Back to the important stuff. Back in the Tower, Kara tells Lena about everything that happened with Esme, and how she feels so bad.

“Do you agree with Esme though? Do you think I’m pretty?”

She’s feeling a bit… well, hopeless. If she can’t even inspire hope in one little girl, how is she going to inspire lasting hope? Lena tells her to just go steal the nukes that are stressing out the countries of Kaznia and Corto Maltese but Supergirl says she’s not allowed to get involved in big picture stuff. She’s not trying to take away free will, or single-handedly affect the course of human history on such a large scale. Just then, Kara feels Nyxly’s glee, a word and emotion that gives her chills for more than one reason.

“I suddenly had the urge to pu ton a newsboy cap….”

Lena gets back to work on using the repelling spell and says maybe Supergirl isn’t the answer for this particular gauntlet. Maybe the world needs to hear from her personal hero, Kara Danvers.

Lena had 90% of the good ideas in this episode, just saying.

Downstairs in the Tower, Kelly talks to Esme gently and kindly, telling her she knows Alex is sorry she had a hard day. Alex is watching from the window like a sad puppy as Kelly tries to comfort the scared little alien girl. Esme just keeps her sad eyes glued to the floor and tells Kelly that she should just take her back to the group home, before her powers hurt Kelly, too.

I don’t even know how to ACTORS didn’t burst into tears at this, let alone the characters.

And somehow Kelly’s entire heart doesn’t stop beating for the pain of it right then and there, and she leaves Esme to her sorrow and goes out to comfort the other devastated party.

Alex feels horrible for pushing Esme. Because the thing is, Alex was trying to parent Esme the way Jeremiah raised her. Because it was the most formative for her, even though it wasn’t the healthiest. So it’s her first instinct. But instead, she should be parenting the way Mama Danvers, The Best TV Mom Ever, raised Kara. She says Eliza was kind and understanding, and she doesn’t know how to just snap her fingers and be like that.

Kelly reminds her that Eliza wasn’t automatically perfect at parenting her adopted alien daughter; they fought all the time, too. Alex waves her hand at that, saying it was different because Kara was a teenager and Esme is a perfect little angel. But Kelly reminds her that even despite the fighting, Eliza and Kara ended up bonding just fine, and Kara thrived for her love and support through the hard times. Kelly implores Alex to cut herself some slack. To give herself some time.

“If we can’t figure out how to raise a child, literally no one should be allowed to.”

Besides, Kelly says there’s blame to share. Kelly assumed that all of Esme’s apprehensions this morning were about her powers, but that’s not all that was happening there. Yes, she’s been taught to fear her own powers; Miss Hannigan’s Group Home had her in a power dampening cuff, her last foster parents wielded her as a weapon then sent her away because of them. But it’s deeper than that. It’s not only the why, but the fact of being sent away; Esme is scared of getting close to Alex and Kelly, because she’s lost so many people already.

Alex reassures Kelly that it’s not her fault, either. They are both nervous and stressed, but they have each other.

We stan healthy queer relationships.

Kelly wishes there was a way to help Esme see the truth, to know implicitly how committed they are to taking care of her, and you can practically see the lightbulb go off in Alex’s head.

Across town, Kara takes Lena’s advice and writes an article about how J’onn is helping keep the peace with Corto Maltese (and Kaznia, but that didn’t rhyme.) But Andrea hates it. She’s been going through it and she fired her therapist friend and her ex-turned-best-friend is a Superfriend now so she seems a bit grumpy. Kara says she wants to try to give a positive perspective and give people good news for once, but Andrea says the world sucks.

“Life sucks then you die, what else do you want from me, Danvers?”

As if to prove her point, this is when Nyxly chooses to bust into CatCo and kidnap a reporter as leverage. Kara sneaks out Andrea’s window and flies back in as Supergirl, and Nyxly says if she doesn’t turn over the Hope and Humanity totems by sunset, she’ll suck the world of its courage until it happens to also lose all hope.

Nyxly makes a move that forces Supergirl to go save Andrea (who hilariously talks to Supergirl like she’s her favorite Hollywood celebrity and has no idea she’s actually the reporter she was just berating) and Nyxly uses the distraction to disappear.

Desperate, Supergirl flies around trying to instill as much last-minute hope as she can, then flies back and tries to take the hope totem, but the mysterious game show voice tells her that she failed the gauntlet.

Up in her tower, a princess Lena is doing some magic, trying to get her repellent spell to work.

“Eleka nahmen nahmen! Ah tum ah tum eleka nahmen!”

When she finishes the spell, she reaches out and the totem zaps her, making her think it worked, but when Brainy comes up behind her and lifts it himself, they realize it’s a one-zap solution and not a long-term protection spell.

Kara comes back, despondent. Losing hope. And bummed Brainy and Lena don’t really have good news for her.

“At least I don’t have bangs anymore.”

Alex and Kelly are also in the Tower, Esme still looking a bit bummed. Alex apologizes again for pushing Esme and explains that she was trying to help but she realizes now that she was hurting Esme and she didn’t mean to.

Normalize apologizing to children and admitting when you made a mistake!

They have something to show Esme, which intrigues her enough to follow Alex and Kelly to meet the Superfriends’ pet TruthSeeker. They explain that it has powers to make people tell the truth, and that Esme can borrow those powers while they tell her something very important. Esme agrees so Kelly and Alex look at her in her little eyes and promise that they will never EVER send her away. Not if her powers get bigger, not if she never wants to use her powers ever again. Nothing she can do can make them send her away. They’re her family now, and it might be hard sometimes, but they’re going to grow and learn…together.

I could think of a few people I’d like to use the TruthSeeker on.

Esme is starting to warm to them but expresses another one of her big fears: She had a family once, before all the foster placements, and bad things happened to them, and then she was alone. Once again somehow Kelly and Alex don’t burst into tears, but instead they tell Esme a secret: They’re superheroes. It’s their job to keep the bad things away, and they’re very good at it. I personally would not have been comforted by them telling me they’re in danger more often than your average moms but Esme has already been saved by Kelly once and Sentinel and Guardian once, so she feels like she can trust them.

To be fair, I do trust them, I just have known them longer than Esme has.

Kara is still feeling the hope draining from her, which maybe is part of the gauntlet, but she shakes it off and puts her hand on her hips and stands tall. She realizes that Lena’s FIRST idea is maybe the way to go; she doesn’t usually get involved in things this big, but the only reason the nukes are on the table is because of Nyxly’s interference, so stopping it will just bring things back into balance. People shouldn’t have to live in fear like this.

So Kara wants to get the hope totem and do what Nyxly asks, and J’onn is stressed but Kara trusts Lena’s spell. So Kara flies to Kaznia and gathers up all their nukes while J’onn gets the ones in Corto Maltese and it’s only right now when I decided to double-check that I was spelling that right that I realized this is also a fictional place; I guess that’s what happens when you’re steeped in the Arrowverse for almost a decade.

Kara yeets all the nukes into the sun then goes back to the hope totem, having very publicly saved two entire nations, at least. And this time she can pull it out, and the escape room voice tells her she performed admirably.

The lily means I dare you to love me.

She uses her earbud to tell Lena that she’s on her way back to her (and this isn’t me exaggerating; she didn’t tell the Tower, she didn’t tell Brainy, she just told Lena. I know it’s because she has the Totem since she’s doing magic on it but STILL.)

Supergirl finds Nyxly and goes toe-to-toe with her, and with the help of Lena’s spell, ultimately saving the kidnapped reporter and getting her hands on all three totems. Hope was more powerful than courage in the end.

The Superfriends look over their spoils; three of seven totems in their control instead of Nyxly’s. But Kara is wondering if they should switch from playing defense to playing offense. Maybe the game isn’t playing keepaway with the totems for the rest of eternity, maybe it’s taking away Nyxly’s ability to win at all. Maybe the only way to keep Nyxly from putting the Allstone puzzle together is to make sure she can never find one of the pieces.

Lena is worried; these totems possess magic that’s on an ancient archmage level and she has barely mastered a third level Glyph of Warding spell. They don’t know what will happen if they destroy one, it could affect life as they know it in untold ways.

“God she’s so smart.” – Kara’s inner monologue, probably

Brainy points out that they technically only have to destroy one piece for the puzzle to be unfinishable; the question now is which. Humanity is way too dangerous, and courage is too risky. So once again, hope is the solution. Supergirl is sure that she can replace hope if destroying the stone starts sapping it. Not just her, them. The Superfriends. As they exist now, and on into the future. It’s their best option right now.

“I will be their sunlamp in the darkness!”

Back at the Olsen-Danvers residence, Alex and Kelly tuck Esme in. They know that the TruthSeeker was just the beginning, that they’ll all work together to build trust, and talk about their feelings. Esme does have one more truth she wants to share before she says goodnight: She loves her room.

“So what’s the deal with Aunt Kara and Aunt Lena?”

When Alex and Kelly are alone again, and admit to each other that it was a rough day, Alex also confesses, tears in her eyes and her voice all wobbly, that it’s better that she ever could have imagined. And what I love about this is that it feels so…right.

So often wlw relationships on TV are only developed to a point and then writers throw up their hands like, “What do lesbians want? They’re both women so probably babies right?” when the truth is, lesbian couples want or don’t want children with a similar variety to any other couple! A wild concept, I know. Plenty of queer couples simply have no interest, so when a couple (or, more often it seems, a single lesbian) on TV suddenly wants a baby, it can feel like a move that means they didn’t know what they wanted to do with the couple anymore.

But not here. Alex helped raise Kara, and has always had a protective instinct. Wanting children someday is why she broke up with Maggie, who didn’t, and for a little while she was so determined to justify that heartbreak she was going to adopt a child alone. But when that didn’t work out, she found Kelly. And then Esme found her. It feels like the correct progression to lead a lesbian character to adopting a child and even if all the scenes in this episode were so cute my heart threatened to fully quit on me, I would support this trajectory.

They even got to smooch a teensy weensy bit this episode!

Outside, Kara puts on her Lena-made space suit and flies up to yeet the hope totem into the sun, destroying it. Nyxly can feel the stone break and knows the allstone can never be whole, but just as she’s about to give up, a present drops down from the sky like it’s from a sponsor in the Hunger Games, with a note from Nyxly’s secret admirer in hauntingly familiar sociopathic handwriting. Inside the box is a watch that turns into a Lexosuit. Nyxly smiles and I scowl.

And honestly I’m so bummed! I forgot Lex was coming back and I’m furious about it. There are only five – FIVE – more episodes left, and these last few episodes have been the best the show has been in years. It was full of teamwork and women supporting women and all kinds of good stuff, and I really don’t want the Men Who Ruined Everything to come back. We can’t even get Lena, Kelly, and Nia all in one episode, why are we adding more people! Anyway, hopefully the show proves me wrong and Lex only comes back long enough for Lena to kill him again.

Unrelated, but with Lena’s hair crimped this episode, it made me think again about the trajectory of Lena’s comfort with the Superfriends, about how over the course of the seasons she went from tight buns and pencil skirts to her hair loose and her clothes flowy…will we see the return of The Sweatshirt? We can only hope.

They were the best of times, they were the worst of times. (Screenshot from Episode 305.)

If you enjoyed this recap half as much as I enjoy creating them for you, please consider donating to our fundraiser. Getting paid to yell about lesbians on TV (and supposedly straight people acting like lesbians) is one of my life’s greatest pleasures and I’d love to keep doing it for you, which I can only do for as long as Autostraddle can afford to pay me. (Thanks, student loans!) Autostraddle’s TV Team brings such a unique perspective to the internet, discussing the representation of marginalized identities being from the point of view of those very identities, instead of by a straight cis white gatekeepy comic-loyalist bro on a mainstream website. Even when you don’t agree with us, or we don’t agree with each other, the fact that these conversations about queer characters are being had by queer people is so hugely important, and unfortunately still pretty rare. I really value this space we hold and the thoughtful, insightful, and often hilarious comments you leave, and I love learning for each other, and would be absolutely gutted if it went away. All this to say, please donate if you can, or send this link to friends and family you think might want to help. Help us be the hope totem we want to see in the world.

AAAAAAAAAAAAnyway. See you next week, when Dreamer returns to us!

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