Supergirl would like to remind you to fight hatred this Thanksgiving, especially when it carries a tiki torch
There are plenty of adjectives you could use to describe the past three seasons of Supergirl: Inspiring, exhilarating, funny, earnest, and often times a little bit dumb. But there’s one adjective that’s never applied until now: Scary. Season four of Supergirl is genuinely terrifying, not just in the sense that I can understand why the characters themselves are afraid (the show’s done that plenty of times before), but in the sense that I’ve felt really unnerved watching these past six episodes. And I mean that as a compliment. It’s remarkable that Supergirl has been able to so drastically and effectively shift its tone to handle the timely political subject matter it’s exploring this season. But I have to admit, there’s also something strange about watching a show I once turned to for comfort food become a show that’s not always easy to watch.
Of course, Supergirl is still a fun, funny show, and this episode in particular features some laugh-out-loud jokes and plenty of endearing interactions between our core characters. Brainy is around to provide some excellent and much-needed comic relief. Alex channels her life through Harry Potter references like the true millennial that she is. But—and I don’t want to draw this parallel lightly or flippantly (nor, I think, does the episode)—“Call To Action” is also an episode that essentially depicts National City’s Kristallnacht. The Children of Liberty deliver a manifesto secretly marking Thanksgiving evening as the night they plan to unleash a mass attack against National City’s alien residents. Then they don masks, grab tiki torches, and break into aliens’ homes in order to beat them in front of their children. It’s shocking stuff to watch, especially because it’s calling upon real-world history while simultaneously evoking our current political climate and where it might be headed in a worst-case scenario.
While that physical confrontation is brewing on one side of the Earth First movement, Ben Lockwood (who notably remains safely out of the fray) is leading a public ideological war that ends with him getting his own TV show after a successful on-air debate with Kara. Ben continues to be the single scariest villain Supergirl has ever introduced, which comes down to both the well thought-out conception of the character and, especially, to Sam Witwer’s truly terrifying performance. It would’ve been easy for this politically charged season to introduce a buffoonish Donald Trump stand-in as its villain, but Ben is tapping into a lesser explored element of right-wing bigotry: The faux intellectual who can use his history professor skillset to make pro-hate arguments sound like reasonable thought experiments. Agent Liberty may wear a physical mask, but the far scarier mask is the one Ben puts on to hide his internal anger. Witwer is never better (or more terrifying) than when he captures the moments Ben transitions from his true rage-filled self to the polite image he projects to the outside world.
What impressed me most about “Call To Action” is that it feels like a particularly adult episode, not just in the level of violence it’s willing to depict (Manchester Black engages in some pretty terrifying torture and murder in this episode, even if it’s against bad guys), but also in the level of nuance it brings to its debate. During the Danvers family Thanksgiving, Supergirl finally starts digging into the issues we’ve been discussing in these reviews and their comments sections. Aliens—or at least a good portion of them—do seem to have pretty big biological advantages over humans. How do you deal with that reality? Lena, naturally, wants to play god as the person who gets to dole out superpowers to the “good” humans worthy of them. (It’s the most Luthor plan in the world and I love it.) James, meanwhile, still thinks there’s hope of reaching out to the Children of Liberty with empathy in order to change their minds. His friends, however, are quick to point out that maybe hanging out with a domestic terrorist organization isn’t the best plan in the world. “This is how journalists end up dead,” Lena tells him in another one of the episode’s darkest moments.