‘Supergirl’ episode 17 review: Lucy Lane plays key role in flashback-heavy episode

We’re going to start our review for Monday night’s “Supergirl” with a fairly-simple question: How much of it did we really need? “Manhunter” was designed for the most part to fill in some of the cracks of the past, with a couple of reveals sprinkled in along the way.

Through flashbacks, we cannot say we really learned too much. Of course, Alex struggled with feeling significant after Kara’s arrival before Hank Henshaw a.k.a. J’onn J’onzz entered her life, and J’onn owed a lot to her father Jeremiah Danvers for his own survival. It was a slight disappointment to learn that the backstory for J’onn and Jeremiah was really limited to one scene; they met each other, and after the Martian Manhunter saved his life, Jeremiah tried to protect him from the real Hank Henshaw. He died, and J’onn eventually took his place.

While we didn’t really need to see much of this, it did all lead to a big reveal that Jeremiah is actually still alive, and is currently situated at the top-secret government research facility named Cadmus that is the reason why Clark Kent won’t work with the government. Why does the military on these shows always have to look so evil?

Another reason for these flashbacks was seeing Lucy Lane be the person who really held much of the power tonight. She had to understand where Hank came from and what he meant to the DEO and Supergirl (who finally revealed herself to be Kara to her in this episode) in order to convince her that locking up Alex and Hank was not the best way to keep National City safe. Good on the writers for not making Lucy strictly into a scorned ex of James Olsen desperate to make him miserable, since that is such a common trope for TV shows. Is she probably a little hurt that James has a close connection to Kara? Sure, but she knows that there is more at stake than this.

In the end, this episode concluded with Lucy now in charge of the DEO for the time being, and Alex on the run trying to find some sort of answers.

We suppose that the main B-story that really matters here is the birth of the Silver Banshee, which came about after Siobhan tried and failed to get Kara fired from CatCo by sneaking in and writing Cat a strongly-worded email from her account. She didn’t count on Winn effectively turning on her and determining that the typing pattern was different than with Kara’s other messages.

Did the show bungle the whole Silver Banshee origin story? Right now, we feel like they did, given that Siobhan screamed loudly enough that she spared herself from falling to her death at the conclusion of the episode. There was no real explanation or build-up to it; we get that there may be more backstory coming, but we would have preferred an origin story for the show where she, desperate for revenge, maybe was proactive in instilling the curse on her rather than it just being within her all along.

In the end, we’d say that “Manhunter” was merely an okay episode of the show. Much of the backstory we already assumed, and other than Jeremiah being alive, some of the reveals were presented in a ho-hum manner. Episode Grade: C+.

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