In the Supergirl recap for the fall finale, Kara is forced to deal with her aunt Astra and some family secrets while Cat Grant faces the fallout from an email hack….
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
The first eight episodes of Supergirl wrapped up nicely with a cliffhanger in the latest offering on Monday night titled ‘Hostile Takeover’ as Kara was forced to confront some old demons left behind after her home world was destroyed but didn’t take everyone with it.
Kara’s aunt Astra is still alive and tonight’s back story gave a closer look at how close they were back on Krypton not to mention how and why she was captured and exiled to the Phantom Zone.
While Earth’s very existence is being threatened, Cat Grant is dealing with her own drama after her email was hacked and sensitive information is being leaked out in droves and it appears the mole came from within her own company.
Oh yeah, and someone new figures out Supergirl’s true identity!
With that said let’s recap the latest episode of Supergirl titled ‘Hostile Takeover’….
ALL HANDS ON DECK
This week’s episode picks up seconds after we left off the previous one with Supergirl facing off with her aunt Astra and a pair of Kryptonian guards displaying just as much strength as she does and able to hold her back. To make matters worse, Astra has the kryptonite knife that Hank shanked her with a few weeks back and now she’s using it to threaten her niece. Oh more bad news — Astra has developed a suit that stops kryptonite from affecting her so she can use the weapon ad nauseam without it hurting her at all.
Astra tries recruiting Supergirl for her cause, but her niece has other plans and ends up tossing herself off a roof and barreling underground to get away from her fellow Kryptonians.
Kara hightails it back to the DEO where she reports what’s happening and gets ready to go back into battle mode until both Alex and Hank tell her to take a step back, recharge and make sure she’s actually prepared to face Astra a second time once she’s at full strength. Kara isn’t happy with the idea and she’s also curious why Alex and Hank are so buddy-buddy now when a week ago they were at each other’s throats. Alex explains that she found out Hank didn’t kill her father and he is a good man, but doesn’t tell his actual secret that he’s really the Martian Manhunter in disguise.
Kara opts to go back to work to distract herself but things there don’t put her in much better mood after finding out that her boss Cat Grant had her emailed hacked and all of Cat Co. is in DEFCON 9 currently.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
Everybody at Cat Co. is on high alert following the hack that got into Cat Grant’s emails. Much like the Sony leak from last year, some of Cat’s emails aren’t painting her in a very flattering light but she’s worried there’s something more incriminating in her files so she assigns Kara, James and Winn to dig through everything to find out what might be lurking in there.
To make matters worse, Cat has to meet with the board of directors and they are just about ready to tell her to step down for the sake of the company but one man — Dirk Armstrong — is by her side saying that she should stick this out and if things get too bad then she would stand down on her own accord. As soon as Cat leaves the board room she smells a rat because she knows Dirk is a backstabbing conniver and when Kara uses her super hearing, she finds out that he’s the one behind this entire ordeal.
So Winn whips up a hacking device of his own that James is able to plan on Dirk’s computer so they can find evidence of his hacking. James also calls in Lucy Lane to act as legal consultation on the scheme they’re about to pull because if they don’t get this right, Cat Grant will be forced to resign and then who knows where their jobs will be in the morning.
IT’S A FAMILY AFFAIR
Kara goes back to the DEO for a sparring session and while she’s getting the upper hand, she still can’t seem to pull the trigger on the knockout shot and that concerns her sister. Alex isn’t sure that Kara could finish Astra off if that’s what she need to do to ensure the planet was safe.
The same thing is going on in Astra’s secret lair where her husband Non — yes, the same grunting hulk from the Superman movies yet this time he’s much more normal and British — is accusing her of the same inadequacies when it comes to dealing with her niece. Could she finish off Supergirl if that’s what it took to get the job done?
Astra promises she could do it and so does Kara but a flashback shows just how close these two were before Krypton exploded and it makes their current problems compounded even more.
While Kara is still trying to power up again, Astra appears in the skies over National City calling her niece out for a fight and the folks at the DEO think this has to be some kind of trap but Supergirl doesn’t care — she’s ready to face the challenge.
Her anger and focus lead to Supergirl beating down Astra and returning her to the DEO where she’s placed into holding. Astra won’t speak to anybody accept Kara so she grants her aunt a two minute audience to explain herself.
Astra reveals that she was more or less an eco-terrorist, who blew up buildings and killed people in her effort to stop Krypton from sucking the planet dry of all its natural resources when she realized everything was to go nuclear from the inside out. So as it turns out, Kara’s mother used her daughter to lure Astra in thanks to the bond they shared and when she shoed up to the House of El, she was arrested and sentenced to the Phantom Zone.
Kara is enraged to find out that her mother used her like that not to mention that she had no idea why Astra was sent to prison in the first place. Before she can figure all this out, however, Alex and Hank discover something even more disturbing — the fight with Astra was a plant. She was supposed to lose so she could distract Kara from the real attack that was about to happen as Non and the rest of the criminals they’ve teamed up with from the Phantom Zone attack Lord Industries looking for technology for their war against humanity.
A SECRET REVEALED
Back at Cat Co., Kara and her team make the discovery about Dirk’s hack into Cat’s email and how he plotted this entire ordeal so that she would get booted as CEO and he could takeover.
Cat finally confronts Dirk about his underhanded dealings and when he laughs at her for hacking him the same way he hacked her she has to drop some rather bad news in his lap — since he used a Cat Co. computer to do the hacking and that’s where his emails came from as well, he can’t do anything to her legally because technically that’s all her property.
Dirk is ousted and Cat is still safe and sound.
The big save helps Cat from having to reveal a hidden secret that Kara discovered amidst her many emails. It seems Cat has another son named Alex Foster, who is 24-years old and she’s been sending him money every month without any other real contact. She explains to Kara that it was something that just happened years ago and she always regrets not being a better mother to him and the last thing she wanted was for Alex’s life to get disturbed thanks to her own blunders.
Cat thanks Kara for saving the day once again but she has a bigger question for her assistant after putting a few things together recently. Like for instance, Kara getting sick around the earthquake at the same time Supergirl was nowhere to be found. When Supergirl reappeared, Kara was perfectly fine and her broken arm had also healed. She also noticed several other incidents where Kara and Supergirl weren’t in the same place at the same time and Cat asks her assistant to remove her glasses.
When she does, Cat acknowledges the help and tells Kara ‘thank you Supergirl’ and that’s one more person who has figured out her secret! Kara calls the DEO to break the bad news but there’s an even bigger problem going on — namely Non’s attack on Lord Industries!
FACE OFF
Non’s assault is blocked briefly by the DEO, who arrive on the scene to battle it out with the alien army currently on the attack. Hank and the others do their best to fight back the alien attackers, but they just don’t have the man power to truly face off with them in a war.
Thankfully, Supergirl shows up in the nick of time and she’s ready to throw down.
So she finally comes face to face with Non, who she remembers as Astra’s husband from back on Krypton. The two stare down for a moment and then charge at each other with all the force they can muster behind them. As the two Kryptonians collide, the Supergirl symbol flashes and we will pick this up in 2016!
