Supergirl Recap: “Solitude”

He won’t mind if I poke around, will he?

This week’s episode takes Kara to Clark’s Fortress of Solitude (so, I guess it’s the Fortress of Slightly-Less-Solitude now?). In “Solitude,” Supergirl faces a new foe called Indigo, played by former Supergirl, Laura Vandervoort. Let’s dive into Season 1, Episode 15 of CBS’ Supergirl!

**THIS IS A RECAP – SPOILERS ARE PART OF THE TERRITORY.**

S1, Episode 15 – The Basics

• Alex arrives at Kara’s apartment with an offering of doughnuts (but no crullers!) to try and convince her to come back to the DEO, but she won’t. Kara still can’t bear to work beside Hank after Astra’s death. Alex feels super-guilty.
• At CatCo, Siobhan starts the day off super-annoying as she emasculates Winn and brags to Kara that she intercepted a special delivery for Cat in the mailroom that she will take credit for getting right to her. But, when she gives it to Cat in their morning staff meeting, Cat reprimands her for not having opened it first … the way Kara had suggested … because “what if it’s anthrax?” James opens it, and removes a flash drive along with a cryptic note. Except it’s not so cryptic. It’s from Diamond Discretions, an Ashley Madison-like cheating website that was supposedly unhackable. Until it just got hacked. Lucy is raring to make the information on the flash drive front-page news, but Cat refuses to become a tabloid, and she tells Siobhan to destroy it. But something in Siobhan’s face says that she’s probably not gonna.
• At the DEO, Alex spars with Hank. After he bests her, she confronts him about Kara. He insists that it’s Kara’s choice if she wants to leave the DEO, and that the Organization did fine before she arrived. He also insists that Alex keep this secret to maintain her relationship with her sister. Alex worries about the toll that losing Kara will have on Hank, who’s already lost so much, but Hank says that “hard experience,” has made him used to it.
• James confronts Kara at CatCo, begging her to allow him to tell Lucy that she’s Supergirl so he doesn’t have to lie anymore, but Kara refuses, saying that everything’s already too complicated and she and her loved ones are too unsafe for her to let him do that. Then Lucy shows up talking about how much she hates liars. Awesome.
• Suddenly, Laura Vandervoort’s (I mean, the hacker’s) face appears on every screen at CatCo. She is not happy that they decided against running the story, and so she brings the “Age of Chaos,” basically by fucking with the traffic signals and all computers. Supergirl saves a family about to be hit by a truck … but she knows that finding the person responsible is going to be much harder.

Photo Credit: Michael Yarish/CBS

• Cat wants the whole team on identifying the hacker. When she asks Siobhan to contact her investment planner, Siobhan for the first time seems flustered. In fact, she’s been off ever since Cat reprimanded her for the envelope and she held the flash drive in her hands. Kara makes the save, and agrees to call the planner for Cat.
• James and Lucy have an awkward conversation in which she tries to work on figuring this out with him, and he says he’s going to run down “some old contacts.” She correctly guesses that he’s going to “someone in a cape,” and wonders why his first instinct is to work things through with Supergirl and not her. (Ugh. Don’t you have some military contacts you could bother?)
• Team Supergirl meets up at Kara’s, where Winn creates an “inversion pathway” to track the hacker’s whereabouts. However, there seems to be no need, as the hacker shows up—first on Winn’s screen, then morphing out of it and appearing in the room in a much more blue form. She says she is a font of omniscient knowledge, and knows that Kara is Supergirl. She flings Kara across the room, then threatens Winn and James, but before Kara can save them, Hank and Alex burst through the door, scaring the hacker off—for now. Kara is pissed that they showed up and escorts them out in a hostile fashion. She can barely look at Hank.
• On a nearby roof, the hacker in blue interrupts a proposal in progress. As the lovebirds run away, Non appears. He and the hacker know each other—apparently really well (speaking of cheaters! Was Non a Diamond Discretions client?). She calls herself Indigo now, though she used to be Brainiac 8, and while Non was prepared to release whatever the hell Myriad is to “help” Earth in the way Astra wanted, Indigo is set on destroying Earth and has already set something in motion. Because “predators can never live with prey.”

• Winn happens upon Siobhan who is beating the crap out of their copier trying to fix a paper jam. He helps her, and she ends up revealing to him that her father was a client on Diamond Discretions and was cheating on her mother. After a brief moment of vulnerability, she goes back to being Super Bitch.
• Alex shows up, but when Kara reminds her that she’s not coming back to the DEO, Alex says she’s there for Winn. They need his computer expertise. Winn waits for Kara’s blessing, which she gives, and he leaves with Alex like the giddy little nerd that he is. When James enters, Kara complains that the DEO has drafted Winn, taking their best hacker, and she now has no way of accessing DEO information on aliens. James suggests an alternative …
• … and they fly to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, where Kara had been invited before, but never been. As Kara’s the only one strong enough to lift the key, she does so and they enter. A Kal-X appears to answer their questions, and tells them about Indigo, a kaluan (made of Kahlua?) and how she was the most dangerous prisoner at Fort Rozz and wanted to destroy Krypton’s population. James asks if Kara wants to run this information by Hank, but she refuses. When James suggests that she not deal with this alone, she says, “I’m not alone. I’m with you.” (Yeah, except that James DOESN’T HAVE HACKING SKILLS OR MILITARY-GRADE WEAPONS!)

• James tells Lucy about Indigo and the fact that she’s an alien being, but when she asks how he found out, he realizes that while he was at the Fortress with Kara, he was missing a planned date with Lucy. He apologizes, but she’s not having it.
• Later, Kara approaches Lucy to try and comfort her, but does the opposite when she tells Lucy about the story James told her about his dad buying him his first camera. He’s never talked to Lucy about his dad. Good job, Kara.
• In a scene intercut between Winn decoding alien code at the DEO and Lucy telling James and Kara information from the Pentagon, we learn that Indigo’s hack was all about getting to one person, a General Mathers, who has access to the nuclear missile silo at Fort Pemberton.
• Indigo “hitches a ride” into the silo with General Mathers on his cell phone before emerging and taking all the soldiers in the silo out. She grabs the keys that access the weapons and is able to stretch her arms enough to get both keys into their respective keyholes and turn them at the same time. She starts the launch sequence for a nuke.
• Supergirl gets to Indigo in the silo and they fight, but Indigo quickly overpowers Supergirl, and calculates the death toll at 7 million as Supergirl looks at the nuke in horror.

• Supergirl breaks free of Indigo and goes after the missile. She tries to knock it off course, but it doesn’t work. She realizes she needs the DEO’s help, so she reluctantly calls Hank. He talks her through getting to the missile’s flight computer and typing in the code that will stop it. After a failed attempt, Supergirl succeeds and the missile falls into the water seconds before hitting National City.
• Meanwhile, Winn is working on a computer virus to take Indigo out, as Supergirl returns to the missile silo to stop her from setting off another nuke. As they fight, Indigo realizes that Supergirl is talking to someone at the DEO, she pinpoints Winn and reaches her hand through his screen to choke him, but his fingers keep typing and eventually he releases the virus, which sends malware into Indigo, weakening her.
• While weakened, she tells Supergirl that she wouldn’t be on Earth in the first place if it weren’t for her. The reason why the symbol on her forehead looked familiar to Kara is that Indigo used Kara’s pod to get her and the rest of Fort Rozz out of the Phantom Zone. Before she could gloat for too long, Indigo EXPLODES in a cascade of red pixels.
• At CatCo, Winn tries to comfort Siobhan again by telling her a little about his family. After giving him snide comments, Siobhan kisses Winn, touched by his kindness toward her. Then, she threatens to kill him if he tells anyone, which she does a lot. Then, she shoves him into an elevator, kissing him again.
• As Cat goes home to Carter after the events of the almost-apocalypse, Kara confesses to James that the only reason she wanted James to keep her secret is that she enjoyed them solving problems just the two of them. But she realized that was selfish, and agrees to let him tell Lucy. He’s thrilled.
• That thrilled sensation is short-lived. When he goes to Lucy to tell her, she breaks up with him, but not because of Supergirl. Because after Kara told her that camera story that James had told her, it was clear to Lucy that James loved Kara and that Kara loved James—even if they can’t say it or admit it to each other.
• Later, Kara returns to the DEO—reluctantly. While she’d rather not work with Hank, she realizes that people could have died because they didn’t work as a team. As a stony-faced Kara agrees to work with Hank, Alex bursts and tells Kara that she was responsible for Astra’s death. In a tearful scene, Alex reveals everything, and at first it looks as though Kara is going to leave in a rage. But this is her sister—she hugs Alex instead. Before Hank can leave, Supergirl takes his hand, silently thanking him and apologizing for how she’s been treating him. It’s a beautiful moment …
• … that is promptly ruined by the last shot of the episode, in which Non has Indigo in bits and pieces, and he’s talking to her about doing things “his way.”

 
The Review Bit, Wherein I Express OPINIONS:

This episode is quite possibly the most tightly-written episode of Supergirl yet. Unlike some other episodes in which it sometimes feels as if two completely separate episodes are going on at the same time, “Solitude” (written by Anna Musky-Goldwyn and James DeWille) didn’t waste a single scene. Each moment was beautifully woven into the other, and everything got its due payoff. Even better was how the main hacking plot of the story affected not only Supergirl/Kara and her goings-on, but it caused the eventual connection between Siobhan and Winn. I figured there was a reason why she was always specifically sniping at him.

This is also the most solidly-acted episode of the season, and I say that knowing that this amazing cast has already done brilliant work. But whereas in other episodes, individuals would shine, here the entire cast was on, and everyone brought their “A” game. One scene of note was the one between Indigo and Non—Laura Vandervoort was amazing in this role, grounding a character that could’ve ended up a caricature in someone else’s hands and giving her depth (and even a little bit of humor!). I’m thrilled that it looks like she’ll be “reassembled” and have the opportunity to return. Oh, and by the way, I loved her costume and make-up.

Another amazing scene? The one toward the end when Alex tells Kara the truth about Astra. Chyler Leigh was magnificent in that scene, and she, Melissa Benoist, and David Harewood work so well as a team. We’ve had many emotional moments on Supergirl thus far, but that moment when Kara is hugging Alex while holding Hank’s hand actually made me cry.

Meanwhile, I loved that the episode also gave Winn and James so much to work with. Winn has never been this badass or awesome before. I’m so glad that the DEO has brought him in to help them—he’s truly in his element there, and I could easily see him quitting CatCo to work there full-time eventually. I also love that we see him being kind to people other than Kara. Before Siobhan kissed him, he had no reason to think of her romantically, especially since she’s walked around being horrible to everyone. And yet, Winn reached out to her just trying to be nice. Genuinely nice, not I Wanna Get in Your Pants nice.

I also love that James finally has to come to terms with his feelings for Kara and that, in the end, Lucy wasn’t threatened by Supergirl. She was threatened by regular ol’ Kara, and not in a catty way. It’s not about “another woman,” it’s about what she and James don’t have with each other.

Lastly, I didn’t miss Maxwell Lord. Not even a little.

This is now one of my favorite episodes of the entire season!

What say you, Supergirl fans? What did you think of this week’s episode? Tell me in the comments below!

Supergirl airs Mondays at 8PM ET/PT on CBS. For more Supergirl fun, check out The House of El—February’s video is up now!

(images via CBS)

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?