This week’s Supergirl introduced a villain named Psi. She targeted people’s fears. Jane the Virgin‘s Yael Grobglas was a fun guest star. She played Psi’s villainous delight in seeing people crumble perfectly.
Psi triggered Kara Danvers’ memories of her capsule ride to Earth. After Psi re-awakened this source of stress, Kara experienced a panic attack without Psi directly targeting her. She also started spiraling with guilty thoughts about sending Mon-El into a capsule. It was nice getting to dig into Kara’s traumatic experience, which often get brushed over because of her always positive demeanor.
However, in the end, Kara heard one pep talk from Alex Danvers and was immediately able to face Psi. She told her simply, “Mind over matter.” That was it. This felt like a huge cop-out both narratively and thematically. It was a cheap way to resolve the episode, but more importantly, it felt like a sudden slap in the face after an episode dedicated to the fact that everyone experiences panic and this is okay. The fact that they dared to call this episode “triggers” and then suddenly threw in a message that you can just put fears aside if your mentally strong enough was truly disappointing.
Meanwhile, their portrayal of Kara’s work life continued to have issues. She constantly wanted to duck away from CatCo to be Supergirl and acted annoyed that Lena Luthor expected her to do her job. What’s so confusing about this is that Supergirl works for an agency. This means that if she wanted to make her salary off of being Supergirl, she could. Any time. So, why is she continually doing a job that she isn’t passionate about? The show seems to want the conflict of Kara having a regular job without actually selling us on the why. If they want us to root for her succeeding as a reporter, they need to show her caring. If they want her to wish that she could just focus on being Supergirl, they need to give us some practical reason that’s not an option.
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