Supergirl season 1, episode 4, “How Does She Do It?” aired tonight. Read our recap and discuss the episode with fellow fans.
The modern woman’s dilemma
In this episode, Kara faced an issue that many modern women face: How do we balance it all? Many women struggle to balance working a full-time job, being a wife/partner, being a mother, and having a personal life. More often than not, something has to give — and it’s usually the personal aspects.
In that same vein, Kara finds herself trying to balance more than she can handle. Not only is there a big media event that the company is covering in Cat’s absence — leaving Kara with a lot of professional responsibility — but a disgruntled ex-employee of Maxwell Lord is planting bombs around National City. Add on to that is Kara agreeing to look after Carter Grant, a gifted kid with a crush on Supergirl, and the arrival of Lucy Lane, who wants to mend fences with James, and Kara’s plate is completely full.
A couple episodes ago, Cat Grant told Kara that Supergirl is taking on too much at once, and we saw another case of that in this episode. Cat reiterated that advice in this episode, saying women can have everything, but not all at once. We have to learn to keep two balls in the air before we can juggle three and four balls. (And this is not only true of women or mothers!)
For a show that is serving as an entry point to modern feminism for a large chunk of its audience, having Kara face issues that modern women face makes a lot of sense. It may not always be the most subtle, but we aren’t necessarily expecting subtle from what is essentially a Feminism 101 course for an audience that perhaps isn’t particularly plugged into the issue.
However, Kara is more than a feminist hero; she is a hero for millennials — an age group that is coming into its own and facing the same struggle of learning to balance everything. While most of us aren’t saving cities from bombings, we are learning who we are and what we want.
And though CBS’s audience isn’t predominantly millennial-aged, Kara serves as an entry point for older generations to understand what their younger counterparts are going through in a modern age. With all that in mind, “How Does She Do It?” was a smart episode that made a lot of sense to have early on in the series’ freshman season.
Maxwell Lord
Maxwell Lord is an enigma. In the comics, he straddles the line between hero and villain, and he seems to be following a similar path in the television show. We learn in this episode that he offered to pay the medical bills of an ex-employee’s sick daughter if said ex-employee would plant bombs around the city. Lord targeted his own company with his own technology, which seemed to give him an alibi.
However, Kara realized Lord was testing her. He wanted to know what the limits of her abilities are and what makes her tick. And he wanted any clue about her civilian identity. But to what end? Will he be tied up in the Astra storyline, as she has been quiet in the last two episodes, or will he be playing a longer game? Will he be more interested in helping or harming Kara?
Love triangle-ish
The other development in this episode was the relationship between James and Lucy. We learn that while James thought Lucy broke up with him because she prioritized her career (she is a military lawyer) over him, she admits to Kara that she broke things off because James prioritized Superman over her, and she was tired of coming in second.
When Lucy heads to the airport to fly back to Metropolis, James hears there is a bomb at the airport and immediately rushes to get her. This causes them both to realize that they still mean a lot to each other, and they seem to be on the path to rekindling their romance.
The interesting thing that this episode did — and that the series as a whole is doing — is invert tropes. There was an eye-roll inducing discussion of the “friend zone,” but rather than the expected discussion of a male being in the friend zone with a female friend, this was about Kara and her feelings for James. In this series, James is playing the traditionally female role of sidekick who gets into trouble and is oblivious to the hero’s romantic feelings. Those tropes get tired, so seeing them flipped is refreshing.
Also refreshing is Lucy’s statement that she likes Kara. There is no animosity between these women — Kara is more hurt by the situation than Lucy as a person — and that is also not something we see enough of.
Also worth noting
- Cat Grant and her mother do not have a close relationship.
- Carter gets himself trapped on the train being bombed because he was hoping to meet Supergirl. Tricky kid.
- Hank Henshaw does some serious Cyborg Superman-ing in this episode. Kara sees him with glowing red eyes at one point, though she is delirious and likely assumes she was hallucinating, and he uses his inhuman strength to defuse the bomb at the airport, though he covers himself by saying the bomb was a dud.
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