But Lena tells Brainy she was wrong. She once told him to put his feelings in little boxes and push them away. But the thing is about little boxes is that if you stack them too high they’re bound to topple and crush you.
She tells Brainy not to let the rage consume him and ot let it out, then let it go. So he does. Lena’s heart breaks for Brainy as he yells and yells and finally just collapses into a chair. He adds one more thing to the pile of things bothering him, maybe the thing that is bigger but harder to look directly at: He misses Kara. Lena takes his hands in hers and says simply and quietly, “Me, too.”
I, for one, am a huge fan of this dynamic. I love these brainiac buddies, and I look forward to watching their friendship continue to grow.
As the rest of the team watches M’gann carefully for signs of turning, J’onn admits that Alex was right. He was so focused on marching forward, he went too far to fast. He didn’t listen to M’gann, he was too focused on not feeling his feelings that he tipped the scale too far the other direction. Alex understands; she didn’t want to get out of bed this morning, she didn’t want to live in a world without Kara. But she repeats what Kelly told her, what Kara would have said if she were there: You have to keep fighting. Even if there’s only a snowball’s chance in hell that it would work. You have to at least try.
And it turns out Kelly was right, helping someone else helped lift Alex’s fog a little, and she gets an idea about how to save M’gann. Kelly shows up and is going to help them with some Obsidian tech while they do what is essentially a soul transfusion. There’s a very small window for this to go right, and the Phantoms will be here soon, so Alex calls in Brainy and Lena to help them. And can I just say, hearing Alex call Lena’s name to join her while powerwalking into battle brought me so much joy. All I’ve ever wanted was for Lena to be properly integrated into the SuperFriends and it looks like we might be on our way.
Lena is going to use her portal watch to send the Phantoms to a containment unit, so Brainy and Alex just have to hold them off while she works her magic.
While J’onn and Kelly work on putting M’gann’s soul in a jar, a Phantom breaks past the first line of defense and attacks, and all Kelly can do to help is kind of poke at it with an IV stand. Which is largely ineffective. But J’onn is able to multitask and eventually with teamwork they get the Phantoms to a safe place (except Phantom Prime seems to have portaled away) and they stop M’gann from turning into one of them.
Later, when Lex gets back to his office, he gets a taste of his own medicine when he finds Lena there waiting for him. She tells him that while she would love to kill him, she doesn’t think that’s actually the answer.
Instead, she’s going to do something that will hurt him worse than shooting him again. She’s going to disengage. Lena is not going to participate in Lex’s game anymore. She’s laying down her king, and she’s not playing. She can’t lose a game she’s not in; and he can’t win it either. She’s leaving LuthorCorp and leaving it for him to run into the ground.
He doesn’t believe her, of course. He’s a narcissist sociopath, he thinks she enjoys the cycle of abuse he puts her through. But she’s done. Plus, her leaving LuthorCorp means the lawyers will drop their investigation into her and Non Nocere. She’ll get a fresh start.
Lex can’t fathom walking away from something like this, from all her work, from him. He thinks she hates him to much to let this go. And she says yes she does hate him. But now that she is rekindling old friendships and making new ones, now that she has seen that she can be loved and respected and supported by people like Kara, Brainy, and Alex…she’s starting to love herself, too.
And I love this for her.
The day well saved, Alex goes home to find Kelly waiting for her. Alex brought Kelly flowers to thank her for being her rock, for helping her so much. Kelly is confused; she was just sitting here thinking about how useless she was when the Phantoms showed up. But Kelly did help, Kelly helped Alex face the hard things, helped her realize that there was still something to fight for. And it’s something she doesn’t take for granted, and frankly Alex wants more of it. She asks Kelly to move in with her, something I assumed had already happened off-screen like everything else between these two, but apparently didn’t. But Alex’s speech is sweet, saying she wants to wake up with her every morning, she wants to share the little things with her, she doesn’t want to waste one more minute. And Kelly says yes, yes of course.
Nyxly and Kara find the raiders and save Father Zor-El, and dad and Nyxly both seem…wary of each other. But when Kara says they’re going to look for a way out and think Nyxly’s magic could come in handy, she realizes that this isn’t the end of their mission. She assumed Kara would be done with her now, and she’d be back to being on her own. She seems genuinely pleased that Kara finds her useful and also wants her to stick around, two things she never got from her family back home. But despite Kara’s rough start with Mr. Mxyzptlk, he ultimately proved to be a friendly fellow who meant well, so she has nothing against fifth dimension imps in general, and so far Nyxly has done nothing but help her, so why wouldn’t she trust her new princess pal?
Can we trust Nyxly? Who knows. Did we need to be introducing so many new characters in the final season? Probably not. Am I excited that Kara has another lady friend? Yes. Overall I enjoyed this ep; still very sick of the Lex stuff but I loved all the Superfriends scenes (especially now that Lena is in them) and glad we finally got some Dansen growth on screen. More of that, please!
