Supergirl season 1, episode 6, “Red Faced,” aired tonight. Read our recap and discuss the episode with fellow fans.
Supergirl season 1, episode 6, “Red Faced,” looked at various sources of anger for the characters. Notably, it also addressed the fact that women and black men in particular are discouraged from expressing this normal emotion.
Parental anger
So much of the venom Cat spews clearly stems from her relationship with her mother, who we meet in this episode. Cat’s mother goes out of her way to belittle Cat’s success, but it’s not until she belittles Kara that Cat snaps at her. It’s obvious Cat gets her drive for success from her mother, but she hasn’t inherited her mother’s parenting style, as Cat’s attitude toward her son — and even Kara — is much healthier than her mother’s attitude toward her.
General Sam Lane, meanwhile, is in town for some military work, but he takes time to have dinner with daughter Lucy and her boyfriend James — during which he informs James that he’s not good enough for Lucy. James, he believes, associates with greatness in Superman and Supergirl, but he himself is not great. This is the exact fear that James expressed to Kara earlier this season.
Lucy, for her part, mostly supports her father, for whom she also works — until Supergirl saves her life, that is. She realizes her father is being unreasonable, and she even quits her job to be with James. Lucy goes through a subtle arc from putting Supergirl down (unknowingly while in the same room as Supergirl) to seeing her as an ally and hero. This seems to help her take control of the rest of her life as well, despite it putting her at odds with her father.
Meanwhile, Kara and Alex’s search for the truth behind Jeremiah’s death begins as they convince Winn to hack into the DEO. He finds some heavily redacted files that piece together a narrative: Jeremiah and another agent went to South America to confront a hostile alien, but something went wrong. Both agents disappeared, but a month later the other agent resurfaced, apparently with no memory of the events. That agent was Hank Henshaw. This is obviously an issue for Alex, who has been working for the DEO and trusting Hank implicitly. He’s been a mentor to her, and she feels betrayed.
Romantic jealousy
While James and Lucy show off how well they know one another at game night, Kara’s feelings of jealousy and inadequacy get more tangled. It doesn’t help when Cat calls her out for “throwing herself” at James, saying the entire office knows. Kara eventually tells James that seeing him and Lucy together makes her feel like she’ll never have what they have.
And while that’s true, it’s obvious to everyone but James that she wants the close dynamic James and Lucy share with, well, James. Kara recognizes she’s never going to have a normal life, and one of the only people who can truly understand Kara’s struggles is James, considering his experience with Superman.
However, to the show’s credit, while Kara does feel this jealousy, it’s not what drives her. Her anger and pain are much deeper, and her jealousy at James and Lucy’s relationship is a symptom of the larger issue.
Revenge
After Supergirl defeats Red Tornado, General Lane fires Dr. T.O. Morrow, the scientist who created the android. Morrow, however, goes on a quest for revenge by continually targeting Sam Lane with Red Tornado. Though Alex eventually kills him in order to stop his telepathic connection to Red Tornado, we see that sense of rage in him at being discarded after years of dedication to his work.
Red Tornado becomes sentient and Kara has to dig deep to defeat him. She eventually blows him up, but we hope this won’t be the last we see of Red Tornado. In the DC Comics, Red Tornado and T.O. Morrow are characters with long histories (Morrow first appeared in 1964; Red Tornado in 1968). While Morrow is a super villain, Red Tornado is actually a superhero and member of the Justice League. He’s also trained members of Young Justice. He would be a strong ally for Kara down the line.
Addressing the deeper anger
After an alcohol-induced heart-to-heart with Cat Grant, Kara realizes there is more to the anger she has been feeling with everything going on in her life. She channels her rage and pain at the destruction of Krypton and the loss of her family to defeat Red Tornado.
Though Kara has created a family for herself on Earth with the Danvers, Winn, James, and even Cat, they can’t replace the House of El. All she has left of her mother is a holographic message and an AI programmed to look and sound like her. That pain has likely been simmering under the surface since Astra’s emergence. Though Kara has loved ones, there are some things that she is going to miss out on without her actual family around her, and that’s the underlying issue Kara realizes she has to face.
But the episode does not end on a hopeless note. Kara learns how to channel her anger. Recognizing its source gives her power over the emotion. And, as we see in this episode, there are numerous potential sources of anger for us all.
Watch a promo for the next episode
