Welcome to The Pop Break’s weekly round up of all the DCTV that the CW could squeeze into it’s schedule. With the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event less than a month away, the schedules for our Arrowverse shows will be a bit spotty over the next few weeks. This week, The Flash and Arrow are both on hiatus, so, in addition to our regular Supergirl and Batwoman coverage, we are making a stop in Freeland to check in on Black Lightning, a DCTV CW series that has not previously connected to the other Arrowverse shows but whose lead character will factor into next month’s crossover.
Supergirl Season 5 Episode 6: “Confidence Woman”
With Supergirl and some of her superfriends needing some time off to film next month’s crossover, Supergirl’s usual sprawling storytelling tapestry is hemmed in this week to mostly focus on the two morally grey women who appear to be at the center of this year’s season long arc, Andrea and Lena. Told mostly through flashbacks, we learn the story of these women’s friendship and how it all went wrong.
The frame of this episode revolves around Andrea, who turns out to be the super-powered shadow assassin from a few episodes ago, trying to free her former boyfriend (the man who used to be best friends with William but now has robot arms and tried to start an ecological disaster last week) from both DEO captivity and Leviathan control. After a failed attempt, she comes to Lena for help, who, after some informative flashbacks about their fraught former friendship, decides to help her.
It turns out Lena and Andrea were best of friends through their teens and twenties. Andrea even accompanied Lena on an Indiana Jones-esque quest for an ancient medallion. This medallion had been an obsession of Lena’s deceased mother and coincidentally could have also held the key to stopping Lex from trying to kill Superman a few years back. However, Andrea found it before Lena and was immediately blackmailed by a Leviathan agent to take the artifact and its ancient shadow powers for herself. Andrea complied in order to save her father’s life and reputation, and years later Lena found out the truth, ending their friendship.
This whole backstory for Lena & Andrea is a bit far fetched and quite rushed. However, the actresses are both strong, doing their best to sell this extremely silver age material. The episode’s structure is similar to last year’s “Man of Steel” wherein Season 4 villain Ben Lockwood’s origin story is told, incorporating his perspective on several key moments from Supergirl’s past. This time, however, the execution is a bit forced and the character motivations which the flashbacks are meant to shade in are quite rote. By episode’s end, we get to know facts about Lena and Andrea’s lives, but we don’t really get to know them as characters much beyond what we already knew last week. As much as I am looking forward to the crossover, it will be nice to have these shows unburdened by their production demands.
At least by the time all is said and done, our season long plot has progressed, with Lena succeeding in helping Andrea save her boyfriend from the DEO in exchange for the now powerless medallion (which has Leviathan written on it…) only for him to be assassinated by Leviathan in Andrea’s arms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4NY8yoExbs
Batwoman Season 1 Episode 6: “I’ll Be Judge, I’ll Be Jury”
This week’s Batwoman forgoes the more intimate and focused storytelling of last week in order to tell a somewhat muddled story about family and justice, two themes that are prominently emerging in the early goings of this series.
The episode kicks off with a grizzly murder of a Gotham City prosecutor by a hooded vigilante who appears to be some sort of executioner. It should come as no surprise that we eventually learn this hooded figure is an actual executioner for the city, upset with a cabal of corrupt city officials in the justice system.
Despite trying to make this personal for Luke, whose father was murdered in a mugging and whose killer was brought to justice by the executioner’s first victim, this whole plot feels a bit undercooked. Kate still doesn’t feel like much of a superhero, relying on Luke for almost everything and being undone by unconvincing fight choreography throughout. Meanwhile, the mystery doesn’t get enough room to breathe and the antagonist of the week is so obviously going too far that he’s not a compelling presence. A better version of this may have allowed the executioner to tempt Kate with his more radical ideology, but he’s really only here to bluntly clarify for the audience exactly what kind of masked vigilante Kate is.
Family is a main driver of events and motivations this week. Luke is motivated by his father’s death. Kate is motivated to prove to her dad that Batwoman, like Batman before her, is not his enemy. Kate’s father is motivated by displaced shame and regret for letting down Beth all those years ago. And Beth, now Alice, spends the episode balancing an increased desire to find a way to fit Kate into her life and her adoptive brother Mouse’s very jealous and possessive antics.
That last corner of the show demonstrates a notable softening of the character of Alice, seeming to shift the true “big bad” status to Mouse, whose shape shifting abilities allows him to steal a gun that could penetrate the batsuit in a similarly rushed subplot. As much as I may have had issues with Rachel Skarsten’s performance, Alice was still the best thing this series had going for it. This decision to make Mouse the truly evil presence pulling the strings feels like one to ensure Alice can stick around for multiple seasons, possibly even being redeemed over time like many Arrowverse bad guys with which the creative teams have fallen in love (Malcolm Merlyn & Captain Cold being two notable examples). That impulse, while understandable, feels like a mistake.
What isn’t a mistake is the choice to allow Kate’s dad to come to peace with Batwoman after she saved his life from the executioner’s final assassination attempt, which occurred even after The Crows killed him. Batwoman was obviously going to end up working with The Crows in some capacity, and I’m happy to see the whole “Kate’s dad hates Batwoman whose actually Kate” plot abbreviated. It even results in a touching moment between Kate and her dad, sans masks, in the episode’s closing moments, which is enough to keep Sophie from telling him her suspicions that Batwoman and Kate are one in the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3twAwvsKlDY
Black Lightning Season 3 Episode 5:
“The Book of Occupation: Chapter 5: Requiem for Tavon”
It would be tough to catch up on two plus seasons of the series, so the most important thing to know to appreciate this week’s episode, which marks a transition from the series’s “Book of Occupation” into next week’s “Book of Resistance,” is that the Pierce family spent the beginning of this season forced into an uneasy alliance with a shadowy governmental agency (the ASA). After the ASA learned that the family was masquerading as costumed vigilantes in their spare time and had secret meta abilities, it used it as leverage to make the Pierces help them contain a meta-human outbreak. This marked rise in metas, which was created by the spread of “green light” (a highly addictive recreational drug the ASA developed and then spread on the streets of Freeland to create super soldiers), is a pressing concern now that the remote country of Markovia has attacked Freeland, seeking to kidnap Freeland’s metas to create an unstoppable super-powered army.
This Markovian threat has given the ASA license to create a full military occupation of a Freeland, complete with “temporary” interment camps for Freeland’s metas or even those suspected of having dormant meta genes. Black Lightning is a show that never shies away from commenting on current political issues through their themes, plots, and imagery and anyone who doesn’t see the connection between government activity in the fictional city of Freeland and government activity at our very real border with Mexico simply isn’t paying attention.
However, this week, Jefferson Pierce (aka Black Lightning as played by Cress Williams, Living Single) seems to finally be at his breaking point. The typical star of the show, Jefferson takes a backseat for most of this episode. His deal with the ASA means he won’t suit up as Black Lightning, so when a student’s parents come to him for help after the student, Tavon, has gone missing, Jefferson has to rely on his eldest daughter Anissa (Nafessa Williams, Black and Blue) for help. Anissa, using the alter ego of Blackbird, instead of her typical Thunder (which the ASA knows about), has been helping lead meta refugees to freedom from ASA detention via an Underground Railroad of sorts. Last week, she helped lead Tavon to freedom, but his family was kept in the dark and they have proof he’s not a meta, so Jefferson asks “Blackbird” to bring him back from the secret refugee camp outside of town.
Anissa objects to the plan, believing it to be too dangerous, but Jefferson pressures her in only the way an overly controlling parent can, and Anissa gives in to calamitous results. One of the true strengths of this series is the way the writers rely on real, relatable family dynamics to add richer emotional stakes to classic superhero antics. This difficulty of Anissa’s to be her own woman outside of her father’s shadow and overbearing parenting style is a backbone of the series, and it’s continued to be mined for rich drama this week. When Khalil 3.0 (Jordan Calloway, Countdown), his identity obscured from Anissa, pops up to tangle with Anissa, he murders Tavon in the process, and Anissa is quick to place the blame squarely on her dad’s shoulders for not trusting her judgment. It’s a moment indicative of the larger strengths of this series, which allows our hero’s to be emotional and impulsive and wrong and to have messy, complicated relationships with their family despite a deep reservoir of love being present under the surface.
Elsewhere, most of the events of the rest of this episode seem to be set up for the new arc that’s about to unfold. Lynn (Christine Adams, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D), the Pierce family matriarch who lacks superpowers but is a brilliant scientist who knows her way around a shot gun, is struggling with her greenlight addiction, culminating in a scene where she experiments on Tobias (Marvin “Krondon” Jones III, Spider-Man: Into the Spidervse), Black Lightning’s archnemesis whose currently in ASA custody. He reveals he’s figured out her family connection to Black Lightning, Thunder, and the new Lightning (the alter ego of the Pierce’s teen daughter Jennifer). Lynn, possibly due to the addled state of her drug addicted mind, calls on the ASA to kill Tobias once her experiments have concluded. Meanwhile, Jennifer (China Anne McClain, Descendants 2) continues to be seduced to the dark side by ASA Agent Odell (Bill Duke, Predator) who gives her an opportunity for revenge against the ASA soldiers who beat down her father after he got between them and protesting students at his high school.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnrPcD4WP0A
