‘Supergirl’ season 2, episode 4 review: Roulette, Miss Martian, and Mon-El at a bar
“Supergirl” decidedly has a villain problem. It’s something we’ve said for a good few weeks now, especially given that “The Flash” has the Reverse-Flash, “Arrow” has Malcolm Merlyn, and even “Legends of Tomorrow” is borrowing some of the better adversaries from those shows.
Tonight, at least this show brought in a fairly-interesting character in Roulette a.k.a. Veronica Sinclair, a woman responsible for running a secret alien fight club that is probably the closest thing to some of those Superhero Fight Club videos that The CW puts out as promos. Roulette didn’t necessarily have powers, but she had a knack for getting aliens far more powerful than her to subject themselves to terrible violence. We don’t quite get why some of them didn’t just rebel or opt to become heroes / villains on the outside, but maybe this was meant to be some sort of psychological study into how aliens eventually became so marginalized on Earth that they felt it necessary to fight each other for one another’s amusement. If that is the case, it has to be one of the darker stories thematically we’ve seen “Supergirl” take on.
Eventually, Kara was able to take down the operation (at least at first) with some help from her friends, but not before we got a chance to learn that Miss Martian was actually a participant in the operation, which emotionally devastated J’onn J’onzz, who felt like he was going to have a chance to connect with her through their shared experience on Mars. Alex also spent some time in here bonding with Maggie, and even seemed ready to ask her out before realizing that she was going out with her girlfriend instead.
What also proved fun about all this was that Kara was able to use Supergirl as a “source” to get ahead at work. Is this slightly against the rules of journalism? Probably, but Snapper Carr really had it coming for being such a prick. Hank also found some of his footing with his fellow Martian by the end of the episode … or so he thought. The big “twist” at the end of the episode was that she wasn’t actually a Green Martian at all, proving further that Hank may truly be the last of his kind. Pretty sad.
In other alien news – Winn had the bright idea of taking Mon-El out into the real world, which led to a hilarious bar scene — and one of our favorites of the season so far. Eventually Kara realized that she needed to take a more hands-on approach with him rather than locking him up, so we’ll see how that works.
Grade: A-. Roulette at least posed emotional challenges as a villain, but more than that this episode had humor, heart, important character moments, and everything in between. All in all, our favorite episode of the season.