Nia gets sucked into her dream and decides to try to really focus on it this time.

Nicole Maines in a dress with a black jean jacket over it in this lighting…whew. I am so gay.

She uses her powers within the dream to keep the cougar at bay while she reads the letters on the cage she couldn’t make out last time – P.W. – and when she snaps out of her dream she’s still holding a ball of energy. The Glam Rock Aliens appear, making her release the energy, and it turns out it’s the cougar from her dream.

Brainy thinks it’s cool that she not only had a lucid dream but also manifested something from it, but Nia thinks it’s really fucking scary that she just released a dream cat into the wild BY ACCIDENT.

When they save Kenny and CJ, Nia realizes that she was wrong about her dream the first time and that Cat has been the cat all along.

Just when things look dire, Kara smashes in to save the day, looking adorably proud of herself.

She’s t-u-f-f tuff!

But then chaos ensues. Plutonian land sharks were released, Cat knows Kara is Super, the cops are there; and Brainy is very stressed about how drastically this will change the course of the future.

So Nia and Brainy decide there’s only one thing to do: they have to go back a few hours and fix this. Kara decides to do the same and flies off, right there in front of everyone.

When Nia and Brainy get off their timeship a few hours earlier, they realize they had a stowaway. But Kara is incredibly invested in fixing this. When she had CJ Grant with a recorder in her face calling her Kiera, she had a vision of what her future could be, and she’s not ready for it. She’s only 17, she has barely lived her life. She can’t even make rice, for heaven’s sake. She needs more time to figure out who she is, to ground herself before the world expects her to fly. And so Brainy reluctantly agrees to let Little Kara help them.

The first step of Operation Don’t Barry Allen The Timeline is to get CJ Grant off their case. So they break her drone, and Nia gives her a speech that both strokes her ego and encourages her.

“Also you grow up to be Kyra Sedgwick! Can you believe it!”

She gives her a pep talk that would make both Kara and Future Cat Grant proud, and sets her free from her Perry White cage, just like her dream said she should. And off Cat Grant goes to start the media empire that would someday employ the very girl who inspired her to start it.

With Cat back on course, and the Glam Rock Aliens set to land in Uruguay as per the original timeline, Brainy, Nia and Kara rematerialize back at Prom Night. Kara thanks them so sweetly for helping her, for giving her back her future. She’s never going to forget them. (Except maybe she will. The glasses are a great disguise.)

When they get back are Alex and Kara going to be like, “Wait, YOU TWO were Brenda and Brandon?!”

The meteor strikes again, right on schedule, and this time since things are aligned correctly, the original course of actions unfolds: Kara punches the rock to bits, but it makes her fall through the gym floor and bleed, but this time she’s mostly fine. “It’s just a flesh wound,” she says, because her and her sister have always been monumental dorks and I love them.

“She turned me into a newt!” “A newt?” “I got better!”

(Random fact: After my senior prom, we all went to my friend Katie’s house for the after-party, and when it settled down and was just down to those of us who were going to sleep over, we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So this delighted me on a personal level.)

Alex goes to pull the truck around and Kara tells Kenny that she loves him again. The speech starts the same as it did before the meteor hit the first time, but this time the tone has changed. This time it feels more like goodbye. Kara isn’t ready to go right into supering full time, she wants to go to National City University where she can get a sweatshirt her future girlfriend best friend can wear when she’s drunk. She hasn’t gotten to choose a lot in her life so far. She didn’t choose to be put in a pod, or stuck in the Phantom Zone, she didn’t choose to land in Midvale, or even to have powers. So she wants to make some choices for herself for a little while to help her figure out what she wants.

Maybe since Kara had such an amazing boyfriend that ended amicably in this version of the timeline, she never dated any stale loaves of white bread? Maybe they stayed friends as the timeline intended?

She offers an invite to Kenny to join her in National City, but you can tell in the sadness dripping off her words that she knows he won’t come. Kenny tells Kara that he was in a bad way when they met, and that she was his light in the darkness. He’s braver for knowing her, stronger, better. But now that he’s not lost in the dark anymore, he needs to learn who he is without her holding him up. Just like she needs to make choices to figure out what she wants, he needs to take steps and see who he is on his own two feet. Their paths had merged at just the right time for both of them, but now their paths diverge. And that’s okay. They’ll always have Midvale.

As they go off to enjoy what’s left of their time together, Nia and Brainy wipe tears from their eyes because they watched that whole thing from behind the bleachers like voyeuristic stoners. But they have the rock with Kara’s blood on it, so it’s time to go back to present day National City so they can save grown-up Kara.

On the ship, Brainy tells Nia she was amazing, and that it was her dreams that really came in clutch in the end there. She saved the space time continuum. Nia thinks the only reason she interpreted this dream in time was because she had a personal connection to it, but Brainy doesn’t care why, he just knows it was amazing. And he knows that when they save Kara, it will be because of Nia.

This is just a Nia Nal stan account now, sorry not sorry. LOOK AT HER.

Brainy starts to cry a little, then. He heard himself say it, “when” instead of “if.” And the relief of hope overwhelms him. He spent so long holding on to this heavy fear, this burden of dread, that when he is finally given a reason to set it down, it feels like he can breathe. He realizes now that Lena was right, that it’s not about finding ways to avoid or cope with the negative feelings. It’s about feeling them, about enduring them, about surviving them, so that when the good feelings come – and they will – you’ll appreciate them that much more.

So off they go, home again. Save the Supergirl, save the world.

If I’m not mistaken, next week will be the last episode we get before another hiatus, so here’s hoping we get Kara out of the Phantom Zone so everyone is just chilling out, maxing, and relaxing all cool in the weeks we’re away from them.

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