‘Supergirl’ season 2, episode 7 review: Cyborg Superman, Jeremiah Danvers, and a different Hank
“Supergirl” tonight started off with a device that we’ve seen both it and “The Flash” use on several occasions in the past, and that is start things off with a flash-forward to events that were going to be coming up later in the episode. Tonight, that meant giving us a small dose of Hank Henshaw … the real Hank Henshaw. He survived, and was now fighting off aliens as a part of the super-dangerous Project Cadmus.
In theory, we like the device provided that you are not spending a whole lot of time beforehand promoting what is coming during the episode. The issue here is that we already knew that Hank a.k.a. Cyborg Superman would be here. Therefore, there was no reason to do this other than to remind us in case we somehow forgot over the past few days.
The stakes surrounding Cadmus were indeed huge going into the hour, given that the group kidnapped Mon-El and more or less placed Supergirl in a position where she would have to fight tooth and nail in order to find him and eventually rescue him. The bad news is that after Hank beat Supergirl down, she also found herself in prison with Mon-El before Lena Luthor’s mother a.k.a. Evil Cadmus Lady decided that she was going to drain the radiation from Kara much like we saw during her battle with Red Tornado last season. Look at “Supergirl” referencing a small storyline from over a year ago!
The big reveal in the episode, even more so than Hank still being alive, was Jeremiah Danvers turning up at Cadmus for the first time! He helped to free Kara. This ending was in some ways really anticlimactic, given that eventually we did manage to see our two heroes out of there relatively unscathed, but given the cope of the setup, we thought it would’ve ended in a way that was a little more dramatic. Instead, before we knew it we had Kara chilling back at home with her friends while Mon-El was sniffing around James and Winn to see if she was open to “latching,” or getting together with someone to use a more-Earthly term.
Life of a Guardian – It’s not pretty. Not only is James Olsen still struggling with figuring out how to be a vigilante in the city, but there’s someone else in a similar costume out killing people. This felt a tad too much like this past episode of “Arrow” with Vigilante out killing people. Eventually, things got so tricky for James and his partner-in-fighting-crime Winn that they realized the only way that they could move forward was in telling Alex the truth about what they’ve been up to, and convincing her to call off Maggie and the rest of the police so that they could take down the dangerous vigilante.
Eventually, we did see the confrontation we’d been waiting for, and it was well-choreographed and exciting. This villain was overall rather lame since we knew very little about him, but how could we given the limited amount of screen time? What’s probably the most important thing here is that Alex and Maggie eventually did opt to let him go.
Your weekly romance update – After being told that she and Maggie could be “friends,” Alex fired back at her, feeling as though she was led on by Maggie giving her advice to come out to her friends and sending her signals suggesting that she could be interested in her. All of these points, we gotta say, were pretty darn valid. Maggie gave her a reason for the confusion.
After everything settled down Maggie did visit Alex at home to apologize. They’re not together, but they’re at least on better terms.
Hank learns the truth – It was only a matter of time before he realized that Miss Martian wasn’t exactly who he thought that she was, and that was revealed finally through her blood. She professed that she wasn’t like the others, and did a good job even presenting some evidence of it. Yet, at the same time we got a sense that Hank wasn’t really down for hearing it. As a matter of fact, he came fairly close to outright killing her.
Then, we came around to the part of this that was even more shocking and devastating to J’onn: Her blood, which was used to save his life, is starting to make him into a White Martian.
Grade: B-. This was a reasonably fun hour, but the Cyborg Superman story was a major letdown given the hype — though to be fair, he didn’t really look like the character until near the end of the hour. The Guardian story also proved to be fun, but don’t you think telling Kara would be useful?
Next week – We are going to see the epic CW crossover event begin … and also a dangerous virus spreading across National City.