me rather more joy lately (although The Flash does have a shout-out to one-time god of war, Beebo.) Not that there are many laughs in 'Daddy Darhkest', as John Constantine leads the team to an asylum in Star City, 2017, and a girl named Emily who is possessed by a demon who knows Sara's name. The demon is Mallus, and laughs at Constantine's most substantial wards, and the girl it turns out is Nora Darhk. Mallus throws Constantine, Sara and Leo back in time, where Constantine and Sara get jiggy(5) and Leo gets drugged. With the Waverrider in trouble because - among other things - Ray and Zari are off trying to convince Nora not to go evil in later life, Sara has to willingly channel Mallus in order to mark and reactivate the time travel rune that was used to send them back in time, in order to get home. This means that she potentially opens herself to Mallus in future, and Constantine urges Ray to keep working on a nano-pistol designed to kill the possessed.

Also, Ray goes home to Earth-X.

Okay, not much joy there, but then we have 'Here I Go Again', which is, in the parlance of the show itself, the Groundhog Day episode, as a temporal fluid leak and an explosion on the Waverrider leaves Zari stuck in some sort of time loop. The first few times around, Sara - already narked at Zari for dragging her heels on repairs - has her sedated, but it turns out that Nate is willing to believe, and gives her Groundhog Day as a shorthand to convince him each cycle. She struggles to solve the problem, and as she looks for a mole in the crew she learns a lot about them, such as Ray's work on the nanite gun, Sara's burgeoning relationship with Agent Sharp, and the fact that Mick is writing a halfway decent sci-fi romance.

I have a deep and shameful love of sassy female-voiced computer. And sassy
male-voiced computers, actually, although there are fewer of them.

My favourite thing about this episode is the twist. It does all the standard time loop stuff - the intense struggle, the dossing around cycles - but then, just as the source turns up and the loop gets broken with the countdown still ticking, it turns out that this isn't a time loop. The fluid leak just knocked her into a coma, and Gideon - who is just the scariest voyeuristic caregiver ever - put her into a simulation in order to convince her that she could stay and be a part of the team, which is a nice spin on a classic trope.

Finally, we go all pirate in 'Curse of the Earth Totem', as one of the missing totems is tracked to the Caribbean and the near-legendary Captain Blackbeard. Cue hilarity as Ray and Nate try to be piratical, but ultimately own Amaya the better pirate, and boast her up as their pirate queen in order to blag a ride with actually-a-complete-coward Blackbeard to the island where he buried the 'cursed' totem with his lover, Anne Queen(6), after it turned her into a plant-manipulating hell-ghoul, because the totems are powered by one's own spirit and pirates aren't good people. There are crosses and double-crosses, the Darhks turn up and blag the spirit totem, but Ray shoots Nora with the anti-mage gun, which works a treat.

For it is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate queen.

The team retreat to the Waverrider, but Nate isn't able to leave a woman he knew as a girl to die of horrible internal burny-freezy nanites. He goes back and offers a cure in exchange for the spirit totem, but hangs around too long and gets mage-choked by Nora, surviving only because Damien Darhk suggests a use for him.

Also, Sara and Agent Sharp - I want to say Evelyn? - go on a date, only for Sara to dine and dash when she gets an alert from the team, and Rip Hunter escapes from Time Bureau custody to recruit Wally West, first for a mission of his own and then as a potential new recruit to the Waverrider crew.

"I don't have the best history with people called Brainiac, but we won't
mention that. At all."

Finally, Supergirl reopens two weeks later than the other shows, with 'Legion of Super Heroes'. Reign is pretty much... Reining, with no-one to stop her as Kara is in a coma, her only contact with the outside world being the projected presence of Mon-el and Whatsherface's(7) teammate, Brainiac-5, who is trying to coax her out of an internal projection of her apartment. As the DEO struggles to contain Reign, Mon-el resists the urge to join the fight, since the Legion a) aren't supposed to get involved in past stuff, and b) his team hold the key to curing a terrible future plague in their own DNA, because apparently the twenty-eighth century(8) doesn't do thumb drives, data crystals, notepads, or any other form of information storage more efficient and stable than living DNA.

The twenty-eighth century is kind of dumb(9).

Power rings and cool outfits.

Mon-el and Imra eventually do join the fight, activating the Legion's 'ah, fuck it' protocol, and Kara snaps out of her coma to join the fight after realising that she is keeping herself in the room, partly on account of how much of a beating she took, but also because she's still trying to deny her humanity and be an alien arse-kicking machine, where her civilian persona is still vitally important, and not just in the sense that J'onn has to pretend to be her again after James tells Lena that Kara is home sick.

Anyway, Kara comes to the aid of the outmatched Legion, taking a bit of green vein to stick Reign with an emergency Kryptonite shot held back in case of bad Superman. Reign retreats to what I'm going to call the Temple of Doom, where the hologram of her creator tells her that the world has been seeded with support goons for her, and Johnny Used-to-Worship-Supergirl(10) tells her he can help her, since he sees a Kryptonian object of worship who offers some potential for validation.

(1) For some reason, I was sure it was called 'The Trial of Barry Allen', possibly because Barry Allen was on trial, while everyone still loved the Flash.

(2) Experience shows this to be a fair cop, but mostly because he lacks the intellectual coldness to plan such meticulous deceptions, or even wear a mask when breaking into a mastermind's house.

(3) The Trickster family are a bit of an oddity, continually straddling the border between diabolical supervillainy and genuine mental illness, although rarely as successfully as in the JLU episode 'Flash and Substance'.

(4) With no money, passport, ID, or - so far as anyone can tell - Chinese language.

(5) Points for having Constantine also hit on Leo. They still haven't shown him as actively and definitively bi, but since Leo is in a committed relationship there was only so far they could have gone without creating other problems.

(6) Related to Oliver?

(7) Imra, damnit.

(8) Or whenever they come from.

(9) Fair play, they were trying to hide the information, although sticking it in your genome and escaping through time still feels a little belt and temporal paradox.

(10) Just in case anyone thought it was just female characters whose names I couldn't remember.

DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Reign'; The Flash - 'Don't Run'; and Legends of Tomorrow - 'Beebo: God of War'

Giving new meaning to the term 'street fight'.

It's that time again, when the CW superheroes close out for the mid-season break with pain, failure and frustration.

We begin, as always, with Supergirl, and 'Reign', which unsurprisingly introduces the Girl of Steel to the season's big bad. Wrongdoers around National City start turning up dead by superstrength, and a Kryptonian sigil unknown even to Kara's holo-Mom is burned into the crime scene with heat vision. The crazy prophet of Supergirl turns out to have a clue, however, explaining that in his research into Kryptonians he spoke to Fort Raz prisoners still at large and tracked down many Kryptonian artefacts, which led him to learn of an apocalyptic prophecy from the ancient days of Krypton, pre-dating the unified worship of Rau, and speaking of the coming of the Beast, the Worldkiller, an unstoppable force of judgement.

At the same time, she learns that in the far future, Mon-el had formed a team of superheroes called the Legion, modelled on Kara's example and including his now-wife Whatsherface(1). This is a bit of a good news, bad news thing - good news: you inspired a Legion of Heroes; bad news, one of them married your squeeze - and not helped by Imra telling her how Mon-el was dedicated to getting back to Kara for four or five of the seven years he was in the future before their team was caught in some sort of time vortex and thrown into the distant past, where it lay dormant with them in stasis until Edge's torpedo shook them up.

Speaking of Edge, Lena and James try to prove he's been building an evil Kryptonian, mostly to push forward their whole romance angle. Sadly, after a few weeks of no movement, this is now feeling a little forced. Eventually, it turns out that the Kryptonian killer is Reign, and she and Supergirl have a massive fight across the city which ends with Kara being dropped off a roof and rushed to the DEO for medical treatment, because damn.

Oh, and Sam may be turning permanently into Reign in front of her teenage daughter. Yay!

 

Yes, these are also the Christmas episodes.

Meanwhile, the Flash is abducted by Devoe, and Caitlin - who is feeling pretty pissed that the guys have been hanging out with Killer Frost while her side of the persona has been sleeping - by Amaunet. Devoe's motives are obscure, but Amaunet wants Caitlin to save a metahuman telepath who was shot resisting her attempts to capture him to sell to an interested party. This leaves Iris in the unfortunate position of having to make the tough call on where to focus their efforts: Rescuing Caitlin or rescuing Barry. She tries to do both, but after a tough love pep talk from Harry chooses to focus on Caitlin and trust that Barry can escape on his own.

Caitlin works with the telepath to try to escape, but in the end the outside assist is needed, as neither of them are exactly sluggers. Barry, however, is able to seemingly outthink the Thinker by vibrating his molecules fast enough to appear to vanish from his Speed-proof cell. The team reconvene in triumph, but when Barry is called away to the apartment, he gets a call from the telepath, whose power has been abused to transfer Devoe's mind into his body, leaving Devoe's body a) dead and b) in Barry's apartment with the police knocking on the door. Steeling himself with the titular advice 'Don't Run', he prepares to face the music.

All praise Beebo!

Finally, we wrap up Legends of Tomorrow with 'Beebo: God of War', in which time falls out of joint when the younger Martin Stein becomes an anachronism and the must have Christmas toy Beebo becomes the 'blue god' who will lead Leif Erikson and his sister Freydis to the conquest of the New World and ultimately supplant Christ as the winter festival deity(2). While the team is able to infiltrate the camp, rescue Stein and eventually destroy Beebo, this just leaves the Vikings to be wowed when Damien Darhk turns up in a winged helmet, with Nora playing a Valkyrie to his Odin, clearly planning to take over the world, starting with Vinland.

With the off-the-books assistance of Agent Sharp, the Legends have no choice but to take on the Darhks, magic and all. Sara, Zari and Nate face off with Damien, while Mick and Lenny Snart use the old crossed-stream trick to take down Nora. Sara tries to stop Damien time-teleporting out, and finds herself in the domain of Molos, but is dragged out at the last minute. It's pretty upbeat for a mid-season finale; except that Stein refuses to keep Jaxx's Back to the Future letter and as a result Jaxx opts to leave the Waverrider. Oh, and John Constantine pops up and tells Sara that a possessed girl is calling her name.

So far, it's been a pretty strong season for DC/CW, although not without its flaws. The transition of Sam to Reign still feels too sudden, and there is always a problem with convincingly portraying a super-genius as a convincing threat, but also as one that could possibly be defeated. Legends is managing the best, perhaps because its goofy nature means that it can weather a few little inconsistencies. Arrow, I'm not sure about, since we're a ways behind. Maybe we'll get caught up before the end of the midseason break; or maybe not.

(1) It's Imra, but I always find it telling when I can't remember the name after a couple of weeks.

(2) Agent Stick-Up-Her-Butt - she's sympathetic enough I ought to call her Sharp from now on, especially since she has conspicuously and literally let her hair down - suggests that the Legends handling an anachronism on this level would be a Beebo's Day miracle.