Supergirl S3 Ep 19 – “Alex:” A Recap!

Over National City, a helicopter circles. On the streets, cops are surrounding a bank where a robbery has turned into a hostage situation. Maggie is on the phone talking to the bank robbers, and it’s easy to tell that she is close to getting them to surrender. Unfortunately, Supergirl swoops in to help, and Maggie isn’t able to do her job, something she’s obviously displeased about. That night, Kara, Mon-El, Alex, and Maggie are having dinner, and while Mon-El is trying to support Kara’s superhero adventures, he says the stupidest phrase you can ever say to a member of law enforcement: “Who even needs cops?” Maggie gets rightfully offended, and goes on a rant about how Supergirl is ruining things for the police and making life harder; because of how roughly Kara handles humans, even if they are criminals, the justice system has developed the Supergirl Defense. It’s a Defense Plea that criminals can use to get off of their sentence, depending on how they came out of the fight with a super-powered alien/vigilante.

Kara, upset with how Maggie was speaking with her, decides to leave, and Alex goes after her to try to smooth things over. The following day, Maggie finds Kara at CatCo, and the two quickly learn that Alex hasn’t gone home, never met up with her sister, and didn’t show up for work that morning. Within minutes of their discussion, Kara gets a call from Alex’s cellphone. A mysterious voice comes over the line and tells the Kryptonian that he wants Peter Thompson freed from prison. He sends her a picture to prove that he’d kidnapped Alex, before revealing that he knows Kara Danvers is Supergirl.

In her prison, Alex comes to, and immediately takes an assessment of her surroundings. She notes the pipes near the bottom of the floor, as well as the cameras. Despite not being able to see the kidnapper, she tells him that she knew he recognized him from the elevator in her apartment complex, and that when she get out of there, she WOULD end his life. (Points to Danvers for threatening to murder someone while being kidnapped.) Meanwhile, Kara updates the team at the DEO about her unnerving phone call. The group goes through various ideas on how to save her, including Mon-El, who unhelpfully suggests that they do exactly as the kidnapper demands. Maggie explains that they can’t do that, and the questions they’re asking are the wrong ones. She goes on to say that the guy has obviously been plotting this, and that he’s a ghost that won’t be found unless he wanted to be. The question they should ask, according to the detective, is “Who is Peter Thompson and what does he mean to this ghost?”

At the prison complex, Maggie, Hank, and Kara meet with Peter. Sentenced to life in prison for two murders, Peter does nothing but make jokes toward the trio, which sets Kara’s temper off. She slams her fist into the table, denting it and demanding answers. J’onn, in that moment, reads Peter’s mind, and when he finds nothing, he decides to let him go. As Maggie and J’onn are trying to calm Kara down, Winn calls and informs them that he located someone – A man named Rick Malvern, who just so happens to be Peter’s son, AND Kara and Alex’s former classmate in Midvale. When they manage to track him down, Kara loses her temper yet again and throws Rick against the wall. Behind Kara are a handful of monitors, allowing her to see her sister’s current state. Rick tells the kryptonian that things are as simple as a trade, Peter Thompson for Alex Danvers, something that frustrates her so much that she almost uses her laser vision on him. Almost.

 

Back at the DEO, J’onn reveals that he’s unable to read Rick’s mind, and Maggie convinces the director that she should get the chance to interrogate him. As she does, Rick tells her that he’s been planning for over a year, watching Alex, and that he knows everything about their lives. Kara, fed up with the games, tries to use her strength to intimidate the maniac, but he simply laughs, commenting on how if she uses that kind of pep to rescue his father from prison, things would be going a lot faster. He tells them about how Peter rescued him from an abusive home, and that when they were kids, while Kara was hiding her superpowers, he was trying to hide his bruises. A while later, Maggie retrieves Peter and delivers him to Rick’s cell, where the two reunite with a hug. It almost fooled him, until Peter tried to convince Rick to tell them where Alex was – At that point, Rick realized it was J’onn utilizing his martian powers, and refused to do anything further.

Meanwhile, Alex has gone into complete and total Badass Danvers mode. She removes her jacket and her belt, takes down the camera that had been watching her, and dismantles it. She pulls her wallet out, breaks her credit card in half, and while using her belt as something to bite onto, she uses the broken credit card to dig her tracker out of her shoulder. Once it’s done, she comments with a quick “Well that sucked,” before connecting the tracker to the camera, which successfully pings the DEO to her location. Winn, thanking the heavens for Alex’s beautiful brains, traces the ping to a warehouse. (It’s always a damn warehouse.)

Kara alerts Maggie that they’ve found Alex, but the detective sees how confident Rick still is. She tries to ward Kara off of going after their girl, but Kara is too stubborn and scared to listen. At the warehouse, what she finds isn’t Alex, but a laptop with Alex on the screen. A timer sits next to the laptop, and while Kara started out with 36, and had roughly 24 left, this attempt at freeing her sister without retrieving Rick’s father dropped the time to four. As the timer falls, the pipes within Alex’s confines begin spraying out vast amounts of water, slowly filling the tank. Kara sets the laptop down in front of Rick and demands her sister back, and while he denies her that, he does allow her to talk to Alex.

Alex had thought Kara was coming for her, she had heard Kara fly in, and when Kara explains why she hadn’t, Rick chimes in to let the DEO Agent know what he wants. Alex tells her baby sister not to give in, and convinces her when she says “Supergirl is bigger than me.” At that point, Maggie has walked in, and Alex requests to speak to her girlfriend alone. Maggie takes the laptop into the hallway, and one of the most heart-wrenching scenes to exist commences. Alex is trying, and failing, to say her goodbyes, all because Maggie refuses to let her talk like it’s the end. She tells the eldest Danvers that this isn’t all for them, that they’ve still got to go through hundreds of firsts, like their first dog. She tries not to break down when she asks if they’re going to get a dog, to which Alex responds yes, but that they’re naming her Gertrude. Maggie demands that Alex promise to hold on, and as Alex opens her mouth to reply, the screen goes black.

She throws the laptop to the ground, and Kara comes out of the interrogation room to investigate. The detective yells at Kara about rushing in, and blames her for making things worse. Kara retorts that she did what she thought was right, but Maggie plainly states that as Alex’s girlfriend, her voice should’ve been heard. Kara quickly responds that she’s Alex’s sister, and Maggie very quickly shuts her down by saying that she was the one who got Alex to open up and be herself, and the two end their argument when the NCPD officer claims to have just as much to lose as Kara.

J’onn comes upon Kara standing on the balcony of the DEO, trying hard to listen for Alex, but she’s unable to. J’onn tries to comfort her, and ends up admitting that he’s just as scared to lose Alex. Maggie goes to Rick once more, but it seems his persuasion to get his father free may have convinced the detective to do what needed to be done. All the while, Alex continues to be a badass when she uses her belt to try to switch off the water pipes. Failing at that, she wraps the belt around her hand and tries to punch her way through the glass. As the water rises, Alex decides to take off her pants, tie them together, fill them with water, and use them as a life vest around her neck. At the Prison complex, Maggie has fully snapped, and decides to bust Peter out of the prison. Kara stops them, and with a speech about being a good father to a son that loved him, convinces Peter to give them any information they can about where Alex might be. He gives them only one location, but when they get there….it seems to have been too late.

They find Alex floating, unconscious in the water, and within a split second, Kara dashes across the room and smashes the glass apart. Alex rolls out with the flood of water, sputtering for air, and, clutching to the two people she loves most in the world, lets them know that she held on. While recuperating at the DEO, She and Maggie FINALLY say I love you, both teary-eyed and obviously in love. But, as per usual, Alex can’t stay down for long, and with Maggie’s help she makes her way to the control center. J’onn tells Alex that he’s going to wipe Rick’s memory, and she tells him that before he does, there’s something she needs to do. Without a word more, she turns and lands a solid punch to Rick’s nose, before commenting to J’onn that he can’t let Rick forget that.  (Maggie’s face is PRICELESS.)

Meanwhile, during the chaos that ensued in the life of Supergirl, Lena Luthor is going through an interesting change of her own.  The CEO is fascinated by the technology and proposal that Reya has given to her, and tells her that it may take quite a push to get this up and running, but that she’s extremely interested to know more. Reya invites her to dinner, where the Daxamite is telling Lena about her fabricated life; apparently she studied at M.I.T. She comments on how proud Lena’s mother must be of her, but Lena rebukes that by telling Reya what kind of person her mother was. The Queen pulls out some bull-crap half truth about her son having fallen for a horrible woman, and right after he barred she and her husband from his life, her husband tragically died. As they toast to the night, and to their new friendship, Reya thanks the gods.

What she doesn’t realize at first is that by thanking the gods, she’d given herself away. Lena slyly tells Reya that she needs her thumbprint so that the Daxamite can come and go as she pleases, and when Reya enters her thumbprint, the device Lena was holding flashes red. In truth, Lena’s device was the alien-detection one, and Reya scoffs about how red is never a good thing on this planet. The young Luthor forces Reya to leave, but that night, she shows up yet again on Lena’s balcony. Reya confesses that when she’d seen what Lillian Luthor had done to aliens, she had “presumed” that Lena would react the same way. Lena snarks that “That’s what people do when they hear I’m a Luthor. They presume.” Eventually, the two find common ground once more, and Reya convinces Lena to help her. What this will mean for our favorite Luthor, I don’t know, but I do know that if The Queen of Daxam is involved, there’s a good chance that Lena might get hurt.

That’s it for this week’s episode of Supergirl, tune into The CW at 8/7 central every Monday to watch more!