After all the surprises last episode, the newest Supergirl is called “Manhunter,” filling in some backstory for a major supporting character. There are more plot twists this week, and they resist the temptation to do a quick and simple fix. Supergirl is definitely among the shows willing to change the norm for the sake of story development.
I’ve been following the Aquaman title since the reboot. I think it’s the last of the “New 52″ books that I’m still reading. This is the best issue since the first one that set the tone for the book. This has action, humor, and some nicely executed character work, as well as some beautiful artwork.
Gotham’s Wrath of the Villains continues with “Mad Grey World.” It takes a while to come together, but the episode is actually a really brilliantly done plan. It does a great job of showing how dangerous one of Batman’s underrated villains can be, if you once again put aside the fact that most of the Bat-foes seem to be a generation older than the Dark Knight himself. I really applaud the writers on this one.
After a several week long break for no apparent reason, Flash returns with “Trajectory.” Before I get to the review, I’m going to take a moment to point out something that’s really getting annoying to me about a lot of current hero shows and movies. This is a mini-geek rant, so if you’re not interested, feel free to move on. Secret identities seem to be falling out of favor with most heroes, something I really don’t like, but that’s another issue. The ones that still have a secret generally have reasons for it. But over and over, we keep seeing so-called “masked” heroes in public with their masks off. If the hero wants to keep their secret, keep the mask on. If the actor playing them is so desperate to get their face on screen at all times, don’t sign on to play a hero who wears a mask. It’s a stupid trend no matter how you look at it, and it comes up several times this week. Ok, rant over. On to the review.
Supergirl has a really bad few days in “Falling,” and so do a lot of her supporting cast. One of the challenges of the show is that Superman exists, and has been around for a while, but at the same time they are having some classic Superman elements appear for the first time on Supergirl. That makes sense, you don’t want a lot of, “Oh, this happened before with Superman,” but it also makes those of us who know the comics a bit confused from time to time. When she fought Reactron, he’d been around a while and has clashed with Superman before. The Bizarro idea was new to this show, for example.
I admit that Gotham got me with this week’s title. I saw “This Ball of Mud and Meanness” was wondering which version of Clayface would be turning up. It was a decent guess, but I was wrong. Instead, we see them do another major departure from later Batman canon. At this point, the show is absolutely an alternate world from the later Batman stories, and this just nudged it along further in that direction.
The Legends of Tomorrow crew take a trip to the 1950’s in “Night of the Hawk.” There are tensions and unanswered questions among the team, and that’s before they end up in the sleepy little town of Harmony Falls, which is, as Jax says, just like all the towns where old horror movies start. Everything looks normal until things take a turn for the ugly.
The back half of Gotham’s second season appears to have been titled “Wrath of the Villains,” as opposed to the “Rise of the Villains” that was the first half. Just as Galavan was the big bad throughout the first part, I suspect they are positioning Hugo Strange to be the serious behind the scenes menace this time around. I’m amused that they are so carefully avoiding calling him Dr. Strange, no doubt due to the movie coming out later this year. For the record, Hugo showed up in Detective Comics back in 1940, Dr. Stephen Strange not making the scene until 1963, well over twenty years later, in the appropriately, but coincidentally, titled Strange Tales.
For this week’s episode, “Marooned,” they seem to be patterning themselves off their companion show, Arrow. A good bit of the show is flashback, in this case showing us something of the origins of Captain Rip Hunter. We already know what led to his split with the Time Council, now we get to see the roots of that problem.
There are some familiar faces in new roles, as well as a few surprise reveals along the way in “Solitude,” this week’s episode of Supergirl. After the many problems with last week’s episode, this one is a lot better in my opinion. They are doing a good job of building Supergirl’s mythos up separate from Superman’s, while still including him. That’s a fine line to walk but I think they are doing it well.
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