‘Supergirl’ season 2, episode 8 review: Who’s hunting Mon-El, Maggie and Alex, and a crossover’s birth

Tonight, “Supergirl” kicked off its midseason finale with nary a mention of Barry Allen and the crossover that was coming. If you watched it live because of all the promotion, odds are you were slamming your head against the wall about halfway through the episode when there was nary a mention of The Flash or Cisco Ramon.

Don’t worry — they did turn up by the end of “Medusa.” There were just some other issues that the show needed to navigate before getting around to that point.

Thanksgiving interrupted – A bizarre set of circumstances caused part of the evening’s plans to go awry for Kara and company — a potential breach from the outside world that is probably the foundation to Barry turning up later. This also interrupted Alex’s plans to come out to her mother.

Unfortunately, the happy vibe of the night faded soon when Mon-El, not too long after attending the dinner and hoping to impress Kara’s mother (and by association, Kara), found himself running after who we thought was J’onn J’onzz. In doing so, he barely avoided an ugly death courtesy of the Medusa virus. The real Hank Henshaw decided to come into the bar and unleash a killing spree. As a result of possible exposure, Mon-El was locked away back at the DEO while Kara and company had to figure out precisely what they were going to do. Mon-El stayed alive just because Medusa was meant to attack non-Kryptonians, and his people shared enough traits for him to battle off the virus for at least the immediate future.

Knowing that time was of the essence, Kara wanted to team up with J’onn in order to find a solution to solving Medusa quickly — so after visiting the Fortress of Solitude and having the quickest and saddest robot fight in existence, the two forged their next move in the midst of a pep-talk: L Corp was going to be the key. Unfortunately, Cyborg Superman was also very well aware of this. The two battled things out, and while Maggie was hurt in the crossfire (we were pretty darn worried about her for a second), it seemed as though she was going to be okay.

The search for Lillian Luthor – The next phase of Kara’s plan was a difficult one: Finding a way to convince Lena that her mother was the person behind that. She didn’t want to believe that, and understandably as a result of that, she was defensive when faced with the possibility of her being in charge of Cadmus. Unfortunately, what Kara really didn’t realize was that Lena really was willing to fall over to the dark side completely, offering her mother her help — even though her mother didn’t think that she was willing to fight for “the cause.” We wanted to think that this was all a cruel trick … and luckily, it was! Lena pulled a fast one on her mother, making the virus inert and effectively ensuring the safety of everyone.

Also, along the way Hank and “Hank” got into a fight and David Harewood really had to beat himself up for a little while in here. Great job to the stunt / effects team for making this seem realistic to the show and in no way cheesy.

Did Alex finally come out? – She did, but not in the way that she first planned. Her mom basically figured it out on her own based on how much she mentioned Maggie. She was perfectly accepting in all of the right ways, and this is one of those reasons why this show is loved by so many — it represents hope, and the majority of our heroes are good people who are accepting and loving.

While at the hospital later Alex passed along the news to Maggie, and the two had a nice moment as the former realized that while she liked Maggie, she didn’t need her in order to be happy. Interestingly, this — plus Maggie almost dying — was enough for the two to finally share a kiss.

Kara’s own romantic future – Is Karamel officially a thing? (Our understanding is that this is becoming the new name for the Kara / Mon-El relationship out there.) He did kiss her while he was starting to fade from Medusa. Apparently, he didn’t even remember kissing her when he recovered, and Kara decided not to tell him.

The aftermath – After Lena’s heroic move, we saw Hank be cured of his blood-transfusion problem, and was now back to being a Green Martian. Meanwhile, two mystery characters are hunting Mon-El and the Kryptonian pod.

Also, Barry and Cisco finally turned up a minute out from the end of the episode to tell Kara about the Dominator threat; other than a quick “hello,” the only other takeaway from this was that these two are still clearly not getting along following Barry’s actions via Flashpoint.

Grade: B+. The Lena twist was welcome and unexpected, as we thought she was going to go full villain for a moment or two in here. The only real downside to the episode, which was otherwise exciting, was expectation. Given how much it’d been billed as a crossover, we imagine that there were many people out there who wanted to see Barry and Cisco interact with at least another character or two from the show rather than getting to Kara’s place before asking for a favor.