written by Cara Russell
SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT
As of last week, Lena has gone off-camera in search of her birth mother, and Brainy is chauffeuring Zor-El to Argo City. Kelly takes their place, returning from orientation at her new post-Obsidian job as a social worker. We have several major plots going on this week, and fortunately most of them integrate. It doesn’t feel like an information overload, and indeed, they are all entertaining. I’m pretty suspicious and hope this is the new norm and not an exception.
Kelly’s social work with alien children in foster care points a finger at the abuses of a prison work program involving the elder brother of a child she worked with. Supergirl and J’onn investigate some thefts by superpowered beings who are “unlikely” to work together (although why they think that when they have five different species on their own team, I don’t know). It doesn’t take long to link the two, and Kara investigates using her reporting credentials, along with her connection from an earlier feature on the launch of the prison’s work release program.
Kara and William discover that Intergang had paid off the prison to use the prisoners to commit high-level thefts. Fighting this turns into a boon for CatCo as Kara helps William get the scoop, along with an exclusive interview with Supergirl regarding the corruption in the prison system, which helps keep Andrea off their backs about focusing on the Super Friends.
Kelly discovers that the woman in charge of the alien foster home is abusing the kids’ power-suppression cuffs, and causing them pain. She forwards some footage to authorities and gets the woman replaced, which also gives Kelly the realization that she wants to officially become Guardian. Alex is one step ahead of her, and had already contacted James to get his mask and blessing for Kelly to pick up the shield.
Meanwhile, Nia is still dreaming about her mom. She’s confronted by Nyxly (previously seen sabotaging Supergirl’s efforts to escape the Phantom Zone), who offers to bring Nia’s mom back to life for one day in exchange for help escaping the dream realm. This has shades of Kara doing questionable things for Astra (a stand-in for Alura, before we learned Argo still existed). Unfortunately, we know how Nyxly operates, so when Nia agrees it’s a pretty good indicator things will go sideways for our heroes. Possibly in song form. We’ll soon find out!
Supergirl airs Tuesday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on the CW. Cara can be found on Twitter @virtualcara.