Supergirl Review: The Quest For Peace (Season 4 Episode 22)

Supergirl Season 4 Episode 22, “The Quest For Peace,” concludes the season with a heartbreaking end for one character, a big reveal for another, and a whole lot of questions for season 5. 

Supergirl Season 4 Episode 21, “Red Dawn” ends with Lex’s plan to stage an attack on the United States only to make himself the hero who stops it successfully being put into action. “The Quest For Peace” begins just prior to that big public display showing what Lex was up to while Kara and Red Daughter were fighting and how the different pieces of his plan came together. 

It also shows the moment Red Daughter realizes she’s been betrayed by her “Alex.” That moment and the scene that follows when Lex berates and belittles her while he locks her in one of his alien power siphoning contraptions just broke my heart.

Red Daughter’s story is one of the more tragic we’ve seen on Supergirl. She is a complete innocent taken advantage of and manipulated to further the goals, first of the Kaznian government and then of Lex Luthor only to die without ever getting the chance to really live and sacrificing her life to save Kara’s being the only decision she ever gets to make freely.

The tragedy and injustice of that hurts and makes you angry on her behalf, a feeling only deepened by Melissa Benoist’s vulnerable portrayal of her. Yet, I can’t help but think if we had gotten more time with her this season her death would have been even more impactful.

There are a few things I wish would have happened this season but mostly I wish we’d had more time with the Red Daughter storyline. Red Daughter is a character so full of depth and potential and as this episode in particular shows, we only get to scratch the surface with her.

The rest of the episode moves at a pretty quick pace. The team is able to find Lex’s location thanks to some astral projection from Dreamer, Alex gives Ben Lockwood a very satisfying beat down, and Kara is able to defeat Lex with that sacrificial assist from Red Daughter. 

It’s after the season’s big bads are defeated that the shocking, possibly game-changing reveal happens. Escaping to his layer after losing to Kara, Lex is confronted by Lena who, without hesitation, removes the Haranel from her brother and then shoots him in cold blood saying that the world would never be safe with him in it. 

With his dying breath, Lex reveals that Kara is Supergirl and taunts Lena with the fact that all of her friends have been lying to her. The confusion and betrayal is evident on Lena’s face as she takes the information in. 

This is obviously going to be a big storyline next season because despite playing it cool at game night towards the end of the episode the last scene of Lena drinking a cracking the glass of a framed picture of her, Kara, and Alex makes it abundantly clear she is anything but ok. 

Supergirl has always played with the idea of Lena going evil and the damage it would cause if she ever found out Kara is Supergirl, especially if she found out from anyone other than Kara, but they always managed to stay on the right side of that line. They’ve kept Lena in grey areas without falling into a tired storyline about an evil Luthor and her character has been more interesting because of it. 

I hope that this doesn’t turn into that moment where they finally have Lena cross over into villain territory, or that they completely unravel all the progress Lena made with Kara/Supergirl this season. 

Yes, have Lena be hurt. Bring on the angst but please do something more interesting than simply turning Kara and Lena into enemies because of this. Please let the writing for Lena next season continue to be more complicated and nuanced than that.

Like every season of Supergirl on the CW so far, this season is the tale of drastically different quality between the pre-winter hiatus episodes and the post-winter hiatus episodes. The big difference this season is where other season started strong only to stumble to the finish line, this season struggled early on and came back very strong after the hiatus.

If you’re going to have an uneven season it’s always better to finish on a high note so ultimately I’d say this season is an improvement on the last two season and mostly a successful one. 

In truth, almost all of the problems with Season 4 go back to one thing, too much time spent on Ben Lockwood. Even before we knew that Lockwood would turn out to no more than a pawn in Lex Luthor’s plan the amount of time they spent to trying to flesh out his character was frustrating. Finding out that he wasn’t even really the season’s big bad makes it pointless. 

We didn’t need to know or understand this character to the extent that we were asked to. His character doesn’t change, his motivations are never difficult to understand or even that interesting and yet he took up so much space in the first half of the season that more compelling characters like Alex, Red Daughter, Dreamer, and even Col. Haley were more or less pushed to the periphery.

Once he was no longer centered and just fills the role of the belligerent bad guy and Lex Luthor’s chess piece the quality of the episodes get decidedly better. The second half of the season has wonderful storylines for every character and gives the Danvers sisters their most poignant storyline since season one and some of their best scenes since the first half of season two. 

It’s hard not to lament the season that could have been if the first half was as strong as the second half but ultimately the good in season 4 outweighs the bad and I am, as I always am, cautiously optimistic for what Supergirl has in store next season.

Stray Thoughts

• I’m relieved that James’s time as a superpowered human is over. It was fine for a short storyline but I just don’t think he is a character that needs to have superpowers permanently. I like him much better as a normal human and I’m even interested to see what happens with his character for the first time in a long time now that his sister is staying in town. 
• As glad as I am to have Brainy back and see him with Nia, that bit about him reverting to his less emotional self ultimately felt a bit tacked on unless they are planning to explore that further in season 5, which I hope they do. 
• It will also be fun to watch Brainy and Nia awkwardly and endearingly explore their new relationship next season. 
• I’m happy Alex has a new love interest, and I’m completely onboard with Kelly being that love interest but I would have preferred if they had held off on their first kiss until next season so we could actually watch their romance progress a little more. We’ve seen them getting closer over the last few episodes but I’m not sure I bought that they were quite there yet. Plus, who doesn’t want to see Alex nervously fret about asking Kelly out or confide in Kara about her new crush?
• Leviathan, the big bad set up at the end of the episode seems intriguing and as an added bonus it seems to mean we might get to see more of Miss Tessmacher next season.

What did you think of this episode of Supergirl? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Supergirl airs Sundays at 8/7 c on The CW.

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