Welcome! Thanks for joining me here in this Supergirl recap for episode 603: “Phantom Menace.” Let’s dive right in, shall we?

Previously on Supergirl, Brainy thought he had to work with Lex to ultimately stop him and it got him in a heap of trouble, Lex sent Supergirl to the Phantom Zone, Team Super tried to get her back but failed spectacularly, and Lex was found not guilty of his attempted MASS MURDER because the justice system and also maybe the structure of this TV show is broken.

This week, Kara is set on her plan to hitch a ride on a phantom to get through a portal to see where it leads, but things go sideways and she hurts her leg, and her and her dad find themselves in a crater with some raiders. While they’re being tied up, a woman drops in and manages to convince the men to leave with a little trickery. The men take Father Zor-El but leave Kara behind, and she’s grateful.

“Honestly he looks nothing like I remember so we can probably just let him go.”

Back on Earth, Brainy is working in the Tower, talking to himself while scanning the Phantom Zone for signs of a petite blonde heroine, when Lex comes on the TV. Brainy starts to lose it, screaming at the news coverage, almost punching the image of Lex, but luckily before Lex can claim the TV as another victim, the Martians swoop in. They had found Silas at his apartment and he told them a phantom had hitched a ride inside him and now is loose in the world. Silas says his roommates are missing and J’onn needs his team but looks around and finds his numbers lacking. Brainy explains that Nia is taking over for Kara at a reporter retreat (which let’s be honest she probably would have had to do for Kara even if she were here) and Alex hasn’t come in yet today, so J’onn calls her.

But Alex isn’t answering her phone right now. No, she’s wallowing in her grief and watching Kara’s Legacy Download, listening to Kara talk about how Alex was her first companion on this Earth and taught her how to be human. Kelly comes in and asks why she’s watching it now when she wouldn’t before, and Alex says before she didn’t think Kara is gone, now she does.

Alex was making some really good points here like, “What’s the point of anything” and also “Why bother trying.”

Alex thinks Kara is in hell because of her, and what’s the point in doing anything if she can’t save her baby sister. Kelly comforts her, says that she was upset when Obsidian folded but found helping people made her feel better. Showing up for other people can be easier than showing up for ourselves. Only she can decide to keep going, but she had to make that choice.

Across town, Lena arrives at her office to find her brother lurking like a bad stench.

I love that as Lena finds herself, she is starting to loosen up, emotionally and re: her outfit/hair choices.

He’s mad about being shut out of his company but Lena is dead-set on protecting not only LuthorCorp but also the world from him. She doesn’t want to give him more power so she’ll fight him at every turn. Lex says he has tricks of his own and he will win this game she’s playing, he’s seen the Queen’s Gambit and thinks he knows how it ends.

“How dare you say anything even remotely related to Oliver Queen in my presence.”

At first I thought this was going to be Lena’s new role despite finally knowing Supergirl’s identity, that she was going to just be stuck alone in Lex’s web, but luckily I was wrong.

After her pep talk from Kelly, Alex does manage to pull herself together enough to make it to work, where J’onna and Brainy have figured out the Phantom that was let loose can make new Phantoms now, and probably started with Silas’s roommates. Unfortunately they get to watch the process in real time when Silas’s soul leaves his body and he becomes a Phantom before their very eyes. As the Phantom rises up and attacks, Alex has flashbacks about the last time they fought Phantoms which makes her think of Kara and how she might be gone forever and Alex just…freezes. Alex “would jump off a balcony because it looks cool” Danvers can’t move for fear she’ll be unable to save her friends, that she’ll lose someone else she cares about.

This is what I’m going to look like the first time I’m in a social situation with more than one other person.

But luckily the team rallies and stops the Phantom before that happens. There’s a lot of totems shmotems here about the history of the Phantoms and their alien race and how all this metaphysics works but the important thing is, they come up with a plan to stop the Phantoms before they start a Phantom apocalypse.

Alex goes out on to the Feelings Balcony and J’onn joins her for a Space Dad pep talk. Alex doesn’t understand how he can soldier on, but J’onn says marching forward is the only way to get Kara back. But Alex is too tired to march.

Me @ my day job when they want me to do things despite the world falling apart.

Back up in the prison world, Kara is trying to stand on her broken leg, unused to this pain but trying to power through it, and blaming herself for her dad getting kidnapped. The new lady says that the men who took her father are going to sacrifice him to a terrible monster, but the good news is there’s some time before that will happen.

They decide to get to know each other, Kara giving her the spiel from the top of every episode and explaining how at one point she thought there were only two Krytponians left in the universe but then they started popping up like weeds so that’s no longer the case. The lady introduces herself as Nyxly, a fifth dimensional imp like Mxyzptlk. She has a power dampening cuff on so she’s not at full power but she has a crystal ball she can use to scry on dad, who seems fine for now.

Don’t even worry that this looks exactly like the one the Wicked Witch of the West had, just don’t think about it.

Down on Earth, M’gann has an idea to contain the Phantoms, but J’onn rudely yells at her to not, which is a surefire way to get someone to do something, in my humble opinion.

Lena is working in her office when Brainy holograms in to discuss what they’re adorably calling Operation: Vengeance, aka their plan to take Lex down. They talk about how they already locked Lex out of some aspects of the company, and the next step is to take money from one of his shady fake foundations he uses to buy Kasnian weapons and donate it to a children’s hospital.

Mischievous looks good on her. Well fine literally everything looks good on her but I like this a lot.

And so Brainy gets to hacking for her. A formidable duo of intelligence, these two.

But then Brainy hears something happening in the Tower so he hangs up his hologram and goes to see what’s happening. The Phantom looks like he’s trying to head south even though he’s in a containment unit, and Alex scans the news and finds an alert for a disturbance at a warehouse to the south. They turn to tell M’gann to suit up and realize she left without them, against J’onn’s orders. Which frankly doesn’t feel like something M’gann would do? But maybe when they melded souls she caught some of J’onn’s “my way or the highway” tendencies.

It does turn out J’onn was right this time though, because when they find M’gann at the warehouse, the Phantoms are portaling away and M’gann has been scratched. If they don’t do something fast, she’s going to start luring teen girls into her watery underground lair.

In the Phantom Zone, Nyxly tells Kara that she was sent to the prison realm for no reason other than she was the daughter of a mad king. Her father was a power-hungry, paranoid narcissist who got rid of his heirs, killing Nyxly’s older brother and banishing her.

While she tells her princess origin story, she builds Kara a splint and a crutch, all while calling herself useless without her powers. But Kara points out that she has saved her twice over at this point, and that Nyxly is resourceful. They might not have their powers, but they have each other and they have the one thing this place hasn’t taken from them yet: Hope.

Literally a light in the dark, this one.

In his lackluster lair of lethargy, Lex is trying to strike a deal with Kasnian weapons dealers when he realizes his accounts have been drained and donated to the Luthor wing of the children’s hospital. And what happens next Lena learns about on the news: Lex sets fire to the wing and publicly blames Lena, saying she was in charge of the most recent updates to the hospital.

I don’t know how anyone ever thought this precious bean was a villain.

While Kara gets some rest, the princess imp uses her crystal ball and Kara’s inspirational speech to access her powers again and get the power dampener off; she has her magic back. She tells Kara she’s been having flashes of parallel lives, likely due to CRISIS, but that she was happy to save Kara because she has a good feeling about her. And now that she has her magic, she’s more ready than ever to help. And Kara is so happy she was able to spread hope in such a dark, cold place.

I can’t wait until Kara is back under the yellow sun, partially so she has her powers back, but also because there are TOO MANY SHADOWS FOR SCREENSHOTS.

Lena and Brainy are in the Tower bonding over their hatred of Lex and Lena off-handedly says she wishes she could kill him and Brainy takes that idea and runs with it, serious as can be about taking him out once and for all, and while Lena watches Brainy devolve before her eyes, her expression goes from rage to a soft empathy.

As much as it hurts to watch Brainy break, it must feel so nice to realize how very not alone she is.

Brainy doesn’t understand why she’d oppose this plan, she’s already killed him once. But Lena remembers that timeline and how it broke her, turned her into the darkest version of herself, made her more like him than she ever wanted to be. Brainy is having a hard time dealing with these feelings, the depth and weight of them being fairly new to him. His rage feels like an endless ocean, he wants it to go away, he wants to shut it all off.

Next page: Sentinel babes!

But Lena tells Brainy she was wrong. She once told him to put his feelings in little boxes and push them away. But the thing is about little boxes is that if you stack them too high they’re bound to topple and crush you.

She tells Brainy not to let the rage consume him and ot let it out, then let it go. So he does. Lena’s heart breaks for Brainy as he yells and yells and finally just collapses into a chair. He adds one more thing to the pile of things bothering him, maybe the thing that is bigger but harder to look directly at: He misses Kara. Lena takes his hands in hers and says simply and quietly, “Me, too.”

Is it me or is this the face of a woman who just realized just how badly she misses the love of her life? Just me? Cool cool cool.

I, for one, am a huge fan of this dynamic. I love these brainiac buddies, and I look forward to watching their friendship continue to grow.

As the rest of the team watches M’gann carefully for signs of turning, J’onn admits that Alex was right. He was so focused on marching forward, he went too far to fast. He didn’t listen to M’gann, he was too focused on not feeling his feelings that he tipped the scale too far the other direction. Alex understands; she didn’t want to get out of bed this morning, she didn’t want to live in a world without Kara. But she repeats what Kelly told her, what Kara would have said if she were there: You have to keep fighting. Even if there’s only a snowball’s chance in hell that it would work. You have to at least try.

You can take Kara from the Superfriends but you can’t take her spirit from them. She’s taught them well.

And it turns out Kelly was right, helping someone else helped lift Alex’s fog a little, and she gets an idea about how to save M’gann. Kelly shows up and is going to help them with some Obsidian tech while they do what is essentially a soul transfusion. There’s a very small window for this to go right, and the Phantoms will be here soon, so Alex calls in Brainy and Lena to help them. And can I just say, hearing Alex call Lena’s name to join her while powerwalking into battle brought me so much joy. All I’ve ever wanted was for Lena to be properly integrated into the SuperFriends and it looks like we might be on our way.

Lena is going to use her portal watch to send the Phantoms to a containment unit, so Brainy and Alex just have to hold them off while she works her magic.

I’LL GO PEW PEW, YOU GO TYPE TYPE

“That is an extreme over-simplification of what I’ll be doing over here and frankly not even giving yourself enough cred– :sigh: fine yes, you pew pew, I type type.”

While J’onn and Kelly work on putting M’gann’s soul in a jar, a Phantom breaks past the first line of defense and attacks, and all Kelly can do to help is kind of poke at it with an IV stand. Which is largely ineffective. But J’onn is able to multitask and eventually with teamwork they get the Phantoms to a safe place (except Phantom Prime seems to have portaled away) and they stop M’gann from turning into one of them.

Later, when Lex gets back to his office, he gets a taste of his own medicine when he finds Lena there waiting for him. She tells him that while she would love to kill him, she doesn’t think that’s actually the answer.

Look at her channeling her Supergirl power stance to do the bravest thing she’s had to do in a while.

Instead, she’s going to do something that will hurt him worse than shooting him again. She’s going to disengage. Lena is not going to participate in Lex’s game anymore. She’s laying down her king, and she’s not playing. She can’t lose a game she’s not in; and he can’t win it either. She’s leaving LuthorCorp and leaving it for him to run into the ground.

Big “have a nice life” energy.

He doesn’t believe her, of course. He’s a narcissist sociopath, he thinks she enjoys the cycle of abuse he puts her through. But she’s done. Plus, her leaving LuthorCorp means the lawyers will drop their investigation into her and Non Nocere. She’ll get a fresh start.

Lex can’t fathom walking away from something like this, from all her work, from him. He thinks she hates him to much to let this go. And she says yes she does hate him. But now that she is rekindling old friendships and making new ones, now that she has seen that she can be loved and respected and supported by people like Kara, Brainy, and Alex…she’s starting to love herself, too.

Self-confidence is sexy.

And I love this for her.

The day well saved, Alex goes home to find Kelly waiting for her. Alex brought Kelly flowers to thank her for being her rock, for helping her so much. Kelly is confused; she was just sitting here thinking about how useless she was when the Phantoms showed up. But Kelly did help, Kelly helped Alex face the hard things, helped her realize that there was still something to fight for. And it’s something she doesn’t take for granted, and frankly Alex wants more of it. She asks Kelly to move in with her, something I assumed had already happened off-screen like everything else between these two, but apparently didn’t. But Alex’s speech is sweet, saying she wants to wake up with her every morning, she wants to share the little things with her, she doesn’t want to waste one more minute. And Kelly says yes, yes of course.

Sentinel babes!

Nyxly and Kara find the raiders and save Father Zor-El, and dad and Nyxly both seem…wary of each other. But when Kara says they’re going to look for a way out and think Nyxly’s magic could come in handy, she realizes that this isn’t the end of their mission. She assumed Kara would be done with her now, and she’d be back to being on her own. She seems genuinely pleased that Kara finds her useful and also wants her to stick around, two things she never got from her family back home. But despite Kara’s rough start with Mr. Mxyzptlk, he ultimately proved to be a friendly fellow who meant well, so she has nothing against fifth dimension imps in general, and so far Nyxly has done nothing but help her, so why wouldn’t she trust her new princess pal?

I really hope we can trust Nyxly and only a little bit because one of my D&D characters is named Nyx.

Can we trust Nyxly? Who knows. Did we need to be introducing so many new characters in the final season? Probably not. Am I excited that Kara has another lady friend? Yes. Overall I enjoyed this ep; still very sick of the Lex stuff but I loved all the Superfriends scenes (especially now that Lena is in them) and glad we finally got some Dansen growth on screen. More of that, please!

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