Supergirl goes full PSA—literally and figuratively

Well color me surprised! Last week, I wrote off the story of
brothers Orlando and Joey Davis as an episodic parable the show resolved way
too easily. But it turns out Supergirl was just getting started. “Still
I Rise” returns to the Davis brothers to explore how difficult life can be for
formerly incarcerated folks, whose past can make it hard to find jobs and whose
lack of jobs can make it impossible to find stable housing—and vice versa. It’s
a vicious cycle that doesn’t lend itself to permanent “happily ever afters,” and Supergirl seems poised to use Orlando and Joey to explore that cycle this season. As Brainy
points out in one of Jesse Rath’s best Balcony of Deep Thoughts scenes: “The fight
for systemic chance often feels never-ending. All we can do is keep showing up.”

The good news is that means more of Jhaleil Swaby’s truly excellent
performance as Orlando, which goes a long way towards making the character feel
lived-in and specific. The bad news is that in using Orlando and Joey more as symbols than as major point of view characters, the Supergirl writers run the risk of getting stuck in soapbox mode. While I
have a famously high tolerance for Supergirl’s blunt socio-political
commentary, even I was finding this episode just a little bit hard to swallow
in how overtly it laid out its messaging. There’s a fine line between weaving a
relevant social issue into your narrative drama and just releasing a PSA.

Supergirl at least seems to know that it has
the tendency to lean too far towards the latter, and lampshades it with a really fun scene of Supergirl
and Brainy recording a hilariously awkward PSA about the importance of eating
your vegetables. While it doesn’t entirely make up for the episode’s more unsubtle moments, at least it winks at them. Elsewhere, the closest “Still I Rise” comes to using its social themes for
actual character drama is in the idea of Kara going all-in on advocacy. Now
that she’s realized how much of a difference she can make by weighing in as
Supergirl, Kara’s starting to become obsessive about calling out as many social injustices as she
can. But that frenetic approach coupled with her impulse to frame things from a
detached reporter’s point of view leads to a fairly disastrous CatCo live
stream that only winds up undermining her case.

The idea of Supergirl doing a social media takeover is such
a fun and original one, that I wish Supergirl had built an entire
episode around it. Instead, it’s just one small stepping stone on the way to
this episode’s bluntly stated thesis: Sometimes powerful public figures like
Supergirl need to use their platforms to amplify other voices, rather than
centering themselves. A great lesson to be sure, just not one that Supergirl manages
to dramatize particularly well. In fact, pretty much everything about Kara’s attempt to
stop National City’s City Council from selling the Ormfell affordable housing
building to be used as headquarters for cloud computing company Orquoia was
forgettable at best and tedious at worst.

“Still I Rise” attempts to spice things up with a whole
bunch of different subplots—from Kelly training to be Guardian to the surprise return
of Mitch the cosmic menagerie hunter from the time travel two-parter. But the
most intriguing elements of “Still I Rise” belong to Nia and Nyxly, respectively. Though I’m still not sure exactly how Nyxly got stuck in the
dream world while hitching a ride back to Earth, it’s fun to watch her repeatedly pull various
iterations of the con she first used to appeal to Kara: Pose as a powerless,
put-upon victim and then turn the tables on anyone who believes the sob story.
It’s how she goes from being Mitch’s prisoner to using him as a pawn in her plan—which is to trick Kara into giving her the heat vision boost she needs to get
her powers back. And while that twist doesn’t quite make up for how lackluster this episode’s big
action climax is (shouldn’t Kara be able to quickly fly those people out of danger
before stopping the freeze bomb?), at least it’s something.

It’s actually the Nia stuff that works best this week, as she’s
treated to 24 hours of tough love from her mom Isabel (a returning Kate
Burton). This is probably the closest Supergirl has come to nailing the “dead
parent returns from the grave” storyline it keeps insisting on returning
to. And it’s fascinating to watch Isabel hold her daughter accountable for her
mistakes while still doing her best to empower her in the process. Isabel points out
that Nia has a tendency to flee from her dreams rather than fully experience
them, which ties in to her tendency to run when things get tough. And while I’m
not sure the running thing is something Supergirl has really established before, I’m glad the show is finally circling back around to Nia’s sister
Maeve, who we last saw in the fourth season episode “Blood Memory.”

Though Supergirl hasn’t put too fine a point on it, Nia’s inability to control her powers is tied
up in her sense of guilt that she “stole” them from her big sister, who spent her whole life
preparing to inherit them from their mother. If Nia wants to get a handle on
her abilities, she needs to confront the pain she’s been holding onto ever since she
parted ways with her once supportive sister on a horrible note. As Supergirl sets about wrapping up all of its various dangling threads in this final season, I’m glad the show hasn’t forgotten about one of its biggest ones.

On the whole, “Still I Rise” actually makes some intriguing
big picture storytelling choices, particularly in its willingness to engage with
the show’s long and short term continuity and to complicate its heroes’ wins with
some losses. Not only does Kara make a new enemy in Councilwoman Jean Rankin (Kari
Matchett), Nyxly winds up vengefully destroying the Ormfell affordable house building anyway, leaving Orlando and Joey out in the cold again. But for all those smart big picture choices, “Still I Rise” just isn’t hugely engaging as an hour of TV in its own right. And while I’ll aways take a so-so episode with good social intentions over a so-so one with no social messaging at all, ideally Supergirl will find a better way to blend its activism with artistry.

Stray observations

• What’s up with The CW not airing promos this season? Ah well, at least the return of Thomas Lennon’s
  Mister Mxyzptlk serves as an effective tease for next week!
• I get that Kara is trying to make systemic change, but given
  how personally invested she is in Orlando, couldn’t she also directly
  help him get an apartment too? Sometimes direct aid is the best form of activism,
  and surely tons of places will rent to the Davis brothers if Supergirl is their
  co-signer.
• The scene of Kara and Kelly training together while working through
  their frustrations is a nice little callback to the time that Kara and James did
  the same thing way back in season one.
• There’s something rather poignant about Mitch’s deep desire to reconnect with Naxim,
  who fled Earth last year. I wonder if that’s a throughline the show will return to again.
• “Sweetheart, you’ve unleashed a force of hell on Earth.”