Supergirl season 3 episode 21 review: The successes, struggles of ‘Not Kansas’

Supergirl season 3 episode 21 was an episode that was meant to better set up the endgame of this season, but instead what seemed to happen here can be described in rather simple terms: It continued some of the general messiness that began last week.

At the moment, it really just feels like the show is trying to do too much too quickly, and in the process short-changing characters we’ve come to know by throwing a lot of other stuff at the wall.

Let’s start, for example here, with Reign. It’s rather heartbreaking to say that we want to see Sam get her evil powers back but we almost do, mostly give how anticlimactic the final showdown with Reign was. It felt like, by and large, Lena kept her pretty contained the past month or so, which isn’t anywhere near the ending we wanted for this character. This was meant to be Kara’s Adrian Chase and by no means did she have the same overall conclusion to her story. Odette Annable is too great in this role to have her sidelined too much for the final showdown, and we’re going to take that possible twist at the end of the episode as a clue that Sam may be back to being a Worldkiller once more.

Meanwhile, it’s great to return to Argo City, but not for a storyline that only lasts a few episodes here at the very end. All of this feels a little too rushed and to be honest, we’ve never loved how humorless most of the people from Krypton have been on the show. They’ve all largely come across as bland and we’d like to see them have a little more fun. Some of them are even incredibly superficial given that their previous home world was destroyed.

Finally, there’s the mess of things right now with Mon-El. We’ve appreciated the growth and development for that character most of the season; yet, to push him and Kara in a romantic direction at this point undermines much of the past couple of months. Mon-El’s marriage to Imra may not have been arranged, and he may have stayed behind to figure out his feelings, but it still feels like there’s a difference between figuring things out and almost acting on them. There’s just no real sense of fun to it because of everything we’ve been told over the course of the season.

The last issue that we want to point out with this episode is the gun storyline that led to J’onn deciding that the DEO will no longer use lethal force. That’s a powerful, almost-idealistic statement, but we do like it. Once again, though, this feels like the sort of thing that should have been set up across several episodes, given that it felt super-rushed into one. The show could have told a one-episode story with a message like this if it offered something a bit more intimate hinting at long-term change down the road. The Arrow episode “Spectre of the Gun” is a great example of a story moving in that particular direction.

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CarterMatt Verdict

Overall, Supergirl season 3 episode 21 delivered an hour that had a lot of opportunity; yet, the execution just didn’t live up to what has been a great third season by and large.

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