Supergirl EP Andrew Kreisberg discusses the developments in season 1, episode 2, “Stronger Together.”

The General

In Supergirl season 1, episode 2, “Stronger Together,” Kara came face-to-face with The General herself, her aunt and mother’s twin sister, Astra. Speaking with Variety, Kreisberg says that confrontation happened so early because they’ve “never gone wrong bringing the big bad up sooner — we’ve obviously been having a great deal of success this season with Neal McDonough on Arrow.”

But the other factor in the decision was that “your hero is only as good as your villain, and your villain has to have a chance of killing the hero, otherwise there’s no jeopardy,” he explains. “When you have someone like Kara, who’s Kryptonian and can do anything Superman can do, you want her to go up against a true adversary, and having her fight another Kryptonian felt like the best way to do that.”

As for the true nature of Astra’s plans, Kreisberg teases, “She’s not trying to establish a new Krypton, which is something that we’ve seen in movies and TV shows before, and we wanted to do something different. To me, the best villains are the ones that say the same thing in public and in private, they just leave out the part about killing a lot of people when they do it.”

Astra “really believes she’s here to save Earth from the path that humans have set it on, because she saw what happened on Krypton.”

He adds, “And as you find out more and more about Astra’s goals and why she was sent to Fort Rozz and what her connection was to Krypton’s destruction, I think it’ll unfold in a new and different way for people who feel like they’ve seen Krypton die in enough mediums before; that its destruction in our version is something a little bit more relevant to our own morals.”

Hank Henshaw

When asked about Hank Henshaw’s glowing eyes, Kreisberg laughs. “I think comic book fans will have a theory about that,” he says, “and Hank is not all he says he is, and I’m going to leave it at that.”

He then goes on to compare Henshaw to Harrison Wells: “There are some things I’m so happy to spoil and there are other things where it’s that great tension for the audience that certainly worked out so well for us with Tom Cavanagh on The Flash in the early going, where he’d do something heroic and then something else that’s slightly sinister and you’re never quite sure what that means or where his loyalties lie, so that when he walks into a room, is he there to help you or is he there to kill you?”

James Olsen

As for James’ story, Kreisberg says he’ll be “trying to figure out who he is in the same way Kara is. He gives that speech that was so interesting to us, that he was famous because he took pictures of Superman, but Superman was his pal — he even says in the pilot, ‘I won a Pulitzer, but he posed for it’ — and now I’ve moved here to start fresh, but if I’m teaming up with another superhero, am I ever going to find out what makes me special apart from all this?”

Danvers siblings

Of Kara and Alex’s relationship, Kreisberg says, “[I]t’s not something that’s well-represented on television, adult siblings, and certainly adult siblings who are in the same business and care about each other.

“You see sibling relationships that are fraught with tension and lies and anger and jealousy, and I don’t mean to suggest that Kara and Alex’s lives are drama free — they’ll have their issues and there’s certainly more drama to come between them — but at the heart of it they love each other in the same way that Joe and Barry love each other, and it’s become so mirrored behind the scenes.”

Episode 3

And finally, Kreisberg teases the appearance of Reactron in the next episode. Reactron “is a Superman villain who has fought with Superman over the years and neither has ever been able to beat the other, and now he’s decided that the best way to get Superman is to come to town and kill Kara. And Kara is in no mood to be treated as someone who can be taken out because they think she’s easier to take down than Superman. Reactron’s going to find out that he shouldn’t have messed with the Girl of Steel.”

Supergirl airs Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET on CBS.