​ "Man of Steel" – Supergirl S04E03 Review

Wow, the main characters in Supergirl are just big ole bags of dicks, aren't they?

The problem is the creative team has to twist itself into more knots than Troy James to present "Man of Steel". Which does not feature Superman, the "Man of Steel", But refers to either Agent Liberty's father, Pete Lockwood, who owns a steel factory. Or Agent Liberty himself, Ben Lockwood (Sam Witwer), who wears body armor and whose father encourages him to stand up and be a man.

So the episode has to show us how Agent Liberty became Ben Lockwood. But it can't make him out to be a totally no-goodnik. Nobody on a CW show wants to see the modern-day equivalent of a super-villainous Hitler be Hitler-ish in the past. Okay, maybe folks want to see it on Preacher, but that's safely tucked away on AMC in the summer.

We also can't have a totally irredeemable bad guy with an unacceptable past. For one thing, that'd be too obvious. For another, Ben has a wife and child who are doing who-knows-what now that he's Agent Liberty. And for another, I get the impression they're setting up the whole thing for a reverse heel-turn. Agent Liberty will turn against his followers for some reason (possibly Supergirl earning his respect by saving his family, if we're consulting the TV Tropeapedia), and may or may not be tragically killed by Mercy.

But on with the recap. The framing piece is the Graves and Traitor Agent Jenson disseminating the kryptonite into the atmosphere using a stolen Daxamite lead-dispersal unit. This brings Supergirl down, and there's a few pulse-pounding moments of J'onn rescuing her from a fatal fall. They bring Supergirl to the DEO and try to revive her with yellow sun radiation.

This leads to flashbacks and a kind of "lower decks" series of flashback as we see the impact the events of Supergirl have had on the "little people". Specifically, Ben and his family. His father Pete (Xander Berkeley) owns a steel factory some vague but easily driveable distance from National City. They're building an alien Nth metal factory next door, and Pete's factory loses a Luther Corp contract to the new rival factory. This causes a riot when Pete's workers storm the factory. Ben, who is a voice of reason and intellect, tries to stop them and gets shot by a panicked alien and his arm spikes.

Hank and a be-wigged Alex (see below) show up. They and their DEO agents are posing as FBI agents, and Pete and Ben wonder why the FBI are helping the aliens. I wonder what the DEO's mandate is. Alex suspects Ben was rioting against the aliens, assumes the worst, and the DEO go off to help Supergirl.

Hank also notes the alien is an American. I'm still trying to work out the legal ramifications here. So there is a legal process for aliens to become Americans? But then there's the Alien Amnesty Act, which presumably gives amnesty to... illegal aliens. So the creatives acknowledge there are "legal aliens" and "illegal aliens" ("aliens" being literal in this case). But often seems to conflate the two. The DEO only seems concerned about illegal aliens that beat up on Supergirl and rob the occasional bank. Fair enough, since most of those aliens have "super powers" that requires special means to take down. But that's kind of Pete and Ben's point: aliens pose a threat because they have powers that make them more dangerous (and economically competitive) than humans. So we have the DEO which was seemingly formed to deal with alien powers, but they're nay-saying "normal" humans that object to alien powers. Like I said, more knots than Troy James.

Ben approaches Lena and asks her to consider the cost of taking away Pete's contract. She comes across as unsympathetic with her "Well, your father should keep up with the times even if it costs millions of dollars that he doesn't have and I just took away any chance of him having" spiel.

Since Ben is a college professor, we then get his lecture where he talks about nativists and how people pay the price for progress. Then Ben goes home and Pete tells him he had to shut down the factory. The Daxamites invade, and not only do they open fire on Ben's town but then J'onn and a Daxamite crash through the Lockwood house and set it on fire. J'onn defeats his opponent, tells the Lockwoods they're safe, and flies off. And I don't expect him to stick around and rebuild the house on the spot. But sheesh, J'onn acts so unconcerned and doesn't come back later to help (nor does the government) that it makes you feel for the Lockwoods.

Ben then visits James at CatCo and wants to know why James isn't doing more stories on the price humans are paying for alien immigration. James is all "Well, we won a Pulitzer for our coverage", like 90% of the population care about who won a Pulitzer. The editor then gives a spiel about how he'll think about it and tells Ben Lena now owns CatCo so he'll talk to her.

Ben's lectures in class have become more strident and one alien student says he's xenophobic. Several students walk out, and the Dean and the tenure board eventually put Ben on permanent leave without pay because of his diatribes. Ben confronts the student at Big Al's alien bar, where she's talking to Nia. Kara is also there, and "accidentally" bumps Ben in the shoulder, keeping him from attacking the student who he believes ratted him out.

Cut to Ben handing out anti-alien flyers and picking fights with aliens who bump into him. Then we get more alien battles as Supergirl and Alura show up. Ben goes home and finds Pete trapped in his burning factory. Pete gives a "going down with the ship" speech and tells Ben to "be a man", and Ben is forced to go as his father dies.

At the funeral, Lena arrives and offers to start a fund in Pete's name. Ben isn't interested, and Lena warns him if he blames other people for his problems then he'll go down the same path as her brother Lex. Umm, except Ben's problems were caused by other people, other than the xenophobic classroom lectures. Which he gave after the government and the main stars dicked him over. Like Alex assuming he was guilty of alien-baiting when he wasn't. I guess they've established Lena's brother Lex is xenophobic. Her mother Lillian definitely is. But it's still an odd little speech, since Ben is at least partially in the right here. Or at least he started out that way. It makes you kind of wonder if Lena is right about Lex: "the winner writes the history book" and all that.

Ben gets drunk with some of the out-of-work workers, and convinces them to set the alien factory on fire. They accidentally burn the quill-shooting alien from earlier, and Ben finishes him off with a pipe to the head.

After the Genesis terraforming event, Ben recruits the Dean that fired him after she and her wife lost their home. Then Mercy and Otis recruit Ben and give him his Agent Liberty body armor. We've now caught up to the present. Lena provides a protective suit that prevents Supergirl from being further infected by the kryptonite in the atmosphere. Which I assume will be cleaned up in time for the crossover event, which will have Superman. He's currently on Argo City, but he has to return to Earth sometime, right?

Also, they make a big to-do about how Supergirl is already irradiated. How is the suit going to deal with that? It prevents further exposure, but Supergirl was already dying. The way they talk, the problem isn't mobility: it's that she's dying from the kryptonite in her system.

Mercy and Otis are ready to kill Jenson, but Ben stops them and says they don't kill their own. And confirms Jenson can get them into the DEO to steal some more stuff.

That wraps up the episode. Like I said, the whole thing is a bit of a mixed message. The creative team have made Agent Liberty the big bad. But they also want to show that he's not entirely bad for whatever reasons. He has a wife and child, wherever they are while he hands out flyers and rallies bigots all day. As I noted, there's a certain amount of "This is what happened to the little people while our main characters were fighting evil" collateral damage. And that makes the "heroes" out to be jerks and Ben to be a lot more sympathetic.

It also calls into question the Marsdin presidency, which I'm beginning to wonder if it was all that good. For one thing, all we hear about it concerns the Alien Amnesty Act. You wonder if Marsdin did anything else while she was in office. For another, her administration doesn't seem to have been very concerned about disaster relief. Ben says at one point insurance companies won't cover disaster caused by alien invasion. Setting aside that that factoid is a huge game changer, you'd think the government would step in. They're not afraid of regulating insurance companies, and even if the real life U.S. government is, Marsdin didn't seem to worry about things like what the government is "supposed" to do.

Like I've noted before, it seems like sometimes they're trying to comment on the Trump presidency. But Marsdin isn't Trump. She isn't even a Republican, apparently. We're also told that alien immigration is legal. While courtroom drama probably isn't that dramatic for a CW superhero show (Arrow's attempts at it once every year or so notwithstanding), and it doesn't give Supergirl anyone to punch, there are several major "Oh, by the way, here's what happened legally" things that it seems like we should get a closer look at.

The show takes a somewhat Biblical/Book of Job approach to Ben's travails. Or maybe it's the Joker's "one bad day" philosophy. Or some of both. Ben just doesn't have one bad day. God shats upon him like Ben is his personal latrine. Again, I'm not sure if this is to build sympathy for Ben ("Of course he turned bad: look at what happened to his life!") and it paves the way for a reverse heel-turn later against the real bad guys, Mercy and Otis. The ending, where they want to kill a seemingly loyal follower but Ben spares his life, kinda hints at this.

Overall, "Man of Steel" was a nice change of focus episode for the show. It gives us an alternate view of the last three seasons, even though it doesn't seem to think through the ramifications and uses it more as an origin story. I think we got only about ten minutes tops of the whole Supergirl/DEO situation. The rest was spent on fleshing out Agent Liberty. But I wonder if they went too far in making him sympathetic, and the DEO and Lena out to be a bunch of jerks. Granted, they may have done it to set the stage for a reverse heel-turn later in the season. But that's a bit too heavy-handed. But Berlanti & Co. have never flinched from heavy-handedness.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?