Since she decided to embrace her powers and become Supergirl, Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist) has fought villain after villain. She’s flexed her physical strength along the way but has also grown emotionally. This evolution was highlighted in particular in “Red Faced,” when she faced Red Tornado and showed off a new side. “I can watch that scene with Melissa at the end of that episode, like, all day,” Andrew Kreisberg, executive producer of Supergirl, said at the Television Critics Association (TCA) Winter Press Tour.
Kreisberg continued, “What I also thought was so interesting about that episode and why it’s so special to me, is I think that was a misconception that this show was sort of overly sunny, and that Supergirl, herself, might have been overly sunny, but we always saw her as this person who experienced probably the worst trauma you can experience. I mean, she literally lost everybody she loved: Her mother, her father. And she’s one of the few remaining survivors. That’s a lot to take in, and it’s a lot to walk around with, and that, sort of, survivor’s guilt.
Discussing “Red Faced,” Kreisberg said, “That was really the first episode where you really got to see that side of the character and that aspect of the character, which is so important to us. Even when we are breaking a story that could be considered to be a little bit lighthearted, we always take into account the damage that Kara sustained as a child and that she brings it with her to her adult life.”
Kara has spent most of her time on Earth, but what happened on Krypton stays with her. She’ll get to visit her homeworld in an upcoming episode. Sort of. Kreisberg announced that the show would be doing an adaptation of Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything,” one of his favorite comic books. This version will be “For the Girl Who Has Everything.”
“We’re doing an adaptation of that comic book, but with Kara. We just finished filming it, and it’s the Black Mercy…Kara wakes up and she’s back on Krypton and has no idea how or why she got there,” he said, “It’s one of the things I’m the most excited about having done, because it seemed like such a pipe dream when we were having these early conversations, but now it’s part of the show.”
In addition to featuring that storyline, she show is also adding Indigo. Executive producer Ali Adler dropped the news and said Laura Vandervoort would be stepping into the recurring role of the villain, “a living, strong-willed supercomputer that was sentenced to Fort Rozz after turning against the people of Krypton.” She’s not the only new foe on the horizon. Jeff Branson is joining the cast in a recurring role as well. He’s playing Master Jailer, a forceful and unrelenting jail guard on Fort Rozz. Master Jailer is in the episode Lexi Alexander directed, and Kreisberg said it has “one of the coolest fights we’ve ever done on the show. One word: chains.”
Even though there are several new villains on the horizon, they’re aware of not making Supergirl a character of the week show. Kreisberg said, “I think what we’ve done on all the shows is we always start with, what does this episode mean to Kara? And then subsequently, what does it also mean to all the side characters, and what is the idea or the issue or the topic that we want to explore this week?” He continued, “Whoever the villain is, that’s the icing on the cake. That always comes last. We never sit down and say to ourselves, ‘Oh, we really want to do a fight between Kara and Red Tornado.’ It was an episode that started with wanting to do an episode about anger.”
Summing up, Kreisberg explained why this particular story matters so much to the character. “For the reason to do ‘For the Girl Who Has Everything,’ as much as I wanted to do it—and I’ve literally been pitching doing it every episode since we started—the reason it’s coming at the time that it is, is it’s going to come at a point in the season where Kara is going to be feeling very lost and feeling very alone and feeling very detached from the people in her life; from Cat, from Alex, from Hank, from Winn, from James.”
Lastly, he offered a hint of something special coming fans’ way: “So, when she is sort of granted this It’s a Wonderful Life moment where she can be living in this fantasy where nothing terrible happened and she grew up on Krypton, there’s actually a reason for her to want it to be true. It’s much more palatable and easier for her to be there than it is on Earth, where she has a lot of work to do. We never think of any of these things as gimmicks, it’s always when it’s the right time to do it.”
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IMAGES: CBS
