Contemplating her life and her choices at CatCo, Andrea decides to call the smartest person she knows: Lena Luthor.
As if it’s a former-almost-villain support group, Lena encourages her not to fall back into bad behaviors, even though she does think it’s kind of great that Lex’s stupid journals are public now.
Lena tells Andrea not to betray her friends, and tells her to think about why she did what she did, what path she’s on, and if it’s a path to the person she wants to be. And if the answer is no…change it. After all, Lena did.
After flying around the entire Earth a few times, casually, Kara still can’t find the glam rock spaceship, and she’s about to go for another spin when J’onn catches on and asks what exactly she’s avoiding. Kara tells J’onn about the fight she had with Alex, and how she doesn’t understand why Alex didn’t want her advice as someone who has been an alien child on Earth. She does feel bad about overstepping, but in a moment that was VERY TRIGGERING for me as a Sweet Marley Rose stan, J’onn doesn’t tell her that she didn’t do anything wrong! He just tells her to clear the air with Alex!! When frankly I don’t think Kara did anything wrong at all! Alex could have said “Cool I’ll talk about it with Kelly and Esme” and walked away instead of snapping! If she had told me about that fight, I would have said, “She’s probably feeling very sensitive as a new mom and wasn’t ready for unsolicited advice yet, or the reminder that she won’t ever fully be able to understand exactly what Esme is going through; your heart was in the right place and she’ll realize that eventually.”
Downstairs, Esme is playing hide and seek with Mama Kelly when a CatCo reporter shows up and reminds us that no one has taught Esme about stranger danger yet. That will be important later.
Kara takes J’onn’s advice and goes to see her sister, who is doing science in the lab, trying to figure out what’s going on with Esme.
Alex still hasn’t gotten the results of Esme’s blood test back so she wants to cancel the bachelorette party tonight, but before she can, she gets a message that there’s a new alien student in Esme’s class whose powers are tantrum-esque in nature. So Alex rushes off to get Esme to her baking competition, leaving Kara still feeling very weird about where things stand with her sister.
Luckily, Lena is there to save the day yet again by giving Kara a task. She uses Lena’s intel to fly up to the glam rock spaceship, but it’s a trap, and Lex immediately shoots her Lenasuit with nanobots, ruining it. She fights Lex and Nyxly and eventually manages to put Nyxly in enough danger to get Lex and her to leave, and she grabs the Truth Totem before J’onn gets them to safety.
So now the Superfriends officially have five totems.
Lena, Alex, Kelly, and Esme come to the tower, excited that Esme won her baking competition.
They leave Esme with the reporter and get ready to head to the party; but first, Kara wants to talk to Alex. Kara apologizes for overstepping, but Alex admits her reaction might have been disproportionate to the advice given. The thing is, even though Kara was coming from a place of giving Esme respite from the overwhelm powers can cause, all Alex could hear was the suggestion Esme hide part of herself to fit in.
Alex might not be an alien, but there were times she felt like one, because she was trying so hard not to directly look at an entire part of herself for so long. She explains to her sister that it sounded, to her, a little too much like “staying in the closet is better” and that’s why she lashed out. Kara understands now, and reassures Alex that she’s a great mom, and Alex reassures Kara that she’s a great sister, and they hug it out.
They head to the bachelorette party, where all of the Superfriends are dressed to the nines in their exclusive suite. They toast to the couple, and Alex and Kelly dance.
Inexplicably, when they go to the dance floor, Lena…leers? after them? I don’t even know what word you would use to explain what Lena is doing, and maybe I’m projecting, because try as I might I cannot separate my SuperCorp feelings from the reality of this television program, but it almost looks like longing.
Brainy, however, has the opposite reaction,and runs off with tears in his eyes, Nia following close behind.
Kara, however, decides to dance with her sisters, and after some coaxing from J’onn encouraging her to take the night off, Kara soon follows.
When Nia catches up to Brainy, he admits he can’t shake the sadness that will come with his inevitable goodbye. Seeing everyone so happy feels bittersweet to him. But Nia encourages him to not waste the moments they do have by thinking about the moments they won’t. Stay in the now, celebrate your friends, enjoy it while you can. Don’t let the inevitable end keep you from enjoying the middle. Which I think is good advice for all of us, even if we’re not about to time travel, ya know?
Brainy had been starting to regret turning off his emotion inhibitors, but he’s now feeling grateful that he’s able to feel this pain, because it means he’s also able to feel the warmth of the love he feels for his family.
And so, with that, Nia and Brainy join the dancing. Just three couples enjoying a jig while their Space Dad looks on.
At the Tower, Esme’s babysitter notices that the security system has been breached so he has her hide like she was earlier. Lex and Nyxly appear and they split up; Nyxly to find Esme, who they now know is the Love Totem, and Lex to deal with the reporter, who he calls Paperboy, which I quite enjoyed.
Nyxly finds Esme and aforementioned lack of stranger danger comes into play, because Nyxly says she’s a friend of her moms’, and Esme just believes her. My mom instilled such a fear of strangers in me that sometimes I would second-guess my best friend’s mom when she tried to pick me up on a day I wasn’t informed she was driving me home. But sweet little Esme, possibly imbued with Nyxly’s imp energy because of her powers so hopefully able to defend herself, somewhat reluctantly goes with the pretty lady.
Meanwhile, Lex shoots Paperboy, whose ego has caused him to set up his phone to record a video instead of to call one of the Superfriends. Now, I don’t have an iPhone, but on my Android, it takes three taps to open my camera, switch to video, and hit record. Possibly two taps if the last thing I did with my camera app was also make a video. Presuming this man has his “phone” app on his home screen (I surely do not; the only person I call is my dad), that’s also three taps. I can call my most recently texted people in four taps. All I’m saying is, if he wasn’t as committed to “the story” as I am to “the bit” he could have called for help instead of recording what happens next.
Especially because he had to know what was about to happen. After revealing that Lex used his sister’s intellect against, and other too-convenient, demoralizing supervillain stuff, Lex shoots Paperboy twice in the chest.
At the party, Alex and Kelly are being cute and taking a selfie when Alex gets another alert on her phone.
Esme’s blood test results are finally in, which Lex had somehow purposefully delayed.
It reveals that Esme has fifth dimensional energy in her, and then they put together that Esme’s new marking looks a lot like the Love Totem. They all rush back to the Tower to save their little girl.
With his dying breath, once again instead of just yelling “Supergirl!” the way the literal child knew how to do, he uses voice commands to send his own snuff movie to Andrea, traumatizing her for life.
The Superfriends fly back to the Tower, but they’re too late. There’s no sign of Lex, Nyxly, or Esme, and the reporter/babysitter is definitively dead.
And on one hand, the fact that they spent the back half of this season shoehorning Paperboy into a one-on-one conversation with almost all of the Superfriends just to fake a bond so that his loss would be impactful to everyone is a move that is usually reserved for women. The particular refrigerator he’s in is actually quite spacious. However, I happened to notice that they made a point to remind us that Paperboy was a man of color earlier in this very episode. Also it is not lost on me that the white cis straight man who was supposed to die but somehow did not is the one who killed him. Lex was already evil incarnate, there was no need for him to cross this particular line, except that in the video he says that the reason he is killing this reporter was because he leaked his journals, which we know was actually Andrea, the receiver of said video. So even though the reporter is the one who died, Andrea will feel guilty for stealing a byline and blame herself for the shooting, Kara will feel guilty for taking a night off, Nia will feel guilty for not seeing this coming, Alex and Kelly will feel guilty for leaving Esme behind. So the question is, who was really the victim in this episode? Because I think it wasn’t only the man who was shot. A man who has done nothing but feel entitled to the Superfriends’ lives and be rude to his (female) boss all season.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m being too hard on Paperboy, but then I remember how much I love Brainy and how much I understand J’onn’s purpose and actions and I know it’s not just my misandry. He’s an anomaly in this show, especially the back half of this season, and while I appreciate how they pivoted away from him being a love interest for Kara, I never found myself particularly endeared to his character. I won’t lie, between Landon on Legacies and Lex on this very show, I have little faith that he’ll stay dead, but in the meantime, I’m not excited to see our Superfam in mourning, and now the series finale of this show called Supergirl, including the episode that is called Kara, is still somehow going to be all about this man., when they should be enjoying a gay wedding instead.
That said, as frustrated as I’ve been with this show from time to time, there’s still so much about it I love, specifically the women at the core of it, and so when the preview for next week’s two-hour event said “series finale” it felt a bit like a punch to the gut. I’ll get into the nostalgia of it all next week, but this show has been an important part of my life for the past six years and will probably honestly always be something I list as one of my favorite shows.
All I can hope for is a slew of happy endings. I’m too jaded to legitimately hope for Supercorp endgame, but I can hope for it to stay open-ended. I hope for Nia and Brainy to find a way to make it work. I hope for Alex and Kelly to live happily ever after with Esme. I hope for Kara to realize how very loved she is, and how much good she’s done for the planet during her relatively short stint on it. I hope.
See you next week, Superfriends! One last time.