Hello and welcome to part two of our Midvale Palooza, Supergirl episode 606, Prom Again!

This episode is special not only because it’s a flashback episode, but also because it is Chyler Leigh‘s directorial debut. That’s right, fam, we have a queer woman directing her own lesbian character when she was just a baby gay. You love to see it.

Previously on Supergirl, Kara got trapped in the Phantom Zone so Nia and Brainy went back in time to get Kara’s DNA with CJ Grant and some Glam Rock Aliens on their heels.

We open where we left off, with Brainy and Nia in an energy dome the Glam Rock Aliens trapped them in. They want these cuties for their menagerie, but Kara hears Brainy and Nia talking about being in danger and flies off to help them. She’s flying around the clearing getting ready to fight when Alex and Kenny catch up, momentarily distracting her.

Kara doesn’t fly around in her casual wear enough, this is hilarious.

She eventually gets back on course and Brainy and Nia help her get control of the situation, but unfortunately CJ Grant caught the whole thing on her drone camera.

Team Mini Super goes back to the makeshift fortress and Alex thanks their new friends for their help. Brainy assures them that the Glam Rock Aliens will be dealt with by the proper authorities, and Kenny is thrilled to learn there are space cops.

As they get ready to say goodbye to Brenda and Brandon, Kara thanks Nia for being such a good friend to her these past two days. Kara liked not feeling like the only alien, she liked feeling different but not alone. Nia promises her that it gets better.

The queer coded language directed toward Kara in this episode was out of CONTROL.

And so, the immediate threats seemingly dissipated, Nia and Brainy get ready to go back to the future, and Kara and Kenny get ready for prom.

But before they take off, Nia gets another dream of the cougar and the cage, but this time there’s something cleaning on the top of the cage, and the cougar has escaped. Nia can’t quite get a grasp on it, and Brainy shrugs it off as a glitch in the dream matrix, but Nia is left with a nagging feeling there’s something she’s missing.

Alex drops Kara off at prom because they couldn’t get Eliza on set during the pandemic and Kara apologizes for defying Alex’s orders to not super around Midvale all willy nilly. But Alex stops her; Kara was amazing and she’s in awe of her baby sister. In fact, she’s proud, and she says as much.

I know you’re probably tired of me saying this but in cast it’s the last time we see them: THESE YOUNG ACTRESSES NAILED IT.

Alex explains that she was a little jumpy about Kara using her powers because when Jeremiah unfairly put the responsibility of taking care of Kara squarely on Alex’s shoulders, Alex felt like she had to put her life on hold. But then she went to college and was starting to get a sense of freedom, and watching Kara risk having her powers exposed made her feel like she was going to have to take a step backwards, so she lashed out. But Kara says Alex wasn’t all wrong in the things she said; Alex was right that Kara has to make a decision about college and tell Kenny what it is. Alex knows that whatever choice Kara made will be the right one, and so do I because the Legends haven’t shown up to fix the timeline yet. What has showed up, though, is the meteor shower we’ve all been waiting for.

“If you make a wish, stars will wash up on the beach in the morning.”

Kara tries to figure out how she’s supposed to wear a masquerade mask and her glasses at the same time, but Alex suggests she ditch both. She has to wear a mask every day, why not go without one tonight?

Nia, however, doesn’t care how often she wears a mask, she knows she rocks it, so she does, indeed, rock it. She walks out in her prom dress and takes Brainy and my breath away.

Her nervous little smile and her nervous little hands PROTECT HER AT ALL COSTS.

Nia is still stressed about not knowing how to interpret her dreams and before she can ask one last time for permission to call her mom for help, Brainy holds her and tells her that she will figure this out. They dance and it’s adorable and then it’s time to go to the Prom because the meteor is about to hit.

CJ Grant is poking around the woods like she’s looking for scoop on the Teddy Bear Picnic when she instead stumbles across the Glam Rock Aliens’ spaceship. She accidentally on purpose releases them – on purpose because she pressed the buttons but the accident was she got herself captured when all she wanted was a statement.

Kenny and Kara meet in a classroom to exchange flowers and that’s when I realize…it’s kind of weird that they’re having their senior prom in the school, right? We had our regular school dances in our cafeteria in high school but junior and senior prom were off-site. But I guess, why pay for an extra set when we can’t even go all the way into the dance during a pandemic anyway.

It doesn’t seem like they know any other teens anyway, so this is fine.

Kara tells Kenny that she loves him and is this close to tell him what she decided about college, and the tone in her voice makes me feel like she was going to tell him she’d stay, but before she gets her full thought out, she hears a meteor heading for the school and flies out to stop it.

Alex sees a bird, no a plane, no her baby sister flying through the air, punching a space rock, then falling to the ground at an alarming pace. And even though this is old hat to present-day Alex by now, this is the first time for Teen Alex, and she is stressed, and thus relieved to see Kara is fine.

THE DANVERS SISTERS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO ME DOT TUMBLR DOT COM

Brainy and Nia see this all go down and can tell something isn’t quite right so they rush off to find out what happened.

When they get to the gym, they find Alex leaning over her Kryptonite-poisoned sister, seeing her hurt for the first time. Before she can process what even is happening, the Glam Rock Aliens show up and start scanning for a Kryptonian.

Kenny knows this is his time to shine and volunteers as tribute, getting himself beamed up like some kind of Sara Lance. It’s not long before they realize that he’s human (“No one wants to see a human” = mood) so they decide to use him as bait instead.

Nia and Alex help Kara walk down the hall and try to convince her she can’t just run off after Kenny in this condition.

This frame doesn’t do this hallway shot justice. Director Chyler Leigh nailed it.

The Glam Rock Aliens send a message to all aliens, confusing the hell out of Alex, and Brainy and Nia step in and say they’ll fix this. When Kara resists, Nia uses her dream powers to put Kara to sleep, and they lock Kara and Alex in the room so they won’t follow.

On the spaceship, Kenny gets thrown into a cell with CJ, and he expresses how useless he feels. CJ Grant is one to throw insults but not one to let someone insult themselves, so she gives him a pep talk, calling him the wrong name but calling out his heart correctly: he’s smart, he’s brave, and he has the makings of a hero.

Back in their own kind of cell, Kara tells Alex that she feels bad for ruining prom night. She wanted one normal, super-free night before she started supering full time with him. Alex tells her that she has to seriously consider coming out as super; coming out will make you less normal, and it’s not something you can take back, says a worried closeted lesbian.

“If you say it out loud…the whole world is gonna change.”

Kara doesn’t care if it exposes her though, she needs to save Kenny. She tries to break out but she’s still too weak so Alex picks the lock, because apparently she’s in college as a Rogue major. The open door exposes Kara to the full moon, and she absorbs the reflection of the sun from it and is revitalized so she zips off after Kenny.

Nia gets sucked into her dream and decides to try to really focus on it this time.

Nicole Maines in a dress with a black jean jacket over it in this lighting…whew. I am so gay.

She uses her powers within the dream to keep the cougar at bay while she reads the letters on the cage she couldn’t make out last time – P.W. – and when she snaps out of her dream she’s still holding a ball of energy. The Glam Rock Aliens appear, making her release the energy, and it turns out it’s the cougar from her dream.

Brainy thinks it’s cool that she not only had a lucid dream but also manifested something from it, but Nia thinks it’s really fucking scary that she just released a dream cat into the wild BY ACCIDENT.

When they save Kenny and CJ, Nia realizes that she was wrong about her dream the first time and that Cat has been the cat all along.

Just when things look dire, Kara smashes in to save the day, looking adorably proud of herself.

She’s t-u-f-f tuff!

But then chaos ensues. Plutonian land sharks were released, Cat knows Kara is Super, the cops are there; and Brainy is very stressed about how drastically this will change the course of the future.

So Nia and Brainy decide there’s only one thing to do: they have to go back a few hours and fix this. Kara decides to do the same and flies off, right there in front of everyone.

When Nia and Brainy get off their timeship a few hours earlier, they realize they had a stowaway. But Kara is incredibly invested in fixing this. When she had CJ Grant with a recorder in her face calling her Kiera, she had a vision of what her future could be, and she’s not ready for it. She’s only 17, she has barely lived her life. She can’t even make rice, for heaven’s sake. She needs more time to figure out who she is, to ground herself before the world expects her to fly. And so Brainy reluctantly agrees to let Little Kara help them.

The first step of Operation Don’t Barry Allen The Timeline is to get CJ Grant off their case. So they break her drone, and Nia gives her a speech that both strokes her ego and encourages her.

“Also you grow up to be Kyra Sedgwick! Can you believe it!”

She gives her a pep talk that would make both Kara and Future Cat Grant proud, and sets her free from her Perry White cage, just like her dream said she should. And off Cat Grant goes to start the media empire that would someday employ the very girl who inspired her to start it.

With Cat back on course, and the Glam Rock Aliens set to land in Uruguay as per the original timeline, Brainy, Nia and Kara rematerialize back at Prom Night. Kara thanks them so sweetly for helping her, for giving her back her future. She’s never going to forget them. (Except maybe she will. The glasses are a great disguise.)

When they get back are Alex and Kara going to be like, “Wait, YOU TWO were Brenda and Brandon?!”

The meteor strikes again, right on schedule, and this time since things are aligned correctly, the original course of actions unfolds: Kara punches the rock to bits, but it makes her fall through the gym floor and bleed, but this time she’s mostly fine. “It’s just a flesh wound,” she says, because her and her sister have always been monumental dorks and I love them.

“She turned me into a newt!” “A newt?” “I got better!”

(Random fact: After my senior prom, we all went to my friend Katie’s house for the after-party, and when it settled down and was just down to those of us who were going to sleep over, we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So this delighted me on a personal level.)

Alex goes to pull the truck around and Kara tells Kenny that she loves him again. The speech starts the same as it did before the meteor hit the first time, but this time the tone has changed. This time it feels more like goodbye. Kara isn’t ready to go right into supering full time, she wants to go to National City University where she can get a sweatshirt her future girlfriend best friend can wear when she’s drunk. She hasn’t gotten to choose a lot in her life so far. She didn’t choose to be put in a pod, or stuck in the Phantom Zone, she didn’t choose to land in Midvale, or even to have powers. So she wants to make some choices for herself for a little while to help her figure out what she wants.

Maybe since Kara had such an amazing boyfriend that ended amicably in this version of the timeline, she never dated any stale loaves of white bread? Maybe they stayed friends as the timeline intended?

She offers an invite to Kenny to join her in National City, but you can tell in the sadness dripping off her words that she knows he won’t come. Kenny tells Kara that he was in a bad way when they met, and that she was his light in the darkness. He’s braver for knowing her, stronger, better. But now that he’s not lost in the dark anymore, he needs to learn who he is without her holding him up. Just like she needs to make choices to figure out what she wants, he needs to take steps and see who he is on his own two feet. Their paths had merged at just the right time for both of them, but now their paths diverge. And that’s okay. They’ll always have Midvale.

As they go off to enjoy what’s left of their time together, Nia and Brainy wipe tears from their eyes because they watched that whole thing from behind the bleachers like voyeuristic stoners. But they have the rock with Kara’s blood on it, so it’s time to go back to present day National City so they can save grown-up Kara.

On the ship, Brainy tells Nia she was amazing, and that it was her dreams that really came in clutch in the end there. She saved the space time continuum. Nia thinks the only reason she interpreted this dream in time was because she had a personal connection to it, but Brainy doesn’t care why, he just knows it was amazing. And he knows that when they save Kara, it will be because of Nia.

This is just a Nia Nal stan account now, sorry not sorry. LOOK AT HER.

Brainy starts to cry a little, then. He heard himself say it, “when” instead of “if.” And the relief of hope overwhelms him. He spent so long holding on to this heavy fear, this burden of dread, that when he is finally given a reason to set it down, it feels like he can breathe. He realizes now that Lena was right, that it’s not about finding ways to avoid or cope with the negative feelings. It’s about feeling them, about enduring them, about surviving them, so that when the good feelings come – and they will – you’ll appreciate them that much more.

So off they go, home again. Save the Supergirl, save the world.

If I’m not mistaken, next week will be the last episode we get before another hiatus, so here’s hoping we get Kara out of the Phantom Zone so everyone is just chilling out, maxing, and relaxing all cool in the weeks we’re away from them.

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