Supergirl – Alex

By: Michelle Lopez

A Lifetime of Firsts

Turns out National City’s lull in crime was a fluke leaving Maggie (Floriana Lima) to spend seventeen hours putting her hostage negotiating skills to work. Just as she thinks she’s making some headway, Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) swoops in and saves the day, much to Maggie’s annoyance. With another job well done Kara flies off to prepare for dinner at Alex’s (Chyler Leigh) place.

The dinner doesn’t go quite as planned when Alex turned dinner into charcoal briquettes so they settle for pizza. The meal starts out fine until Mon-El (Chris Wood) “jokingly” questions why National City even has cops with Supergirl around. Alex sees this going south real quick and tries to calm Maggie down, but she’s got some things to say. She spent seventeen hours negotiating with those robbers when Supergirl crashed in and dragged them out. Kara doesn’t get it, she saved everyone and the bad guys are in jail. She’s never heard of the Supergirl defense. Her punch first don’t bother asking questions style of crime fighting leaves plenty for clever lawyers to use to get charges dropped. Alex tries to diplomatically calm the situation, but Maggie and Kara are stubborn. Kara storms out with Mon-El on her tail while Alex stands in the middle refusing to take sides. She tells Maggie to keep trying with Kara because she needs the two most important people in her life to get along. When Maggie agrees Alex runs out the door to tell Kara the same thing.

The next morning Maggie stops by CatCo to find out if Kara knows where Alex is. Neither of them have seen her since the debacle and Winn’s (Jeremy Jordan) already confirmed she’s not at the DEO. Kara gets a call from Alex’s phone, but it’s not Alex. Somebody with a ridiculous voice modulator has called to let Kara know that he’s got Alex and she’s got thirty-six hours to bust some guy named Peter Thompson (Gregg Henry) out of prison or Alex is going to die. Oh, and he totally knows Kara’s Supergirl.

Elsewhere, Alex wakes up in a dank cell. Never the helpless damsel in distress, she assesses the situation, looks for weak points in the cell, notes the security camera and recalls her last steps the previous night. Suddenly, it clicks and she knows exactly who took her and she tells him to free her or her friends are going to find her and she’s going to end him.

At the DEO they discover the kidnapper to shut down Alex’s subdermal tracker and scrambled the signal from his call so they’ve got nothing to go on. That is until Maggie steps in and lays out the game plan. They’ve got to figure out who Peter Thompson is and why this guy wants him out of prison enough to take on Supergirl.

J’onn (David Harewood), Maggie and Kara head over to the prison to have a chat with Mr. Thompson. J’onn and Maggie calmly inquire about why someone would want him out of prison while Kara stews in the back. Peter’s got nothing and Kara loses her cool completely forgetting that J’onn can read minds. When J’onn confirms he knows nothing, Peter’s taken back to his cell and Kara gets a call from Winn. He’s run some facial recognition software on the one guy who’s consistently visited Peter in prison. Turns out he has a son, Rick Malverne (David Hoflin), who grew up in the same town as the Danvers.

Supergirl flies over to Rick’s house and starts searching for Alex. All she finds is a bunch of monitors showing a live feed of Alex. Rick pops out of the shadows to taunt Kara. Using Maggie’s advice, Kara decides to use her words instead of violence. Rick let’s her briefly talk to Alex, who let’s Kara know it was Rick who took her and tells Kara to use her tracker to find her. Alex’s head is still very much in the game. Kara decides she’s played nice long enough and threatens to melt Rick’s face off with her heat vision but he’s not phased because he holds all the cards right now.

At the DEO Rick tells Maggie and Kara that he spent a year stalking Alex’s life in preparation. He knows Kara’s Supergirl because when they were kids Kara walked away from an explosion completely unharmed. He filed that information away and when Supergirl popped up in the same city as Kara he put two and two together. After his father rescued him from an abusive mother he’s decided it’s his turn to rescue his dad. Maggie stops Kara from beating Rick to a pulp because she’s got a plan. They can use Rick not knowing how to function in a world where his father isn’t around to get Alex back.

Maggie ushers Peter into Rick’s holding room. They have a quick reunion, which ends when Peter tells Rick to let them know where Alex is being held. Rick knows he’s not talking to his father because he’s never suggest that. He spent a year preparing for this and he didn’t miss the shapeshifting martian in Alex’s life.

Back in the cell, Alex has decided that she’s done waiting around. If her trackers not working she’ll find a way to get a signal out. She cuts her subdermal tracker out of her arm with a broken credit card and wires it into a security camera to send an SOS to the DEO. Winn instantly understands what the weird signal is and gets to work on identifying where the IP address is originating. Winn finds the location and runs over to tell Kara who in turn rushes into the interrogation room to let Maggie know. Before the two of them leave Rick very calmly warns them that it’s a bad idea, but Kara’s got a lead and she’s done waiting around. Maggie tries to stop her because Rick isn’t acting like a guy who’s plan just fell apart, he’s acting like a guy who’s still winning.

Kara leaves a Supergirl sized hole in the building when she arrives. Alex hears the noise above her and starts yelling for her sister. Kara scans the room and finds a lead covering on the floor, she rips off the cover she finds a laptop showing Alex in her cell and the countdown clock suddenly drops from over twenty hours to just four. Alex excitedly awaits Kara’s arrival but instead of her sister she gets a heavy flow of water rushing into the cell.

Kara returns to the interrogation room with the laptop and demands to know where Alex is. Yelling doesn’t work so Kara asks to talk to Alex again. He obliges, but casually tells Alex that all Kara needs to do to save her is free his dad from prison. Alex doesn’t miss a beat and tells Kara that giving into Rick’s demands is not an option. Supergirl is bigger than Alex and playing Rick’s game is not an option. Alex asks to talk to Maggie alone for a bit. She drops the tough façade she had with Kara and begins to say her goodbyes incase they’re not able to find her in time. Maggie’s eyes fill with tears as she refuses to let Alex consider giving up. If she can’t break out she’s going to hold on until Maggie finds her because they have a lifetime of firsts to live. She makes Alex promise she’ll hold on and the video feed dies. Maggie unloads on Kara because if she had listened to Maggie’s warning they’d have more time to figure this out. Maggie’s Alex’s girlfriend who loves her. She has just as much to lose as Kara does.

Maggie tries to get through to Rick one last time because they both lose if the clock reaches zero. He realizes Kara was the wrong person to target. Maggie’s desperate to find Alex so he points out all the ways he’s observed Maggie’s love for Alex in his one year of stalking. Those reminders are enough to break Maggie down and she heads off to do the last thing Alex would’ve wanted.

Alex is almost out of air but she’s still fighting. She’s tried everything to break out and it’s not working so she’s switched to doing anything that will buy her more time. She makes makes a floating device out of her pants!

Kara heads to the prison to stop Maggie, who’s past caring about anything but saving Alex. Kara takes a page from Maggie’s book and appeals to the good in Peter. Does he really want his son to kill someone for him? No, he doesn’t so he gives them a location he think’s Alex might be. They rush over and Kara breaks the glass just as Alex is out of air.

In medical, Alex wakes up to find Maggie waiting. She’s decided that she’s got to finish what she started to say over the laptop, which was to finally tell Maggie that she loves her and (of course) Maggie says it back. When they recover from their moment, Alex decides it’s time to go for a walk. Sanvers enters the control room in time to see Rick getting hauled off to have his mind wiped. Alex stops them so she can get one good punch in on him and ensure they’ll leave that memory intact. Maggie pulls Kara aside to thank her for stopping her at the prison and admits that they make a pretty good team.

Bad Deals & Evil Queens

At L Corp Lena (Katie McGrath) nerds out over Rhea’s (Teri Hatcher) proposal to build some device that seems like it can help tons of people, but probably will end up destroying the world. Rhea’s mastered the art of internet stalking and has done her homework on Lena. She explains that Lena’s TED Talk is the reason she came to her with the proposal, it definitely has nothing to do with Lena and Kara being gal pals. Lena’s interested so she accepts Rhea’s offer to have dinner at Paka’s.

Rhea and Lena flirt over some wine at Paka’s until Rhea brings up mothers, which Lena can only scoff at and give a little explanation for said scoff. Rhea takes the opportunity to bond over family drama by tossing out a sob story about her son’s horrible girlfriend and her husbands tragic death (from that time she stabbed him). Lena sympathizes and Rhea decides to hand over the flash drive with her design. Lena’s not sold on the project yet, but she think they’ll be friends either way until Rhea says “thank the gods” and alarms go off in Lena’s head.

At L Corp, Lena asks for Rhea’s thumb print to get her elevator access. Rhea thinks nothing of it and scans her finger in Lena’s alien detector which flashes red. Lena keeps it professional and casually brings up a problem in Rhea’s design, it needs an element not found on Earth. Rhea plays dumb until it’s obvious the jig is up and Lena is kicking her out of her office.

Rhea flies by to makes one final plea that she messed up lying to Lena, but she thought she was like her mother. She explains that she wants to make the portal to get back to her planet, but the portal will help Earth a lot. She’s lying because she’s got that giant spaceship parked somewhere, but Lena agrees to consider. She calls up her best gal pal, Kara, to get her opinion but her timing couldn’t be worst. Kara’s in the middle of crisis and can’t talk which leaves Lena on her own for this.