Supergirl E06: “Red Faced” (or: “Please, can we have more of the B story?”)

A few quick thoughts about Supergirl, in particular, episode 6, “Red-Faced”. (Yeah, there’s some spoilery bits.)

First let me get this out of the way:  I like this show. After getting used to the “Let’s make the worst possible emotional decisions!” stratagem used for S2 and S3 of Arrow, I have no problem with this show’s so-called “soap opera” elements at all.

In fact, they were the only elements of this episode that I liked.

The “A” story – Red Tornado – just made me want to scream that’s not how any of it works … and that’s from a guy who works in nuclear medicine who manages to avoid yelling at the MCU for the way they handle gamma rays.

From General Lane suddenly blaming everyone else for his scientist’s weapon getting out of control (Seriously? Have the writers never heard of DARPA?) to the climatic fight “seventy miles away” (but apparently close an interstate?) and the “Oh, I resign my commission Daddy” crap… man, the A story sucked serious ass.  (And as The Mary Sue points out, wait, did Supergirl just straight up kill someone?)

But – and this is really the saving grace of this show – the emotional bits (which are usually the B story) are things that matter. Women not being able to express anger and shoving rage aside. People dealing with relationships they can’t handle. Trying to do the right thing by your friends that you have crushes on. All of these are handled well and deftly. I love Callista Flockhart and Melissa Benoist in this show.

And the banter’s good. I’m a sucker for banter.

Overall, I’m still with Supergirl. I just want them to keep further away from the villain of the week formula and give us more of something different – like the challenges that a female superhero has to deal with that, say, her cousin doesn’t have to.

One thought on “Supergirl E06: “Red Faced” (or: “Please, can we have more of the B story?”)

  1. I had a huge issue with this episode for several reasons, but the one that I can't seem to let go of in my head is that Supergirl is told that the android has become sentient, that it has become an independent being driven, perhaps, by the last things it had been programmed to do, and she simply destroys it without ever so much as questioning if she was now killing a sentient being.

    As an extraterrestrial life form herself, and one who is fully aware of the existence of other ETs and such (not to mention that she remembers life on Krypton, including artificial intelligence, etc.) you would think Kara would have a bit more expansive a view on sentience, sapience, and how not being human does not mean you are a less valuable form of life.

    Even after being told the android has become self aware, she doesn't try to talk it down, to figure out if there is some way to reason with it (The Red Tornado is a hero in the DC Universe, and much more than just an android) in order to resolve the situation without having to kill it.

    The same kind of thing keeps bothering me about The Flash. There is a general lack of logic applied to the scripts, and it always bugs me, especially in The Flash where the entire paradox of this season is completely being ignored, not to mention that they seem to forget that the man who killed Barry's mother was not Harrison Wells.

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