Supergirl Episode 10 Recap
Using a terrifying talking clown and a yo-yo outfitted with daggers, a villain appropriately named Toyman escapes from prison. (Maybe he wouldn’t have escaped if the prison guards wouldn’t let him have toys.) A news report on this upsets Winn, then the FBI comes in to question him. Kara “accidentally” overhears the conversation and Winn finally admits: his father is the Toyman.
Winn remembers his father as a great man, one who was his best friend. That is, until his dad’s boss, Chester Dunholz, stole Winslow Schott Sr.’s toy design. Schott, a normally weak, even cowardly man, snapped, and sent a bomb to his boss hidden inside a teddy bear. Dunholz wasn’t in the office when it was delivered; the bomb took out six innocent people in the office.
Despite what he told Agent Chase, Winn’s father did make contact. He left his son a talking toy, asking him to meet at “their favorite spot.” Winn tells Chase, and they set up a sting to catch Schott. He meets his dad at a seaside arcade, where dad tells Winn he escaped prison because of him, his greatest achievement. The Feds move in, and Schott refuses to give himself up, so they open fire. Schott is not actually there; he is a hologram projected onto glass. One of Schott’s dolls tells Winn he should have come alone, and the stuffed animals on the walls emit poisonous gas. Supergirl shows up, inhales all the poison gas, and exhales it into the atmosphere, far above the city. No chance any of that is going to find its way back to Earth.
Winn is a little manic about the meeting, and the fact that his father will likely be killed the next time the FBI finds him. Supergirl insists on helping, and goes to the now-abandoned SlingSchott toys factory, expecting to find Schott there. He is, and the toy factory is exactly as creepy as you would expect an abandoned toy factory to be. The meet is brief, with Schott dropping Supergirl into a vat of quicksand laced with explosives, which will go off if she uses her laser eyes to free herself. And there is a child screaming for help from a small wooden box hanging from a moving track on the ceiling. Schott apparently forgot about Supergirl’s freezing breath, which she uses to climb out of the quicksand so she can rescue the child – which turns out to be a talking doll. This whole scene felt pointless. Toyman was just waiting for Supergirl to show up? It seems to be a strangely elaborate setup for the off-chance that Supergirl would come. Nothing was accomplished in this scene, either.
Anyway, Winn and Kara meet up at her apartment, and Winn is ready to throw in the towel and call Chase – who cares if they kill his dad? Kara calms him, soothes him with comparisons between the two of them: that they both have murderous relatives. Winn admits that he is worried that he will snap one day, just like his dad did. He leans in to kiss Kara, who pulls away immediately. She tries to tell him just to forget about it, but he can’t, and he leaves. Out in the hallway, Winn’s dad ethers him.
When Winn wakes, he is being held hostage by his dad, who again insists that he is doing this all for his kid, that it is Chester Dunholtz’s fault he went to prison, yadda yadda yadda. In order to bring the two of them closer together (the family that kills together…) Schott is sending Winn to kill Chester. He will be at the local toy convention, receiving an award, and Schott has made a special toy gun that will get right past security. To ensure Winn goes through with the murder, Schott tells him he has hidden ten bombs in various toys throughout the convention. If Winn doesn’t shoot Chester in the face, he will set off the bombs, killing hundreds. Because, at the end of the day, it’s all about getting some solid father-son time in.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, Winn begrudgingly goes to the convention and approaches Chester on the dais. At the last minute, he can’t go through with it and shoots the gun into the air. Supergirl arrives and he explains the bomb. She sees Toyman hiding beneath the stage, and the countdown has begun. With only five seconds before the bombs go boom, there is no way to collect them all. Supergirl rounds up all the convention-goers, herds them to the stage, sets off the sprinkler system, then freezes the water, sealing the people in a dome of ice. Somehow, this makeshift igloo protects everyone from the bombs: the ice shatters, taking the entirety of the blowback.
Then this episode get even worse: Supergirl confronts Toyman – but absolutely nothing happens. She confronts him in the basement, then we cut to a different scene. I actually had to go back and watch this because I thought maybe I stroked out and deleted a half page of notes. But no, there was no resolution to the Toyman story. I am going to assume he wasn’t caught, because a criminally insane toymaker does make for a good super villain – even if he is stuck in a stupid story. I really hated this episode. There was absolutely no logic in anything that happened. What a waste of an otherwise cool villain.
So anyway, after the toy convention, Kara approaches Winn at the office, where he is playing Minecraft. He admits that the reason he kissed her was because he was afraid that bottling things up was what made his dad go crazy, and he doesn’t want to risk the same fate. So he tells Kara that he is in love with her, has been since before she was Supergirl, and can no longer pretend he isn’t. Kara doesn’t want things to change; Winn doesn’t know what this means for them. For now, it means he doesn’t want to order Thai food with her.
Luckily there were other plots going on in tonight’s episode, one of which was interesting. Alex and Hank are trying to figure out how to get into Lord Tech and see what is being kept in room 52. Hank wants to go in guns blazing, but after some pressure from Alex, he agrees to put his shape shifting to good use. While Alex goes on a date with Max (promising to keep him out until 10pm), Hank takes on Max’s form and enters the facility. He talks with employees who have no idea he isn’t Max. When it comes time to enter room 52, he can’t get past the biometrics, so he uses his alien power to just pass through the door. Inside, he finds the Jane Doe with the black eyes, and a security guard bursts in. “Max” set off a silent alarm, but as soon as the guard sees it is just Max, he relaxes. That is, until “Max” wants to transport Jane Doe to a hospital. The guard gets an itchy trigger finger, and Hank attacks, knocks the guard out, and takes his memories. I guess it is better than killing him. Hank makes it out of Lord Tech and back to the DEO with some photos, but that is about it.
The guard has total memory loss, and the woman who spoke with “Max” before he went into room 52 has no idea what could have happened. All the security cameras have been wiped clean, but luckily Max has an invisible backup. He loads the video and sees “himself” entering the room supernaturally. Max, naturally suspicious, had planted a tiny camera in Alex’s purse. So when Alex goes over to Kara’s apartment for TV night, Kara is just coming back from a Supergirl mind-clearing flight, and Max sees that Supergirl is Alex’s sister. Thankfully, this is the last shot we see, which helps ease the treacle that came from Alex playfully telling her sister that she could tell Winn was in love with her because she is an expert in body language – oh, and she’s a human being.
You can watch a preview of the next episode, titled “Strange Visitor from Another Planet,” using the player below.
