Supergirl Watch: Season 1, Episode 3

Much like Smallville, I suspect that any critical viewing of Supergirl will be an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel.  So, I've brought my 12-gauge and CBS has provided the barrel.  Let's maim some metaphorical fish.

good thing this bronze statue is actually lead.  Hope no one misses it so I don't have to find a pipe or literally anything but this valuable looking statue.

I came to many realizations watching this week's episode.

1. Reactron is not a terribly creative villain.  He was kind of a one-trick-pony/ no personality guy in the comics, and here...  more of same.  Why did I used to like that guy?  Costume design?  No idea.  I like the name, though.  Could be that's it.
2. If Cat Grant were anymore one-note on this show, she'd be a tone in Koyaanisqatsi
3. The writers have just absolutely nowhere to go with Win.  That dude is going to die horribly so anyone can give him a passing thought and he'll ever have mattered in the show.  Also, I am not sure working a low-tier job at CatCo would set you up to hack satellites, get you $30K in equipment, and all the rest of the Smallville Watchtower responsibility he's taken on.  He's so forgettable, I have to place him every time he appears in frame.
4. I have no idea what Kara's sister's name is after 3 hours of television.  She's just "Kara's-Sister".
5. By episode 6, not one character in the DCU will have a secret identity unknown to Win.  truly, that man is the nexus of the DCU

Three episodes in, I'm a little stunned at how badly the writers are handling Cat Grant.  I have no huge expectations, but that the "interview" scene was incredibly poorly managed after the big build up last episode.  It's like Cat's terrible dialog is infecting everyone else's forgettable or fortune-cookie dialog.



Also, Supergirl left Cat's $50+K car sitting on top of a mountain with no road, and then flew away because she f'ed up her interview.  Also, surely Cat was already headed somewhere before she got sky-jacked, or else she wouldn't have been in the car.  And then you have the gall to wonder why Cat would have anything mean to say about you?   Bad form, Kara.

But, in some ways, I'm having a real turn around when it comes to Cat Grant.  She's truly a terrible character.  Here's some sample dialog from an imaginary episode I made up, but I think it's pretty spot on:  "God, these cookies are terrible.  Where's the highly specific random food preference I'm insisting on?  You should just kill yourself, Mom."

If Supergirl fails as a show, I'd gladly watch Cat Grant week after week.

Of course we'll all find out about the wounded person Cat really is, that it's all a shield, and we'll get a more relatable Cat Grant (and if you read the original Cat Grant comics, we all know what's coming).  But, in the meantime, I like to just think she's a just crazy person.

And, this week we're back to more fortune cookie story telling.

"Hey, Cat wrote this totally horrible article about you, but because it's well written, I can tell she really respects you, secretly."  Thanks, Kara's-Sister.  You're either insane or you know all the lies you need to tell your super-powerful sister so she doesn't just give up on the natives and wipe us all off the face of the planet.

Weirdly, the rest of the episode was fine, even if it did briefly look like it was ready to totally chuck last week's "stronger together" idea for "Kara needs to do this all on her own".  And, honestly, they totally did that.  If Kara isn't feeling validated by her peers at all times, the "togetherness" deal is off!

Ignoring last week's episode, this week's theme of Kara being able to stand on her own and get a thumbs-up from Superman via text was a-ok.  It felt very Superman-ish, even if we had to see it all on a screen rather than face-to-face.  The DEO's jurisdictional rules got bent for a good cause rather than becoming some writerly excuse to give Win extra duties, and the FX remain high quality.

Maxwell Lord is properly skeevy, and I'm betting Kara will prove herself more powerful than a locomotive before season's end.

Reactron looked shockingly not stupid on TV, even if his armor looked scavenged from Zod's movie armor.

All in all, it's still finding its feet, but I think they'll learn a lot from these episodes.

However, the overall problem of "Supergirl is a magnet for villains showing up and wreaking havoc" is going to be hard to ignore.  At least The Flash had the decency to not make the villains' actions specifically Barry's fault.  Even if they are all tied together, sort-of, by Barry's story, they aren't there because Barry suggested they come to Central City to rob banks or whatever.  Having an alien-fighting agency that doesn't do anything but watch Kara do their work, who, apparently, had nothing to do before, is going to make less and less sense if people start to think on it too hard.

Really, if I had to guess, The Flash may be the only one of these shows that has an honest-to-god comic fan or two in the room.  It's always weird to see TV shows and movies bobbling the simple things the comics corrected decades ago or which have a simple and elegant fix, but which can be.. problematic... if you're just going by the Show Bible.  And right now, Supergirl is not feeling like a show that knows all that much about how to write superheroes in a way that doesn't make them feel like a terrible idea in the real world.

But, forget all that.  Most importantly, we saw The Signal Watch on Jimmy Olsen's wrist, on screen, for the first time I can really recall.  And it was amazingly cool.