'Supergirl' Season 5 Episode 17: Lex Luthor is the villain to fear while Leviathan ends up being a damp squib
"When there's smoke, there's a Luthor."
Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist) utters these words in the promo for the next episode. The words ring quite true for Kara because Lex Luthor(Jon Cryer) has been a pain in the neck for four seasons or let's say a blunt injury trauma and now her ex-BFF Lena Luthor (Katie McGrath) is leaving no stone unturned to make her life miserable, again thanks to Lex's numerous manipulations.
And so, as the latest episode 'Deux Lex Machina' showed, Lex has been behind almost all the bad happenings in Season 5 and now a lot of the plotlines make sense. As Leviathan has been a rather disappointing big bad, it's glad that Lex took over the reins and will have a more dominating presence in the finale. A bit of a shame, as Leviathan did have an eerie and mysterious effect in the beginning and seemed like a new insidious villain that Kara had to fight. Well, now go away aliens, let Lex take over.
What appeared fragmented and disjointed before, is slowly and chunkily falling into place, thanks to a whole lot of exposition. Turns out that many of the incidents on the show in the post-Crisis world were not just random happenings and coincidences, but Lex was pulling the strings all along. As we know, ever since the Crisis and the destruction of the Multiverse, Lex was declared a hero on Earth and had even won a Nobel Prize (gag) for it. While Kara and her team remained highly dubious about this, the rest of the world didn't.
Of course, the viewers along with Kara could gradually piece the jigsaw puzzle together, because Lex being a good person is an impossible thought. And sure enough, he isn't. As he's a master of manipulation, he got Eve Tessmacher onto his side and it's on his instructions that she killed Alex and Kara's father, Jeremiah. Yes, remember how Granny Leviathan was hanging bodies like burritos? That's the one.
Lex's plans are straightforward: Ensure his sister Lena supports him, while Leviathan and Supergirl fight it out, and hopefully, the sinister organization destroys the Girl Of Steel. Also, we finally found out how Obsidian Tech's Virtual Reality gets to fit into any of this. It's a simple line: Lex needs it to kill Kara and in order to drive that point across, there's a whole lot of exposition for it.
To be fair, Lex makes for a more intimidating villain than Leviathan, even though it means that the showrunners would rather prefer to remain on familiar ground than explore unchartered territory. It works in their favor, but let's see for how long.
'Supergirl' airs on CW Mondays at 9 pm.