Review 627: Supergirl (Season 6)

 

It's never easy being an Arrowverse fan as shown by how wildly inconsistent the seasons have been over the last several years and while Supergirl (Season 6) was an improvement over Season 5 in some areas, there's no reason to believe that the show couldn't have gone out on a higher note.

The season didn't get off to the most promising of starts with the premiere episode: Rebirth which saw the show simultaneously attempt to wrap up left over storylines from a blubbery and dreary Season 5 with Kara (Melissa Benoist) and the Superfriends fighting against Lex Luthor (Jon Cryer) before Kara getting sent to the Phantom Zone. This happened because Melissa Benoist's maternity leave during that time made her unavailible for the first couple months of shooting which, frankly, wasn't a status quo shift that filled me with much joy. From there until Episode 7: Fear Knot, the mid season finale; the main focus was on the rest of the Superfriends working to bring Kara back and unfortunately the majority of the stuff they were doing to achieve that just wasn't that interesting and it felt like the writers were mearly spinning their wheels until Melissa Benoist could return.

Whereas most final seasons end their shows run by celebrating their journey and showing how far its cast of characters have come since the pilot, all the while giving them a grand send-off, for the most part, Season 6 of Supergirl did quite the opposite. Surprisingly, very little of the final season felt like the end of the journey for Kara and the Superfriends. In fact, too often throughout the season, I never felt like I was watching the culmination of anything because it just felt like another season of the show and the stakes just didn’t feel that high. It's tough to not compare Supergirl (Season 6) to Arrow (Season 8) and its cavalade of returning guests stars and its lead up the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event as well as Oliver's inevitable death.

A couple of ideas that I enjoyed included Alex taking up the vigilante mantle of Sentinal and Lena and Kelly taking a more active role in helping the Superfriends but about a quarter of the way through the season, it just felt like the writers had run out of stuff to do with these characters. This is most clearly evident in Kara struggling to balance her duties as Supergirl and as reporter at CatCo or "being behind on everything" as she put it. But when that sub plot was introduced (in episode 16 of 20 no less) I just didn't really buy into it. They've shown how effortlessly Kara can balance her double life in the earlier seasons that escalating that storyline to this degree just feels wildly out of character. Also, I feel that after doing this for roughly six years, she would have a more effective way of dealing with a dilemma like that.

Despite pushing William Dey (Staz Nair) and Andrea Rojas (Julie Gonzalo) to the background for the first half of the season, the show is still struggling to juggle to many characters. With so much time being devoted to the Superfriends getting Kara back from the Phantom Zone, Lena's redemption arc, Alex and Kelly starting a family

Lena (Katie McGrath) became a witch this season, learned more about her birth mother before finally putting the Luthors behind her, a storyline that never really clicked maybe because it was silly and didn’t gel with the world that Supergirl took place in and served as further proof that showrunners just didn’t know what to do with her.

Also, making Kelly the new Guardian was an interesting choice but maybe if I liked the character more than I did, I think I'd be more on board and while there's little reason to believe that this could have happened at an earlier point, it did serve as a good source of development for her in the long run.

Another character who felt oddly underused in the final season was, surprisingly, J'onn J'onzz (David Harewood), a character whose been on the show since the pilot no less. While the earlier seasons showcased him as a valuable ally and father figure to the Superfriends, in Season 6, he's mostly used for the purposes of exposition and emotional support and that's it. He never really had much of an overreaching arc adding to the sense that the writers had just lost interest in him.

And while Peta Sergeant managed to bring a delightfully cheeky charm to the role, Nyxlygsptlnz proved to be a rather underwhelming villain in the long run. Nyxly felt like a crummy villain of the week who just stuck around. The fact that the Big Bad of the season was an Imp from the Fifth Dimention felt like a step backwards into goofiness after Season 5. Nyxly felt like a crumy episodic villain-of-the-week who just an expanded role to the season-long Big Bad.

And while Jon Cryer's Lex Luthor remains as enjoyable as every, I honestly feel that he's overused by this point.  Not helped by the fact that he disappeard after the first three episodes only to return in the last quarter

A highlight of the season was easily Episode 12: Blind Spots which was a crossover with John Diggle (David Ramsey) from Arrow and while his appearance was mostly to act as a mentor to Kelly as the budding new Guardian, his presence made a lot of difference.

Another highlight was the retun of Mr. Mxyzptlk (Thomas Lennon), in Episode 11: Mxy in the Middle; While his appreance was primarily to provide some expositon on Nxly, much like Diggle, his presence made a lot of difference and helped to elevate a somewhat standard episode.

The primary theme of this season seems to be power and the abuse of power and the limits of powers and from without and within. Melissa Benoist herself has stated that this season serves as a self-exploration for Kara, looking in the mirror and contemplating what her power means because it's almost limitless and it makes her so strong on Earth.

This is most clearly evident in Episodes 9 & 10: Dream Weaver and Still I Rise, where Kara and Kelly try to help a young orphan alien boy and his brother get a home whilst fighting a corrupt council woman from turning that home into a tech complex. Unfortunately this theme isn’t given the food for thought that it needs as it ultimately takes a back seat to a rather by-the-numbers totem quest which contain practically the same virtues as the Paragons during the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, only with “Honour” being swapped for “Dream” so as to give Nia something to do. This storyline proved to be dull for a couple of reasons because not only is recycling the virtues from the last major Arrowverse crossover event without even mentioning the paragons lazy and unimaginative but its sister show Legends of Tomorrow already did a totem quest in its third season and executed it far better if you ask me. It also served as an indicator that the show was running on franchise fumes at this point.

Directors Jesse Warn, Glen Winter, Sudz Sutherland, Alexandra La Roche, Alysse Leite-Rogers, Chyler Leigh, David Harewood, Tawnia McKiernan, Eric Dean Seaton, David Ramsey, Armen V. Kevorkian,   the score by Blake Neely & Daniel James Chan is 

The visual effects work suffers more than previous seasons with several elements be it a Goliath feline housecat, the Phantom wraiths or a dream monster looking very wonky, plasticky and poorly composited and not menacing at all. There’s a lack of dynamism to the movements with the Superfriends just duking it out with these creatures without any interesting or dynamic camera moves.

The action scenes range from exciting to repetitive with most of them following the same structure of Kara and the SuperFriends fighting Nxly but she always gets away. Despite claiming the Nxly is their greatest threat and that one false move could literally mean the end of everything nothing about her convinced me she was a credible threat.

Much like Season 5, there was just no real tension, it felt like a pretty easy threat for the Superfriends to handle. Whenever Kara said, heavy handedly, that Lex and Nxly were the greatest threat they ever faced, it was just hard to buy into.

Fittingly, Season 6 concluded on a rather lacklustre note with the finale "Kara".  the action was very much contained to the first half - and felt perfunctory. Watching Kara and the Superfriends fight off Lex Luthor and a whole host of manifistations of previous enemies from the show felt perfuctory and underwhelming. Like the show was just throwing things from its run and then it just stops. Kara outing herself as Supergirl to world Tony Stark style didn't make a whole lot of sense  Kara she was being inauthetic and scared despite and wanted to be herself - despite that clearly not being the case amidst fears about her loved ones being hurt by revealing her identity as seen the shows 100th episode last season. If they were going to go that route, it should've come earlier in the season or else there else should've been far greater consequences

Ultimately, I guess I enjoyed Season 6 slightly more than Season 5 but just barely. It's far from the worst Arrowverse season as a whole, but it's such a shame to see a once vibrant, colourful and optimistic show descend into tedious nonsense, 2/5.

The Anonymous Critic.