'Supergirl' Recap: 'Midvale'

Written by John Edward Betancourt

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When a crisis arrives in our lives, the kind that makes us feel as though our world is crashing down around us…we all react in supremely different ways. Some of us simply let the power of the moment wash over us until it passes, some of us suck it up and forge ahead regardless of the pain, and others stand tall and confront their issues head on, while of some of us step away from our everyday lives for a moment in order to surround ourselves with the people that matter most in our lives, our family.
 
Because no one in this world, knows us better than our family, so what better a place to regroup and heal than amongst those we love? It’s an idea that so many of us have taken part of in our times of need and it is also a notion that Kara Danvers used to help her ailing sister in last night’s episode of Supergirl, ‘Midvale’, since the Danvers sisters returned to their home town to take a break from all of their troubles. Yet, while one might have thought that going home to heal would have provided us with a solid hour of Kara and Alex hashing out their pain, this particular chapter in Kara’s story took quite the unexpected twist.
 
Instead of dealing with the issues at hand, this episode transported us back in time to ten years prior, where Alex and Kara were still teenage sisters that oddly enough, didn’t really care for one another as they dealt with the fallout of Jeremiah’s exit from their lives and the only way that these two managed to come together and put aside their differences, was by working as a team to solve the murder of a local teenager and friend. It was this ‘first case’ that the duo worked on that managed to bring them together as a family and while it was cool to see the Danvers Girls sleuth it up and solve the case, the fact that this episode didn’t deal with any of the pain that Alex and Kara are carrying at the moment, irked me at first.
 
But after a few minutes of pondering it hit me. I sometimes forget that Supergirl isn’t your everyday, wrap it all up in an hour show, it likes to mirror our lives and connect with us and while the flashbacks provided some wonderful background as to what makes these characters tick, the present-day stuff mattered more. In that, sometimes there is no easy fix when it comes to our pain. We don’t just magically wake up one day and find that all is well. The big stuff forces us to take it day by day and heal just a little bit at a time, and dropping that into the show alongside a reminder that we also have to tough it out with our jobs and our lives when we want to curl up and hide because the world doesn’t just stop when we’re down, was a wonderful set of messages to send our way.
 
If anything, all of that reinforces the fact that this is hands down the most relatable superhero show on television right now, because we’ve all been where the Danvers sisters are at the moment and as always, their parallels to our lives also work to inspire us. Because if Supergirl can deal with her pain and still make the world the better place, then nothing should be holding us back in making wonders happen when it comes to our own lives. Either way, this was a lovely change of pace episode, one that did indeed stay true to the wonder of season three and kudos to this saga for being bold by not giving us a happy ending this episode so we can continue to watch these incredible characters fight the good fight and grow alongside the rest of us. Until next time.   

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