‘Supergirl’ 2.22 Recap: “This Is My Home”

After what has seemed like a long and often unfocused season, ‘Supergirl’ finally closes out Season 2 on a high note, with an episode that wraps up the silly Queen Rhea/alien invasion storyline and sets the stage for what we’ll see in Season 3. (Unlike last year at this time, fans don’t need to worry about whether the show is coming back. It was renewed quite some time ago.)

The finale picks up right where last week’s episode ended, with Supergirl squaring off against her cousin, Superman. It doesn’t take long for Rhea to reveal how she got the Man of Steel on her side. He’s suffering from the effects of silver Kryptonite and actually believes he’s fighting General Zod instead of Supergirl. The two heroes take their battle down to the streets of National City. Supergirl (somewhat surprisingly) eventually proves to be stronger than her cousin and knocks him out.

The two wake up in the Fortress of Solitude with Alex watching over them. The silver Kryptonite has finally worn off, and Superman checks the Kryptonian data banks looking for ideas on how to defeat Rhea. He soon discovers something called “Dakam Ore,” a tradition from Daxam that allows an opponent to challenge someone else to one-on-one combat. Supergirl challenges Rhea, and Rhea accepts. If Supergirl wins, Rhea and all her soldiers will have to leave the Earth. But if Supergirl loses, it’s an eternity of enslavement for the planet.

Meanwhile, Lillian Luthor brings her daughter a device (seen in a few earlier episodes) that Lex had developed to destroy Superman. The small silver cube was originally supposed to disperse Kryptonite into Earth’s atmosphere, but Lillian believes it can be adapted emit lead – therefore poisoning all the Daxamites on the planet and either killing them or forcing them to retreat. When Supergirl learns of the weapon, she agrees to keep it as a backup plan against Rhea, even though she knows using the weapon will force Mon-El to leave as well.

J’onn, who has been in a coma since Rhea used an alien device on him, receives a visit from M’gann, who tells him to wake up because a battle is coming. J’onn does, but M’gann is no longer there. She was just a vision. Nevertheless, he’s now fully recovered and ready to join the others in the fight against the invasion.

Supergirl and Rhea square off on a city rooftop, but it becomes clear very quickly that Rhea isn’t going to play by the rules. Daxamite spaceships attack National City during their fight. To make matters worse, it turns out that Rhea’s blood is laced with Kryptonite. While Supergirl takes on Rhea, Mon-El, Superman and the Martian Manhunter deal with the troops on the ground. Not long after they begin, M’gann and a group of White Martians show up to help, with M’gann explaining to J’onn that the other Martians are on their side.

Even though Supergirl gets the upper hand against Rhea, she comes to the realization that the only way she’s going to get rid of Rhea and the Daxamites for good is to use the Luthor device. She activates it using a remote control that Lena gave her. Almost immediately, the Daxam troops beam up to their spaceships, which start to retreat into space. On the ground, Rhea chokes to death on the lead, eventually turning into what appears to be ash and disintegrating. Thanks to his longer time on Earth, the effects of the poisoning work slower on Mon-El, giving him time to get to the pod he originally arrived in and say his goodbyes to Supergirl/Kara. Before he leaves, Supergirl gives him a necklace that her Kryptonian mother gave to her when she was a child and tells Mon-El that she loves him.

The end of the episode (in case you’re wondering, no, Jimmy Olsen does not appear in the finale) has Supergirl having a few heart-to-heart conversations separately with Superman and then Alex. After Supergirl flies off, Alex asks Maggie to marry her. Kara then goes to CatCo for even more words of encouragement from Cat Grant. When she leaves, Cat says to herself, “Go get ’em, Supergirl”, proving once and for all that she knows Kara’s secret identity. In outer space, Mon-El’s pod gets sucked into what looks like a wormhole.

We then flash back 35 years into the past to the destruction of Krypton. After the El family launches Kal-El and Kara into space, a group of shrouded figures in a rival house send an unseen infant in another pod toward Earth. Before the launch, one of the figures feeds it blood off her fingertip. I have no idea who this could be. (Is this some alternate version of Krypton?) Maybe a few of our readers have an idea.

Episode Verdict

This is largely an action-focused finale, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Tyler Hoechlin is pretty good playing Superman and he’d probably be great in his own series, should DC ever want to take that route. I’m so happy the Rhea storyline is over and there is (seemingly) zero chance she’ll return.

As for Season 2 as a whole? I enjoyed parts of it, but much less than I did Season 1. For me, there were just too many other superheroes in the mix this year and the show often forgot to focus on Kara/Supergirl herself. About the only thing that did work well this season is the storyline a lot of fans seemed most worried about: the same-sex relationship between Alex and Maggie. That’s one of the few things ‘Supergirl’ has gotten right, and I look forward to seeing if the writers will actually go through with marrying the two characters in Season 3.

What did you think of the finale and of the season, and what are your theories about that cliffhanger?

4 comments

  1. Guy

    James appeared briefly at CatCo during the city-wide attack. Would’ve been better if he’d been Guardian on the street during the attack heroing montage, but they didn’t ask me. Regarding the cliffhanger, Doomsday is an obvious possibility, but surely they won’t retread ground the current crop of films (poorly) covered just last year. There are a couple of relatively recent comic book Kryptonian baddies with direct Supergirl ties that might be sent in an escape pod on this increasingly pod-centric show. H’el is the one I’d prefer. He had a very interesting, yet spoilery twist backstory in the books, but, as it often goes, the writing grew a bit weak towards the end of the crossover event he first appeared in. The show could take a great setup and improve the execution.

    As for the episode, I give zero craps about Mon-El as a character, his romance with Kara or his vengeful, underwritten mother, so the heavy Daxamite focus in this final third of the season has been annoying to me. I’d have preferred more Cadmus and Jeremiah Danvers. The fact that the majority of the finale dealt with Mon-El issues meant this ended up being a bit of a shoulder shrug for me. I rooted for Kara in action, laughed at Winn, smiled wide for Alex and Maggie, hoped for more Superman, wondered where James was hiding 99.5% of the episode and got genuinely surprised by J’onn getting White Martian backup. All that was fun, but made up maybe ten or fifteen minutes of the episode. The rest was stuff I was only interested in so far as I was hoping it would wrap up and not linger until next year.

    As much as I’m hoping Mon-El is gone from the show for a while (enjoy the year 3000 on the other side of that portal, buddy), that exit was needlessly stupid. They can’t put him in a hazmat suit or a Bubble Boy room at the DEO or on a ship/space station in orbit or use their fancy Cisco-gifted portal machine to stash him on Earth-1 with Team Arrow or Team Flash until they can work on a way to clean the atmosphere? Just really, really poor writing for an attempt at heartfelt drama and character pain.

    • Also, the writers of this show are apparently unfamiliar with the fact that lead poisoning is very harmful to humans. Dispersing it all through the atmosphere – not a great idea. The hand-waive that it will be in a very small concentration is laughable when you see the box explode in a giant plume of lead smoke inside the room where three major characters are standing.

      Amazing that the lead is able to permeate the entire Earth’s atmosphere in all of 1.2 seconds, too.

      • Guy

        These CW superhero shows have worn me down to some degree. For the majority of my TV life I’ve refused to do so for genre shows, but I grade Arrowverse science logic on a curve because story logic and character logic is so often in need of the scrutiny as well. I grant them their super low concentrations of lead explanation because they remembered to hand-wave something at all. I can’t mess with fishsticks when there’s a whole catfish to fry.

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