NOTE: Full spoilers for this episode of, “Supergirl” are present in this review
Supergirl is very excitingly going to be part of the much-hyped musical crossover event with sibling series, The Flash this week, tomorrow in fact! Unfortunately though, said crossover, as with The CW’s big, history-making four-show crossover from this past November, isn’t properly hosted on Supergirl, and won’t really go into effect until tomorrow’s episode of The Flash by itself. That’s the first of many let-downs in a surprisingly disappointing episode of Supergirl this week, with, “Star-Crossed” representing a pretty frustrating speed bump for a show that’s been doing very well for most of this season, especially recently.
Despite the Music Meister, played by fellow Glee alum, Darren Criss, not showing up until literally the last minute of the episode (more on that later), this episode nonetheless tried to push a big development for Supergirl, namely in revealing the dirty secret of Mon-El to Kara and her friends. When the two mysterious aliens played by Teri Hatcher and Kevin Sorbo take over National City’s broadcasting to demand that Mon-El be turned over to them (in a pretty obvious reference to General Zod’s ominous demand for Superman in 2013’s Man of Steel), Kara perceives the demand to be a threat. After failing to stop Mon-El from voluntarily turning himself over however, Kara smuggles along on the beam-up, and sees the mysterious aliens bowing to Mon-El. Turns out, the two alien leaders, Queen Rhea and King Lar Gand, are the rulers of Daxam, and Mon-El isn’t a guard, he’s their son, making him the prince of Daxam!
Many viewers already predicted this twist, and after Jeremiah’s pretty blunt threat to Mon-El a few episodes ago, that seemed to virtually guarantee that Mon-El lied about his backstory, and was actually Daxamite royalty. Now that we know this for sure, Kara naturally doesn’t take it well, making an attempt to dine with Mon-El’s family, only to storm out of the dinner midway through, furious that Mon-El deceived her and everyone else. It’s pretty understandable, and Kara being hurt that Mon-El couldn’t be honest with her is a natural development… At first. As is usual for the instances where Supergirl gets too greedy for drama, Kara quickly starts becoming unreasonable with her anger, and that further drags down a huge chunk of an overall weak episode.
The most frustrating part about Kara furiously distancing herself from Mon-El and fuming all the while too comes into play when Rhea takes a trip to the DEO to ask Kara for a favour. Rhea insists that Kara help convince Mon-El to rejoin his family, so that they can rebuild Daxam, now that the planet is habitable again. Rhea says that the proud nature of Kryptonians will inevitably have Kara judging Mon-El and saying that he’s not good enough for her anyway, so their relationship can’t last. Kara then refuses to go along with this action, only to then completely prove Rhea right! When Kara finally does talk to Mon-El, she decides that he’s a liar, is no good for her, and they break up. Oh, come on, seriously?! On top of Kara refusing Rhea’s demand before subsequently doing exactly as Rhea predicted, which made Kara look like a thick-headed moron, it just became impossible to sympathize with Kara overall before too long. Rather than feel understandably hurt, Kara’s sudden refusal to acknowledge Mon-El’s progress and desire to change instead had her coming off as childish and bitchy toward him.
Speaking of arbitrarily erasing relationship development, Winn also anchored the episode’s main subplot, as Lyra convinces him to break into the National City Art Museum, only to create security footage where it looks like Winn stole a painting, getting him in trouble with the NCPD. After the DEO does some digging, it becomes apparent that Winn has been conned, and that Lyra was leading him on the whole time, setting him up for her crime. After angrily visiting Lyra, and having Lyra confirm that Winn was just a mark, James then tries to arrest her as Guardian, only to provoke a fight, thankfully injecting a bit of decent, if short-lived action into the episode.
Lyra being a con artist that pulled one over on Winn could have been an interesting development, had it not just come out of nowhere, but what deflates this subplot considerably is how quickly the show wimps out of it. After Lyra is imprisoned at the DEO, she already starts going back on Winn simply being a mark. After Winn then breaks her out, he then somehow also commands the forces of the DEO to bust up an alien art trafficking ring that was holding Lyra’s formerly unmentioned brother hostage, threatening to kill him if Lyra didn’t deliver, “Starry Night” from Van Gogh. With Lyra reunited with her brother, and Winn’s name cleared with the NCPD, Winn and Lyra seem to get back together, and that’s just that. That’s it? I get the idea of Winn’s subplot trying to be used as a device for Kara to forgive Mon-El, especially when what Lyra did to Winn is way worse than Mon-El’s white lie about his backstory (and it is a white lie, when it comes down to it), but when Kara rejects Mon-El anyway, that just makes her look even more petty and immature than she already would have!
After all of this is sorted, and Mon-El goes to the Daxamite ship, only to tell his parents to go away and never come back for some reason (because the season still isn’t over yet, I guess), the DEO brings in the Music Meister, who was apparently arrested after some unknown crime. This also comes with the convenient timing of Winn investigating the inter-dimensional gizmo that lets Kara move between her own Earth-38 and the core Earth-1 universe of The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow, and deciding that it… Works, I guess. When the Music Meister incapacitates Kara however, trapping her in a false reality where she’s about to sing on stage, the episode simply ends, saying that the story will continue on The Flash tomorrow. In shoehorning in the Music Meister right in the final minute, the show has him somehow know about alternate universes, know about The Flash, want to attack The Flash, and finally, he ended up on Earth-38 for… Some reason? That’s a lot of ground to cover for this character in tomorrow’s episode of The Flash, since the Music Meister literally comes out of nowhere here, making the transition into tomorrow’s crossover episode with The Flash disappointingly clumsy.
There were a few decent moments in this episode, since some elements of Kara confronting the truth about Mon-El weren’t bad, and Rhea and Lar Gand not being active threats to Earth was a nice change of pace too. The Winn/Lyra subplot largely felt contrived and surprisingly forgettable though, plus Kara’s unlikable and unfair behaviour toward Mon-El also heavily dragged down the main storyline, as well as the big reveal of Mon-El’s true past as the prince of Daxam. “Star-Crossed” didn’t even manage to smoothly lead into tomorrow’s musical crossover with The Flash that well, since it was just too over-stuffed with problematic story arcs, leaving no time for the introduction of the Music Meister until the very end. I trust that the musical crossover on The Flash tomorrow will still be a lot of fun, but it’s been a while since Supergirl really flubbed an episode to this extent. Hopefully, Kara’s latest meeting with Barry will help her get over her tantrum about Mon-El quickly, so we can get back to better storylines next week.