In the ‘Supergirl’ recap, Kara fights to vindicate Lena Luthor after she’s vilified by Morgan Edge and Alex shares a heartbreaking goodbye with Maggie…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
If there’s a serious emotional beat coming on ‘Supergirl’ or ‘The Flash’, you can bet that Kevin Smith will be sitting in the director’s chair.
That at least seems to be the case as Smith was in charge of the emotionally riveting episode of ‘The Flash’ season 2 titled ‘The Runaway Dinosaur’ where Barry is traveling through the Speed Force and talking to people from his life including one particularly tear-jerking scene where he has a conversation with his mother.
Well Smith is back on ‘Supergirl’ this week and it’s another heart wrenching episode because this was the hour where we saw our beloved ‘Sanvers’ break apart.
It’s been building all season long after news broke this summer that actress Floriana Lima wouldn’t be returning in a full time status for ‘Supergirl’ season 3 and it turns out that she only came back for a handful of episodes at the start of the season to close out her character’s story arc. Sadly her last appearance came in the episode called “Damage” where Lima’s Maggie spends one last night with the love of her life Alex before they call it quits.
More on that later because it’s getting dusty in here.
Elsewhere this week, Morgan Edge crawls back out of the gutter for a particularly underhanded trick to try and make Lena Luthor look bad but thankfully she’s got two good friends with a lot of faith in her that are willing to fight to find out the truth.
And of course we get yet one more clue about Samantha Arias one day becoming the Worldkiller known as “Reign”.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘Supergirl’ titled ‘Damage’…
That Girl is Poison
Just when it looks like Lena Luthor has gotten everything on track — including L Corp running smoothly with Samantha Arias at the helm while she’s focusing on increasing Cat Co.’s bottom line — disaster strikes at the worst possible moment
Children all over National City are falling ill and it appears to be the result of lead poisoning. Even Samantha’s daughter Ruby witnesses one of her classmates falling over sick from the illness.
Of course the situation is only escalated with Morgan Edge — evil developer who already orchestrated another disaster earlier this season — is seen on television at a Luthor sponsored hospital, saying that it was Lena’s lead bomb that has caused all of these children to get sick.
Remember a season ago when the Daxamites were invading Earth and it didn’t seem like anything could stop them? Lena Luthor was able to use a weapon designed by her brother Lex that would act as a dispersement unit to send a cloud of lead particles into the air. Lead is deadly to Daxamites and it forced the aliens to forgo their efforts to conquer the planet and that’s also why Mon-El had to flee or risk his own life being sacrificed as a result.
Sadly now Edge is saying that the lead cloud that blanketed the city to get rid of the Daxamites might have actually poisoned a ton of children in town. Of course, Lena is devastated and word of this bad news will only damage her companies so she steps down as CEO of both L Corp and Cat Co. while scheduling a press conference later that day to make the official announcements.
At that press conference, Lena attempts to reason with a hostile crowd calling for blood but just before she’s ready to make her announcement, a gun cuts through the crowd and fires several shots at the stage. Kara happened to be in the crowd so she grabbed one of the bullets, unbeknownst to anyone standing nearby. Another bullet went astray — more on that later — and the third caught James Olsen in the arm as he dove to protect Lena from getting hit.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Lena is devastated and convinced that she’s the source of the problem why National City kids are getting sick. Even James says despite his better instincts about Lena, she’s still a Luthor and her brother did make that machine for some kind of death and destruction so he can’t be all that shocked that people are now dying. Matters only take a turn for the worse when Winn tests the device in a controlled setting to prove that the lead particles would be far too weak to actually hurt humans.
Unfortunately, Winn’s tests still give a 10-percent window that it was Lena Luthor’s lead bomb that has dozens of kids getting sick with more and more pouring into the hospital every hour.
All Through the Night
After last week’s revelation that Alex can’t go on with Maggie knowing that she’ll never want to have kids, this episode focuses on the break up as the couple gets ready to say goodbye for the final time.
It’s a rather heartbreaking bunch of scenes as Alex and Maggie separate their things into separate boxes as if they aren’t standing together in the same room as this all unfolds. The tension in the room is finally cut in half when Maggie puts on the Cyndi Lauper track “All Through the Night’ and a dance between them turns to kissing, which then ends in bed.
The passionate moment still doesn’t outweigh the reality that Maggie never wants children and Alex can’t envision a life where she’s not a mother.
When it’s all said and done, Alex knows that this relationship can’t move forward and she ends it with Maggie. Just before leaving, Maggie gives her one last look while telling Alex that she’s going to be an amazing mother.
The producers behind ‘Supergirl’ had said that after losing Lima after last season with her only scheduled to appear in five episodes during season 3 that they needed a storyline that made sense for Maggie to disappear. They’ve said that killing her would have been cheap and Maggie leaving town because she got a new job would have been something that only would have played back in the 1970’s.
Instead, the writers turned towards their personal lives where the desire to have children by one person and the other never wanting kids has played out numerous times in the past. So that’s what they went with in the end — Maggie never wants children and Alex can’t imagine living her life without becoming a mom.
Of course there’s always a chance Maggie comes back but right now it looks like the power couple known as ‘Sanvers’ is no more. And we’re all a little bit sad about that, right?
Edge of Disaster
Lena is convinced more than ever that she’s guilty for making kids in National City sick thanks to her lead bomb that was only meant to save the planet from invading aliens. While she’s ready to give up, Kara and Samantha are determined to prove her innocence.
They begin by trying to track a pattern with the kids who have fallen ill while attempting to put a map together on how these people all connect to each other. A search of bank records shows that several of them ate at a food truck during a festival downtown. That leads Kara and Samantha to investigate and that’s when they happen upon a YMCA type place with a pool inside where kids can play and frolic in the water.
Kara only needs to take one look with her x-ray vision to know that this water is infected by something that looks like lead. She sends a sample to Winn, who confirms that this pool has been treated by a chemical that reacts with the human body in such a way that it appears to be lead poisoning. Kara and Samantha find the chemicals doing the damage and rush to tell Lena that she’s been vindicated.
As happy as Lena is to know she’s innocent, the mention of the chemical company responsible for poisoning that pool is something all too familiar to her. That’s when Lena rushes off to threaten Morgan Edge because she knows that he owns the chemical company in question that’s been hurting the kids in National City. She even goes as far as pointing a gun to his head and reminding him that at her heart, she’s still a Luthor and he needs to beware.
Unfortunately one of Edge’s guards gets the drop on her and the next moment Lena is waking up in a cargo jet filled with drums of that chemical headed for the National City reserve, which means everyone in town will be poisoned and she’ll be the one to blame.
Thankfully, Supergirl saves the day, stops the chemicals from getting into the water and rescues Lena from dying in the plane crash. Afterwards, Supergirl confronts Morgan Edge to let him know that she’s well aware of what he’s done and she’s going to do everything in her power to stop it.
Of course, Morgan has an alibi — he allegedly sold that chemical company two years ago — and he even framed a lone gunman responsible for kidnapping Lena and putting her on that cargo jet bound for the reservoir with a load of those deadly toxins. Morgan also has the ultimate trump card for Supergirl because he knows deep down as much as she wants to stop him, she’s still got a code and she’ll never break that. Morgan can taunt Supergirl because he knows at the heart of it all, she’d never actually hurt him or kill him and that puts her at a disadvantage in this fight because he’ll do whatever it takes to win.
Super-Bits
— After returning home from exonerating Lena, Samantha is putting her daughter down to bed when she notices a hole in her shirt. She removes her jacket and a flattened bullet falls out. That’s when Samantha gets a flashback to the press conference with the woman with a gun opened fire. She got shot but the bullet cut through her shirt but then bounced off her body. Just one more clue that Samantha is much more than just a single mom who happens to be running L Corp.
— Samantha and Kara also compared stories about being raised by adoptive parents. Little do they know that they were both rocketed off the same dying planet on Krypton before landing on Earth.
— At the end of the episode, Kara goes to console Alex after her breakup with Maggie. Kara calls the DEO and takes off a couple of days so she can take Alex on a trip. They are going home together to the house they grew up in with a mother that loved them both so dearly.
‘Supergirl’ returns next Monday night at 8pm ET with a new episode on the CW.
