This week’s episode of Supergirl made us question what makes a villain a villain and a victim a victim when Maxwell Lord unleashed Bizarro on National City.
In “Bizarro,” Kara comes face-to-face with a mirror image of herself, complete with looks, powers, and feelings, as Maxwell Lord orders the destruction of Supergirl. This Bizarro version of Supergirl looked like Supergirl and essentially was Supergirl, but we saw what happened when someone who is vulnerable is exploited at the cost of what, right now, appears to be a pointless vendetta against the aliens.
Meanwhile, Kara’s love life took an interesting turn as Kara’s fling with Cat Grant’s son Adam crashed and burned — it just wasn’t meant to be, although Blake Jenner is gorgeous (good job, Melissa Benoist!) — while James Olsen finally revealed his true feelings about Kara — only not to her face. But still, we got a love confession and wow is this going to be painful moving forward.
Here’s the rundown…
Supergirl vs. Bizarro
One of the interesting things that Supergirl did with this episode was making us question whether the person we’re led to believe is the villain isn’t actually the victim in all of this?
In “Bizarro,” we meet Maxwell Lord’s creation that is a mirror image of Supergirl in everything: looks, powers, speed, strength, and thoughts. And we saw Lord coercing this Jane Doe — coined “Bizarro” by Cat Grant — into believing that Supergirl is the enemy; that she’s a bad person; that she should kill her.
But the more we watched — especially in the pair’s first face-to-face meeting and subsequent fight — the more we saw that Bizarro was beginning to question what Lord had told her. Here we have this man — the man that essentially brought her (back) into this world — preaching that Supergirl is evil and the enemy, and then Bizarro witnessed for herself that Supergirl saves people, which doesn’t make her evil at all. She tells this much to Lord, and he goes on to tell her that sometimes things that appear to be good in this world really are bad. Once again Lord was brainwashing this poor girl into believing something that she really didn’t believe.
But Bizarro does as she’s told and once again confronts Supergirl with the intention of killing her. The two battle it out — Bizarro Supergirl vs. Kara as Supergirl — until Alex and the DEO show up to help. They’ve created Kryptonite darts to neutralize Bizarro — because if Bizarro is, for all intent and purposes — exactly like Supergirl then that should be her weakness. Only when they hit Bizarro with the darts the exact opposite happens. Instead of succumbing to the Krytonite and becoming weak, so absorbs it and becomes even stronger. So it turns out she isn’t exactly like Supergirl. in fact, they’re like mirror images: similar but not entirely replicas.
After Bizarro kidnaps James — and James alerts Kara — Supergirl comes flying in with some backup to help put a stop to this. The two caped women battle it out before Alex shoots Bizarro girl with what is the opposite of Kryptonite, which ends up sedating the poor girl.
When all is said and done, we see a mutual understanding between Kara, Alex, and Hank. Like Kara said, Bizarro was the victim in all of this. Maxwell Lord was and remains the villain. Bizarro asks to speak to Kara now that everything has calmed down. She apologizes and Kara accepts. They decide to put Bizarro girl in a coma until they can figure out a way to help her. And they promise to help her.
“Afraid,” Bizarro says.
“I know,” Kara tells her. “I once went to sleep for a long time, too. But when I woke up I wasn’t alone. And you won’t be alone either.”
“Thank you, Kara.”
Maxwell Lord was right. He made her exactly like Kara.
Kara and Adam (and Cat)
Last week we witnessed Kara reunite mother and son as she was able to bring Cat and Adam together to reconnect in what appears to be quite an effective way. But we also saw from the beginning that there was an obvious attraction between Kara and Adam played by real-life wife and husband Melissa Benoist and Blake Jenner. So obviously the chemistry was there.
You’d wonder if Adam was a sort of rebound for Kara seeing as she sees no possibility of being with James and (right now) doesn’t reciprocate Winn’s feelings. But there was an obvious connection between the two of them that they both needed to explore.
But there was also a change in Cat’s treatment of Kara as a result of Kara going on a couple of dates with her son. While Cat understood that Adam was staying because of Kara, she didn’t let that stop her from appreciating the fact that it gave her and her son an opportunity to chat and reconnect. So basically, Cat benefited from her son dating Kara.
“Maybe the universe is sending us a message,” Kara tells Adam after both of their dates resulted in being cut short both because of Bizarro. Their first date, which was all kinds of adorable, ended when Kara had to race over to save a train car from falling into the water. Their second date, which resulted in a passionate kiss, was cut short as Bizarro literally swooped in and flew off with Kara.
But it took Kara two dates — and the weight of the world on her shoulders — for her to realize that she can’t be with Adam because she won’t subject him to this life. But it was clear that Adam really wanted it to work out, and he actually thought it would’ve been him that freaked out and pushed away and not Kara. With Kara and Adam over before they started, Adam returned home to Opal City leaving a somewhat calm Cat Grant silently fuming because now Adam “doesn’t have any reason to stay” now that he’s not with Kara. While Cat said that she and Adam did reconnect and are in a good place and that he’ll come by to visit every so often, she was clearly agitated that Kara had “broken (her) son’s heart,” and essentially was the reason he left. Cat insisted that from now on the relationship between her and Kara remain strictly professional so as to not risk anyone getting hurt.
James’ Feelings Revealed
One of the early teases from Supergirl‘s debut season has been the slow burn between Kara and James. Their connection was instantaneous, but the moment has never been right. And it still isn’t. But that’s what makes it a slow burn and something to build towards and evolve to.
In “Bizarro,” the most important thing to come out of this from the romantic side was James’ true feelings. We know that he’s been dating his old flame Lucy Lane, who he seems to genuinely care for, but there’s always been a draw to Kara that he can’t explain and can’t help but feel. But it hadn’t been a problem. Until now. Until Kara began getting flustered over Adam Foster. Until Kara essentially seemed to be moving on from her crush on James and into something that actually held promise of something.
In the beginning of the episode we began to see hints of jealously with James when he saw Kara’s reaction to going on a date with Adam. He was trying to be supportive, to be a good friend, but he couldn’t hide the jealously smacked clear on his face. Only Kara didn’t notice because she doesn’t notice that kind of stuff. How else wouldn’t she have noticed her best friend, Winn, was in love with her for years?
What seemed like a little tease soon grew into something with substantial development. After Kara and James had a brief, tense moment on the balcony at CatCo — “nothing you say will make me feel better right so maybe you should just leave me alone,” Kara says — James is kidnapped by Bizarro and forced to confront and admit his feelings.
Bizarro tells James that he took him because Supergirl loves him. And she should know because “Supergirl and me are same,” she tells James. James understands and tries to appeal to the humanity and the good within Bizarro — the same humanity that exists within Kara. He tells Bizarro — who is upset about her now literally cracked appearance — that the world doesn’t love Supergirl because of how she looks on the outside; they love her because of who she it. And then we get the confession that made me jaw drop open:
“I love her because of who she is. Because she’s brave. Because she’s kind. And she always tries to do the right thing.”
While the confession didn’t entirely work on Bizarro, luckily James was able to hit his Supergirl button on his broken watch and Kara arrived in time to fight Bizarro and eventually defeat her. But it was too late for James; he had voiced his true feelings out loud and for him there is no going back now.
In the final moments of the episode we saw Kara and James back to their usual selves. Kara invites him to drinks for Happy Hour because she never got to hear what happened when Bizarro took him. “Just saying how I was feeling before you arrived,” James tells Kara. but unbeknownst to her, what he was saying was actually a confession of love. Oof. The pain of the slow burn. Strap in folks.
The Threat of Maxwell Lord
While this season has set up Astra to be the big bad that we fear, these last few episodes are proving that there might be an even greater and more intelligent threat than we imagined: Maxwell Lord. Lord is intelligent and resourceful (billionaire, hello), which makes him incredibly dangerous when it comes to the extinction of Supergirl and the other aliens among them.
This week we saw Lord unleash his Bizarro project (nice name, Cat) on Supergirl, where he experimented on six Jane Does before the seventh girl proved to be a success. We saw her transformation, and Lord even explained — in what essentially was a confession though he said it wasn’t — that he injected Supergirl’s DNA into these girls to create a somewhat replica of her. But more than that we saw Lord brainwash this once brain-dead Jane Doe that he experimented on to hate and want to kill Supergirl. It showed how much Bizarro was the victim and Lord was the villain as he continued to force her into hating and wanting to kill Supergirl.
But in observing the way Lord coached up, so to speak, Bizarro to attack Supergirl it was evident that this hatred for aliens runs much deeper than we could’ve imagined. While he says he’s fighting to save humanity he’s actually the villain that they need to be protected from. He can’t see that he’s the one destroying things and Supergirl — the alien — is actually the one protecting everybody.
After Alex was threatened numerous times by Lord — that he would expose Kara, threaten her family — she was finally pushed to the edge and arrested Lord and locked him up in a secure DEO cell where he could never hurt anyone ever again. But his threats didn’t stop. When Kara — followed by Alex — confronted him he essentially threatened Eliza Danvers, as he mentioned the place and house where they grew up and she now resides. But Lord is locked up now. He should be a non-threat, right? Something tells me Lord will soon find his way back to the world and unleash an even greater attack on Supergirl.
