Verdict: An intense and gripping episode delivers some of the best drama Supergirl has seen in quite some time, but struggles in balancing its characters effectively.

Review:

Supergirl hasn’t been about Supergirl as much this year. Like it or not, the move to the CW has opened out this show’s ensemble no end after last season was tightly focused on Kara’s specific struggles of balancing her work as assistant and superhero with her personal life, and we’ve had a surfeit of new viewpoints to see National City through as characters have charted more independent paths, from Alex’s coming out to James’ transformation into Guardian. And no character has benefited more from this expansion out from Kara’s viewpoint of the world than Mon-El, who’s essentially been boosted up to a secondary protagonist in recent weeks, quite frequently receiving the biggest slice of character development in an episode, even compared to Kara.

Homecoming shows why that’s both a blessing and a curse with an intensely personal story of the Danvers family reunited then ruptured by the return of Jeremiah. On one level, this creates some very compelling conflict, with viewpoints that are all fleshed out and substantiated by character development sparking off each other with no clear answer as to who’s right. On another, it’s hard not to wonder whether this personal story would have benefited from a more intimate approach focusing on just Alex and Kara, because the episode is so packed out with character drama, especially with Mon-El, that it doesn’t quite have the time to explore the full range of emotions that the Danvers sisters feel, from joy to devastation. This is a very good episode, but it’s frustrating that it could have been an all-timer with a greater sense of focus.

What Homecoming does best with the return of Jeremiah is to broaden out this show’s exploration of themes of family. His return to the Danvers’ fold is quite obviously suspect from the beginning, and the episode never tries to contradict that sense of unease, quickly placing the outside observer, Mon-El, as the voice of doubt. Yet it’s quite possible to believe that those logical holes don’t matter when they’re up against the power of a ‘family reunited’ narrative. In the scenes where Jeremiah returns to the cheering DEO and then to his adoring family, Supergirl creates an atypically dreamlike tone that’s suspiciously free of blemishes. Everything has a slight glow to it, and everyone, especially the two couples, behave as if every problem between them has been cast aside by the miracle of Jeremiah coming back – there’s only the restraint of Eliza’s reaction to remind us of reality. It feels like everyone is about two seconds away from bursting into song. In short, Homecoming is keen to place emotional realism above rational logic. Jeremiah’s return, and the narrative it allows his friends and family to create of redemption and of the existence of things that are purely good, is evidently intoxicating to these characters, and therefore it’s entirely understandable that they would override their own understandable doubts to focus on the joy of seeing him back. It’s astute writing and directing, ensuring that the rest of the episode has a tragic sense of inevitability, counting down to the moment where the wool is pulled from over the characters’ eyes. Dean Cain’s performance is an important factor in all of this, and he manages to strike the balance of seeming genuinely convincing in his apple-pie humbleness and gratitude while allowing flickers of something more suspect – just enough to be ignored unless you’re looking clearly – to creep in every now and then.

The best character work resulting from Jeremiah’s arrival lies with Kara and Alex, and that’s no surprise – their sisterly bond has always been a strong spot for Supergirl. Importantly, while they both begin with joy and end the episode hurting, comforted by their loved ones, they take a different journey between those two points that’s influenced by the unavoidable fact that their places in the Danvers family are different. Homecoming recognises Kara’s place as the relative outsider, able to gain a clear-eyed perspective on events after she’s shown a piece of evidence because she lacks that crucial blood bond with Jeremiah that means that she can ultimately separate herself and become objective when it counts. Alex, on the other hand, is a Danvers through and through, and her slow journey towards finding out the devastating truth is, or at least should be, the emotional spine of the episode. Chyler Leigh does some truly exemplary work here, required to hold up the final confrontation with Jeremiah on her shoulders with a furious sense of betrayal that’s underlying the simple sadness at the fact that her father lied to her, and she does so with heartbreaking exactness. It’s entirely convincing that Alex would believe Jeremiah until the truth is staring her in the face because Leigh makes it clear that she desperately wants, even needs, to believe it. I just wish that Alex and Kara’s conflict, which is defined by an engagingly complex history of suspicion and jealousy that’s taken two seasons to grow, was given more time than it’s allowed. Their scene together is gripping and quietly sad as the two sisters land cruel blows on one another, but it’s not enough to convey the extent of their emotional situation. With what it does, Homecoming is excellent, but it’s what it doesn’t do that’s problematic.

Take Mon-El, whose character development grows apace now that he and Kara are officially a couple. His arc has become tiring and circuitous in recent weeks, learning something new before unlearning something else, and Homecoming doesn’t fully shake that off – the shape of his character arc in this episode, from brashness to humility, is pretty similar to before. Admittedly, though, it takes many steps in the right direction. For one, unlike last week where he came across as thoroughly dislikeable, Mon-El is basically right in his judgements, and it’s only in his expression of those thoughts where he has to learn his lesson. That’s the right balance for Supergirl to strike, ensuring that the character has a unique value and the evident capacity for goodness, but suffers from an inability to reconcile his worldview with others. And the place that Homecoming brings him to is a genuinely encouraging one. His final scene with Kara is the most purely likeable he’s been in ages because he exhibits a genuine desire to break his repetitive cycles of behaviour and therefore learns to put his own selfish instincts aside to become a wholly supportive shoulder to cry on in that moment. After last week unwittingly damaged the idea of a Mon-El/Kara relationship by making him into a creepy, controlling patriarch, Homecoming finds a better tack and articulates more clearly why their relationship could work, dramatically speaking, going forwards.

Taken on its own, Mon-El’s arc would be a success, and the best step forward for the character in ages. No story exists in a vacuum, however. As with Alex and Kara, it’s what the episode doesn’t do that weighs it down. In this case, it’s how Homecoming doesn’t take into account that there’s a gripping and emotional story at the core that doesn’t really need Mon-El’s involvement to work, and tries to jam his character arc in anyway. Therefore, Mon-El’s perfectly good arc is filtered through the lens of the Jeremiah story, which means that he cuts into the time that was used for other characters’ reaction to Jeremiah. The result is that we get less Alex and Kara, two people who have a fascinating perspective on Jeremiah’s return, and more Mon-El, and the episode never knows which character arc to foreground given that they’re dwelling in the same territory.

Is Homecoming about two sisters coming to terms with the truth that their returned father has betrayed them? If so, why does the episode only have one scene of conflict between them? Or is it about Mon-El’s struggle to strike a balance between his status as the familial outsider and the new boyfriend? If so, is that the right choice for a show that has prided itself on its female perspective, especially given that Mon-El’s hardly been starved for screen-time recently? Both stories work, and could have fitted together well in the same episode if there were a clearer delineation about which takes the most precedence in the episode, but they’re two A-plots placed alongside each other, which rarely works in a 40-minute time frame. Ideally, to be honest, Homecoming would put Mon-El on the back burner and pick up his character arc in an episode where the central conflict is less personal to Kara. The choice made to continue to focus on him heavily here exacerbates the problem that Supergirl has lost sight of Kara’s perspective and has become too preoccupied with masculine voices that can be found commonly on most other superhero shows. It speaks to the strength of the characterisation and themes here that this messiness doesn’t prevent this episode from working, but it certainly holds it back from what it could have been.

Homecoming is Supergirl at its most operatic and ambitious, and the decision to swing for the fences in the intensity of the character drama and choice to portray the main characters as the ones in the wrong is wholly admirable. Supergirl has been a little formulaic lately and a little restrained in its character arcs as if it’s been winding up to something big, so this feels like a long-awaited release of tension that busts outside the confines of that villain-of-the-week formula to create something more emotionally varied and risky. But the episode also exemplifies the troubling issues that are creeping in week by week into this new version of Supergirl, such as a tendency to push Kara into the position of a supporting character in favour of others and a resulting difficulty in finding an emotional centre. Supergirl has found plenty of success in its ensemble this year, but it sometimes just needs to remember who’s in the name if it’s going to maintain its place in the superhero pantheon.

Odds & Ends

• Winner of the week: it’s not J’onn. The guy has a very rough episode, from his strange ease in giving Jeremiah full access to the DEO to his swift defeat at the hands of a man whose only weapon is a robot arm. We all have our off days.
• Where is James? He’s only been in one of the last four episodes, including this one. Here’s hoping the off time is being used to figure out just how to use him outside of Guardian.
• Winn seems to be happy in his new relationship. If you’ve seen the trailer for next week, it seems that the happiness will only continue.
• Cadmus watch: they’re not doing an awful lot this episode, as they distract Kara and Alex from their ultimate project: a huge ship. Considering they also stole the National Registry of Aliens. My theory: they plan to round up every alien and blast them into outer space. This would seem oddly impractical, but they’ve tried a lot of angles, and to be fair to them, they’re comic book villains.
• Next episode: Exodus! This one has the intense look of a season finale, and it seems as if Teri Hatcher’s new villain will be coming in for this one. Expect big twists.

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