General thoughts - despite some poor directing, this was much better than the last two eps.
-I've mentioned before how I love it whenever this show decides to showcase Kara's science/tech smarts (a pretty significant part of her character in the comics that the show usually downplays), and the early portion of this ep was chock full of that, so yay.
-Still loving Miss Tessmacher's new role. I kinda want her to be a regular next season.
-Alura's new outfit is awesome.
-Reign's intended purpose on Earth now seems a bit murky. First she was cleansing the world of sinners, but now they're terraforming? I could understand the "moral cleansing" before setting up a new society or something like that, but they literally said this episode that the terraforming would kill ALL the humans, so...why bother wiping out the sinners first?
-Alex taking on the Kryptonians with Kryptonite was pretty cool...
-...but that scene afterwards where the agent guy gave his life was just very poorly done. Including the bit where Kara needlessly tossed them the blood before attempting to destroy it. She could have done literally anything else before destroying and it would have been fine, lol.
-I hope Brainiac 5 makes a new and improved version of Winn's belt at some point. Otherwise, they totally stole one of Brainy's coolest inventions in the comics and gave it to Winn.
-Armen Kevorkian is a solid director when it comes to the action/VFX stuff...which makes sense since he's usually a VFX supervisor. But damn, he really needs to work on his dramatic and basic actor-directing, as there were so many needlessly awkward moments here: When Selena's home collapses, it cuts straight to a shot of Kara and Mon-El standing there like nothing ever happened and then immediately to Alura saying they needed to get Thara help, all within the span of like, 2 seconds. There were ZERO shots of anyone actually reacting and getting their bearings after surviving a major explosion, so the moment never got a chance to land at all. Then there's that shot of Ruby dropping the pointless object she reached for that gave away their location to the Kryptonian lady. That shot was so clumsy, it looked like Ruby literally dropped the object
intentionally. Like, the actress practically threw the thing down. A better director would have gone for another take of that and made it seems like she was fumbling because she was scared, and just knocked the object or something. And of course, there's that whole scene with that random agent guy's sacrifice that I've already covered. So yeah, a lot of major moments that were quite poorly executed from a directing standpoint. I'm glad Jesse Warn is directing the finale. His action directing can be a bit spotty at times, but he gets great stuff from the actors and usuall
y nails everything else.
Regarding next week's promo: OMG, how many times are they gonna use that same shot of the ground cracking from the season premiere in their promos for other eps? It's like their go-to shot for "TERROR IN THE STREETS!" And I feel like I've seen it in at least 4 promos this season...including last week! They seriously need to let that shot go already. If it shows up in any promos for S4, I'm storming the CW marketing offices and deleting the footage myself.
EDIT: misslane has just pointed out that Ruby DID intentionally drop that object to distract the Kryptonian lady, so I retract my criticism of Mr. Kevorkian's directing at that one point.
