When Krypton was destroyed, the infant Kal-El and his older cousin Kara Zor-El were launched toward Earth in tiny space pods. Kara's went off course, however, and plunged into the timeless Phantom Zone for many years. When her pod finally landed, the infant had become a man: Superman, in fact.
Now an adult herself, Kara has embraced a similar role as Supergirl, protecting the people of National City from menaces both human and alien. Most recently, those enemies included her own aunt, who led a group of Kryptonian outcasts in a cabal to conquer Earth.
Shortly after that victory, a third Kryptonian pod crashed to Earth, and the fallout of that event, and of escalating human hostility to aliens in the wake of the Kryptonian coup attempt, will drive a lot of the action in this second season of the show. As will the arrival in National City of Lena Luthor, Lex Luthor's adopted sister and new director to the Luthor's financial empire. Lena claims to want to redeem the Luthor name, but can she be trusted?
The first season of Supergirl was rather uneven in script quality and had what I found to be a frustrating tendency to undermine its title character. This season is better on the second issue - with the exception of the execrable on every level episode 19 - but continues to suffer from the former. When the scripts embrace the cast's charisma and their talent for positivity and light comedy, all is good. When the writers try to put on their Big Time Drama pants, though, they tend to wear them on their heads. Episode 15 is painfully bad, and there's an extended sequence in episode 21 that we're presumably intended to find stirring and dramatic but is instead merely ridiculous.
The cast of this show (including this season's newcomers) and solid and they work hard. Hopefully one day they'll more consistently get the scripts their talent and efforts deserve.
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