Verdict: Survivors struggles to thrill with its alien fight club, but excels in deepening this season’s themes and metaphors while continuing to throw its characters into fascinating new situations.

Review

As an increasing number of watchers have pointed out, there’s one particular change that Supergirl has undergone in its shift to the CW that’s only become apparent in the last couple of weeks, which is the show’s presentation of aliens. Last season saw most alien characters (apart from our central heroes) presented as criminals, escapees from the Fort Rozz prison who generally served as villain-of-the-week fodder for Kara to defeat, and there wasn’t a sense that many extra-terrestrials existed beyond that. This year, however, seemingly overnight, National City is stuffed to the gills with a vibrant array of aliens who have been living on Earth with the full knowledge of humans, with communities like the alien bar forming as these aliens seek to recreate some semblance of their society on Earth. It’s a huge change, arguably even a retcon, but it’s allowed Supergirl to play in a much wider sandbox beyond the freak-of-the-week format with its stories.

That’s on full display, even more so than last week, in Survivors, which continues to satisfyingly dig into this season’s timely themes of immigrant relationships and experiences, even if it struggles to work its stimulating themes into a genuinely thrilling central story. The most noteworthy new addition to this ever-widening canvas this week was M’gann, aka Miss Martian, whose uncertain reunion with J’onn served as this episode’s emotional core. There’s a real potency to the idea of two refugees, each believing they were the last of their kind, reconnecting and attempting to find kinship in one another once more, and Survivors leans heavily on an especially terrific performance by David Harewood to convey the significance of this for J’onn, who has defined himself previously as the sole survivor.

Harewood has a difficult job this episode in keeping a handle on the fluctuating psyche of J’onn as hope that he will forge a new connection ebbs and flows away from him, but he proves to be up to the task in striking a strong balance between raw, unadulterated hope at recapturing his old life to bitter despair as his idealised fantasy of another Martian proves to be just that. However, it’s how the relationship between J’onn and M’gann twists and turns, straining their magnetic pull as the two sole survivors of Mars that really provides the most compelling material here. In particular, Survivors manages to provide a fascinating spin on its themes of how immigrants move on from their homes, juxtaposing the starry-eyed nostalgia of J’onn who continues to hold his Utopian past life in total reverence with the cold pragmatism of M’gann who has focused on carving out meaning for herself in the present day while severing all ties to her past life. There’s a sad inevitability to the chasm between their approaches to the past, the only thing that defines a relationship between two people who would otherwise never regard one another, so it’s uplifting, even inspiring that they’re able to reassert those deep cultural ties to one another when it matters the most, placing their lives in danger to preserve all they have left of their homeland.

It’s a clever, yet cruel twist, then, that these deep ties as the two last Green Martians are revealed to be based on falsehood – J’onn’s idealised fellow survivor belongs, in reality, to the species that he can barely mention without spitting, the White Martians. Though it’s obviously a major change from the comics, it works extremely well within the context of the themes this season is exploring, ironically reminding us of J’onn’s reductive, black-and-white views towards his own homeland – when M’gann hints at her true identity in her back-story by mentioning a White Martian who broke ranks, J’onn can barely comprehend the idea, hinting at the prejudice and blinkeredness that’s all going to resurface once he finds out. It’s great to see David Harewood, one of this show’s finest actors, given a truly substantial storyline, and his powerhouse performance is reflected in a rich script that always keeps refuses to provide a simple answer to any of the potent questions that it raises.

Survivors also casts its eye towards another of season two’s thematically relevant additions, Mon-El, offering a wider perspective on the last survivor of Daxam than last week’s narrow focus allowed for. For one, Survivors finds an intriguing similarity between Kara and Mon-El’s journey that belies the ideological differences that still separate them here. They’re both escapees pushed to leave a crumbling homeland by those who wished to perish with their own kind, for one, and then the episode begins to pull at that thread before reaching a satisfying conclusion as the ‘girl from Krypton and boy from Daxam’ finally put aside the differences that seem irrelevant and petty now. In the interim, though, Supergirl manages to find a great place for Mon-El beyond just Kara’s sparring partner by pairing him up with Winn for the episode’s most purely enjoyable plotline.

Christopher Wood is hugely fun in the role, playing up Mon-El’s comic obliviousness and his hedonistic Daxamite tendencies in the bar as his old habits resurface, and he instantly strikes up a really enjoyable rapport with Jeremy Jordan’s Winn as his slightly bemused sidekick. It’s a chance for Survivors to add some real levity to the mix, but there’s also some intriguing development for Mon-El’s character as we see him attempting to recreate an element of his old life, not realising that he’s now on a drastically different footing to the citizens he shares his experiences with. I was sceptical as to whether Mon-El was going to really find a unique place in an ever-growing ensemble before this season, but he’s proved to be a surprising success both in terms of entertainment value and the fish-out-of-water perspective he provides.

Elsewhere, it’s heartening to see Survivors double down on last week’s hinting subtext with Alex and Maggie, a pairing that comes ever-so-close to an explicit possibility this episode. Their growing easiness with each other’s company is shaded in naturally without the episode constantly drawing attention to it. It’s revealed in the way in which they’ve both become the other’s port of call for any kind of investigations, and work seamlessly towards one united goal, and then all-but spelled out at the end when we see Alex’s palpable jealousy at discovering that Maggie is already in a relationship.

If it wasn’t apparent last week that Alex is heading for a major realisation about her sexuality, then it’s pretty clear this time around that Supergirl really is heading in that direction, and from the looks of it, sooner rather than later. While it’s still great to see Supergirl really commit to a plotline of this kind with a frankness that’s still depressingly not seen that often on TV, especially with two characters who have convincing chemistry with one another, it just needs to avoid falling into conventionality with the way the story is being told. There’s a lot of very typical paths forward this could take with Alex’s jealousy and Maggie’s obliviousness to her attraction, so here’s hoping that Supergirl gets to its commendable destination in a more original and compelling way than just following the traditional love-triangle template to its conclusion.

I’ve gone through a great deal of this review without even mentioning what is arguably the A plot, which speaks to the slightly disappointing execution of the fight club storyline that was trumped up heavily in promos. The fight club does function as a fascinating metaphor for the real exploitation of minorities and the way in which their anger and sense of displacement is turned each by an outside manipulator, and in many respects it benefits from its timeliness. At this particular juncture, such a rousing condemnation of divisive fear-mongering and a message that unity and trust in one another can win out is obviously a powerful and relevant one, and it’s the kind of idealism and hope that makes Supergirl such an important show in these messy times.

Yet as a plotline taken solely in terms of its entertainment factor and construction, it’s sorely lacking. Roulette, even though the character benefits from a spirited performance by familiar face Dichen Lachman, is a flat caricature who functions more as a mouthpiece for the main themes of the storyline instead of resembling a real human being. And the story itself feels curiously skeletal, full of shortcuts to avoid any sustained conflict solely related to the fight club – the fight club’s location is easily found twice with barely any hassle, and the supposedly terrifying monster that Roulette keeps goes down incredibly easily by the end. Supergirl has come on leaps and bounds with its comic-book action this season, so it’s a shame that, even if the fight club storyline works thematically, it’s short on the thrills that it promises to deliver.

Survivors isn’t quite as immediately engaging as the first three episodes of the season, and it suffers a little for the weakly-drawn fight club scenario that offered so much potential on a visual level. Yet despite those minor disappointments, the show’s themes and character development continue to come on leaps and bounds, with the Miss Martian storyline offering the most complex and compelling spin on the metaphors that are becoming a cornerstone of this season, while Mon-El’s story brings both fun and pathos to the table in equal measure. As a superhero show, it’s not clear whether Supergirl is the strongest of an increasingly crowded slate of comic-book TV. Yet it’s becoming clear that, thanks to its keen understanding of the hot-button issues that are defining the world we live in, Supergirl is perhaps the most important superhero show there is right now.

Odds & Ends

• Kara’s journalism storyline continues to be (a genuinely interesting and (b slightly educational! Snapper continues to work as a character due to the clear good intent lurking beneath all that gruffness – Kara is coming on leaps and bounds under his wing as a journalist, even if her tactic of interviewing herself as Supergirl shows that Snapper isn’t teaching her a lot about journalistic ethics.
• Roulette is freed from custody by a mysterious benefactor… Cadmus seems like the obvious choice, but I’m betting on Lena Luthor. She was curiously friendly in her scene with Kara this week, after all. (Never trust a Luthor)
• For his own sake, I’m hoping Mon-El really does allow Winn to give him a superhero identity.
• “Your mother is a babe.”
• “I should have lasered that champagne glass out of her hand!”
• Next week: Mon-El joins CatCo! James becomes a vigilante!