Verdict: Crossfire isn’t a classic episode of Supergirl, but it’s still a strong installment packed with surprising twists and a sense of infectious fun, as season two broadens out from its initial themes and ideas.

Review

It doesn’t seem controversial to say that Supergirl has undoubtedly improved with its move to the CW. By bringing political imagery and a progressive feel to the fore while trimming some of the show’s excesses to focus on characters who contribute to the show’s overall themes, it’s become a much more purposeful show that takes the intent that was evident throughout season one and applies it to a set of genuinely compelling stories. While this week’s episode, Crossfire, doesn’t quite pack the same punch as the episodes before it, it’s perhaps the strongest indicator yet that Supergirl has permanently improved itself. It’s the first episode of season two that can be termed ‘just another episode’, coming in the middle of the fall run with the ability to simply take everything the previous episodes has introduced and push it forward. And given that this is, for all its flaws, still an instalment that compares favourably to the episodes where season one was firing on all cylinders, it’s an impressive statement of intent that this is apparently the base level for Supergirl 2.0.

The key theme here was identity, as characters all over the map began to question whether their current lives truly matched up with their wants and needs in life. It’s not as politically charged as previous episodes’ exploration of immigrants and prejudice, yet it does feel like a very natural extension of season two’s continuing preoccupation with the relationship between character and environment, and just how much someone can change to fit in somewhere. That’s an idea that’s at the core of Mon-El and Kara’s story here, as their pairing once again yields consistently strong insights into Kara’s psyche alongside continuing to peel back the many layers of the Daxamite guard turned refugee.

It’s interesting that the arrival of Mon-El has led to a much greater scrutiny of Kara’s own flaws and foibles, speaking to Supergirl’s increased sensitivity and ability to incorporate multiple perspectives on an issue coherently that it’s able to challenge its main character so frequently. Once again, Crossfire pins a central story on Kara learning of the shortcomings in her worldview and growing to compromise with the help of outside figures, and it’s clear that this balanced approach is both benefiting her character by continuing to flesh out the human inconsistencies and irrationality behind the clean-cut hero. Kara is still an incredibly sympathetic character – Melissa Benoist is turning in one of the most naturally likeable performances on TV week by week, but Kara is simply a more dynamic protagonist when we see her biases exposed when applied to real situations. Moreover, her flawed portrayal stems naturally from what we’ve already seen rather than being tacked on unnaturally to add ‘complexity’ – everything we’ve seen about Kara creating her repressed, shy human identity and getting her head down makes it entirely believable that she sees this route, which has been successful for her, as the definitively right way to blend in on Earth. Befitting of the warm humanity and compassion on display in every inch of this show, though, Kara’s journey of self-betterment isn’t one of punishment or horrible error – it’s simply a question of other presences, such as Alex, helping her to widen her worldview and adjust her beliefs just a little bit each week. It’s a difficult balance to strike between exploring a character’s flaws and punishing them unduly for it, but Crossfire strikes it elegantly as Supergirl continues to deliver satisfyingly on the promises of a journey for Kara Danvers this season.

Moreover, though, it’s also working to benefit Mon-El, who’s fast becoming one of my favourite characters in a cast that’s not lacking for likeable figures. It would be so easy for Supergirl to approach Mon-El from a one-dimensional perspective, portraying him as the idiotic jock type with an objectively bad lifestyle who needs to be taught to be ‘improved’ by Kara, yet Crossfire takes a much more nuanced view. It mines a lot of comedy from Mon-El’s slacker antics at CatCo, and rightly so – Chris Wood has the character’s hilarious nonchalance down to a tee already, and some of this episode’s funniest moments stem from Mon-El’s fish-out-of-water confusion as he projects his unconventional principles onto a vastly different surrounding. Yet despite allowing us to have a good laugh at Mon-El, Supergirl ultimately invites us to take him and his beliefs seriously – it’s clear that he’s a square peg in a round hole at CatCo, squashed into a lifestyle that’s incompatible with the desires that have apparently come secondary in Kara’s mind to his safety. Crossfire comes quickly to the deeply effective point that Mon-El’s not wrong for acting the way he does, and that he doesn’t really need to be fixed – as harmful as they can be in the wrong environment, his desires and needs are clearly placed as equally important to Kara’s, even if that requires her to adjust her view of just what ‘blending in’ means. Mon-El is fast becoming a fascinating parallel to Kara, similarly good-hearted and personable but lacking the inhibitions and concerns that inform Kara’s human life. Crossfire does an excellent job for furthering this parallel by continuing to move these characters forward in tandem as they continue to lift one another up by offering a vitally different perspective on life on Earth to each other and thus, as has been a key theme of this season, become just a little bit more accepting of what they don’t understand.

The idea of accepting what isn’t understood seems like as good as a jumping off point as any into Alex’s story, which functions as the plotline that quietly underpins the entirety of the episode, taking the themes explored elsewhere and applying them to a deeply human story of diversity and acceptance. Simply put, Alex’s journey in Crossfire is what many fans expected all along – provoked by the deeply confident Maggie to consider questions that had never even occurred here, Alex travels through a fugue of confusion to a point of clarity where she finds an answer to her questions that seemed right all along. It’s the coming out story that the producers of the CW/DC shows promised us would come, and it’s executed with admirable sensitivity and a careful construction that extrapolates everything unsaid about Alex’s character and gradually brings it to the fore.

Chyler Leigh has a particularly difficult undertaking here as she has to play a version of Alex who lacks her typically strident confidence, but she delivers one of her strongest performances yet that carefully tracks Alex’s evolving attitude throughout the episode and brings it to a quietly cathartic point of certainty at the end of the episode. The final scene with Alex and Maggie at the bar is a fantastic one in its own right, but it’s especially powerful in the light of Alex’s clear unrest and re-evaluation throughout the episode. It’s a scene that eschews grandiose speeches and emphatic realisation for something far quieter and more honest – Alex’s speech to Maggie stumbles and trips up, avoiding anything truly definitive, but that’s a really strong way to illustrate the sea change that’s just occurred for Alex as she’s finally found an answer to questions that she’s been asking for years and can feel a slight, nervous sense of optimism in the new opportunities that this realisation entails. A lot was riding on this story given how few of these specific kinds of adult coming out stories there are on TV (as other bloggers have rightly pointed out, most coming out stories on TV involve teenagers who don’t need to reconsider as much as Alex does here), but I think Crossfire has empathically delivered with a story that’s handled with impressive maturity and subtlety. Let’s just hope the strength of this plotline carries through to future episodes where it’s dealt with in more concrete terms.

Then there’s Lena Luthor, whose arc centres more around a concrete identity that’s being probed for uncertainties and flaws by others. Supergirl has been smartly self-aware in its presentation of Lena thus far, playing off the natural assumption that a Luthor always has ulterior motives to string us along with ambiguous hints that take on an extra relevance given Lena’s heritage. That clear awareness of the natural likelihood that Lena is secretly villainous is manipulated particularly well for a really engaging through-line in Crossfire as Lena is presented as someone with unquestionably pure motives, a fact that seems incredulous to both the characters and the audience. It’s one of the very few times that a ‘she was good all along!’ twist genuinely lands – not because it’s unpredictable, because Supergirl’s diversion is reasonably easy to spot early on, but because it’s surprisingly satisfying to see Lena’s seemingly altruistic nature exposed in a way that can’t really be spun as an evil act or denied altogether. Katie McGrath is excellent at conveying Lena’s determination to carve out a positive image for herself, and the sympathy that her performance and the scripting brings about is the real trump card of this story – that Supergirl’s managed to make us root for a Luthor, even when it’s been flaunting the possibility of an ulterior motive in front of our faces all along, proves a very particular point. It’s a deft trick that strengths Crossfire’s strong defence of the ability to carve out your own identity free of others’ expectations, and it places Lena in a far more interesting position going forward than one might expect.

The final story of identity and reconsideration is James’, and this is the least successful of these stories that Crossfire serves up. ‘Least successful’ doesn’t mean poor, and there are several instances of strong writing evident throughout – like Alex, Crossfire latches onto ideas that hadn’t been outright voiced with James’ character with his eternal sidekick status and confronts them explicitly, which at least pushes the character into justified new territory. Likewise, there’s that essential humanity and compassion to the conclusion of Winn allowing James to embrace his dream because ‘being a hero is addictive’ – for all the practical problems that it throws up, heroism in Supergirl is infectious and aspirational, taking multiple forms and bringing a clarity of purpose to life. However, some of the logic behind this storyline is a tad creaky. It’s kind of hard to swallow the idea that James is an experienced fighter off the bat – that’s an attribute that comes across as being retroactively tacked onto the character to justify this plotline, rather than working from what we’d already seen. Likewise, despite the fact that the episode frequently acknowledges it through Winn’s comments, James’ actions are just a little bit too bone-headed to keep our sympathies throughout the episode. It’s established that Supergirl can’t take on the gang on her own, but their strength is depicted to such an extent that James’ involvement seems ridculous – it’s hard to really believe that he would make any kind of tangible impact with a baseball bat when we’ve seen the crooks launching cop cards into space beforehand. All of this is in service of something interesting, ultimately – it’s going to be exciting to see James launch into action as the Guardian, without a doubt. Yet I’m not sure the writers made a convincing enough case that this was a logical and believable next step for the character, instead working backwards from the idea James would become the Guardian and railroading the story to that end-point.

The real problem with Crossfire, which inhibits it from greatness despite all the strong plotting elsewhere, is the bad guys. That’s not necessarily the gang, who serve their utilitarian function as the muscle to threaten Supergirl and spark the episode’s action – they’re underdeveloped, for sure, but their threat is purely physical and thus doesn’t need much psychological depth behind it. Again, the real problem is Cadmus, who aren’t a whole lot more interesting than they were in their first appearance. It’s a shame that in execution they’re so dull, because the idea of xenophobic bad guys using public prejudice as a weapon couldn’t be more topical or on-theme for this season. Yet they’re just thin in reality, represented by Brenda Strong’s character whose dialogue cycles through the same rhetorical points about alien influence and freedom again and again without truly fleshing out the deep reasoning behind that, or at least providing some nuance to her absolutism. The revelation that Strong’s character is Lena Luthor’s mother is a hugely promising one that tilts the plotline in a promising direction, but within Crossfire they’re simply not a very dynamic threat, feeling like a collection of interesting talking points in search of a character.

On the whole, this is a solid rather than a great episode, as Crossfire does lapse into some of the issues of unengaging villains and rushed plotting that plagued this show’s early days. Nonetheless, elsewhere, Supergirl’s development continues to march on thrillingly, with a clarity of focus on characters’ paralleling journeys that’s leading to a much more balanced and overall well-rounded ensemble, while all the while keeping the fun and humour quotas as high as you’d expect for a show as outright joyful as this. It’s not without its niggling flaws, but if this is Supergirl by numbers, that says something seriously encouraging about how far this show has come.

Odds & Ends

• It’s perhaps an overused trick for superhero shows, but the spinning shot of Kara and Supergirl changing in and out was a hell of a lot of fun.
• Are we moving towards a Kara/Mon-El relationship? They have tangible chemistry and it’s even commented on here, but the mentor/mentee dynamic based on Clark and Kara might make anything romantic a bit weird subtextually.
• No Snapper this week. His journalism tips are missed.
• Tragic loss of the week: the gang members, offed by Cadmus before they can be questioned. They, too, will be missed.
• I kind of love how, of all the things, Alex eating a doughnut is a big warning sign for her.
• Next week: Parasite! Guardian!