Unity

Plot summary: Supergirl returns from Spring Break in Metropolis to discover Smallville is under the thrall of a monstrous alien entity.

  1. Notes and Trivia
  2. Recap
  3. Best Performance
  4. Episode Ranking
  5. Rogues Roundup

Notes and Trivia

Episode: 51 (S3.E10)

Original Air Date: May 15th, 1999

Directed: Shin-Ichi Tsuji (3)

Written: Paul Dini (13) & Rich Fogel (10)

Animation: Group T.A.C. Co., LTD. & Jade Animation (4)

Music: Lolita Ritmanis (15)

If you’re an insane person this is the final episode of Season 3. But there is no rational way to justify Season 4 being only three episodes, so I’m including them with Season 3.

Kara’s little joke about Barbara Gordon confirms this episode is set after ‘Girl’s Night Out‘

As always Superman is far more willing to murder alien creatures. And as always the censors are infinitely more relaxed about gore and body horror if it’s done to monsters or robots.

Recap

Kara heads to Metropolis to stay with her ‘cousin’ for Spring Break, bumping into a creepy looking preacher at the bus stop. No, she wasn’t allowed to fly for some reason.

After a montage of what she got up to in the big city it’s already time for Kara to return home, where the vibes are decidedly… off…

An eerily calm Ma and Pa Kent drive her out to a carnival tent emitting a strange green light, with other locals shambling inside like zombies.

Kara approaches too, but the creepy man from earlier, Reverend Amos Howell, greets her at the entrance, preaching of the wonders of ‘Unity’, claiming the entire town has embraced it.

Turns out there’s an eldritch horror alien monstrosity inside the tent though, and the entire congregation have tentacles emerging from various orifices to plug into the damn thing. FUN!

Rev. Howell demands Kara join them, but naturally she runs so she can instantly return as Supergirl. She attacks Howell, but notices her blows are felt by all the ensnared townsfolk, so relents.

Kara is able to free Ma Kent and flies her to STAR Labs where she and Clark learn parasites have attached to her brain and can’t be removed without killing her.

While Clark studies a piece of severed tentacle, Ma Kent wakes up and infects the scientists so they can all go after Supergirl. Fortunately Superman learned the parasites are weak to X-Rays and frees the infected.

Superman & Supergirl race back to Smallville and start X-Raying every tentacle in sight, but Rev. Howell mutates into another giant Unity creature and proves far more resistant.

Kara blows up a gas tank to weaken the original alien enough for Superman to finish off both in one shot. Naturally the Smallvillians are instantly freed, unaware of anything that took place.

Best Performance

Nicholle Tom is much improved on her debut episodes. Her open frustrations with living in rural Kansas and eagerness to be in the big city just feel slightly more natural this time around. Giving her a situation to really care about, trying to rescue The Kents and her foster home from an alien hive-mind helps a lot too. I actually believe Kara is deeply invested and desperate to save the day here.

Unfortunately for her, Stephen Root is perfectly cast as the creepy Reverend Howell. His various ‘sermons’ about the blissful tranquility of Unity are exactly what you want them to be, growing the legend of the alien creature before and after you see it. Dini & Fogel have a perfect handle on the verbiage, allowing Root to fully dive into it without being tripped up by the fantastical true nature of the character. Compare this to the clunky dialogue they task Miguel Ferrer with as Aquaman and how much that hampered his delivery. I’m sure he had even more in him than this, perhaps in a world where this becomes a straight-to-video movie and he gets even more monologuing to do.

I wish they’d pushed the ‘join us’ moment further when Kara gets infected at STAR Labs, hearing the voices of her loved ones calling her to stop resisting. It was a great idea, over too soon.

Episode Ranking

It kind of sucks Kara just vanished until now. I’m not saying she needed to be in every episode, but the Season 2 ending heavily implied she’d become a series regular, what with her having a disguise, Clark setting her up with Jimmy and Supergirl getting all the news coverage. She was even part of Mxyzptlk’s fake TV show to trick Bizarro into thinking they were all making fun of him! They could have at least had Clark address where she is at the start of the season. Alas.

They devote a surprising amount of time to just being quaint, with the first quarter of the episode being entirely about Kara’s life in Smallville, how much she struggles with ‘normies’, and her irritable trips to and from Metropolis. It’s not necessarily a bad thing by any means, as all of this is somewhat charming and inoffensive, but given how many episodes seem to run out of road before the end, it was a bit of a red flag to get so far in without much actually happening. It barely lasts 20 seconds amidst all that, but Kara telling Ma and Pa Kent about everything she’s been getting up to in Metropolis, complete with photos, is pretty heckin’ cute.

But the point of all that is to lull you into a cozy sense of security before they go full tilt with the body horror/gnarly creature design of the Unity reveal. Apparently this stuff was off-putting for some fans to the point Bruce Timm and Paul Dini have had to defend the episode. I guess this is a show for children. And when those creepy vibes arrive boy do they entrench themselves. Like a brain parasite! Every time one of the enslaved opens wide and unleashes a tentacle it’s genuinely a little bit unsettling, and they emphasise that by really lingering on these kinds of shots for longer than you’d expect. Then there’s Rev. Howell’s glorious transformation into… like… a second Unity? I’m actually somewhat shocked they got away with all this to be honest, but I’m glad they did.

Plus by committing so hard to that opening stretch they get to do the payoff with Kara deciding she’s into normcore now, which is a cute button to put on the episode. I’d also say that they managed to fit in exactly the right amount of everything by the end and it never felt rushed for time. There’s plenty of minutes to demonstrate their whacky creature design, do the STAR Labs stuff and then gave a satisfying final confrontation. Could they have done with 2 more minutes for that standoff? Sure! But the final episode is plenty good.

Lolita Ritmanis’ score perfectly fits the atmosphere they’re going for throughout, from the cheery disposition of Kara’s spring break, to the unsettling ‘disturbance in a small town’ vibes before you know what’s going on, to the full-tilt pomp and surprises of a zombie/alien story. Tremendous work. Some of the best in STAS. It’s not just the music, as the hissing sounds the drones make while trying to infect people with tentacles is perfectly unnerving too. Ditto the squelching noises as they pass… fluids?… into Unity.

Not to keep beating a dead horse but Group TAC/Jade episodes are just distractingly low detail a lot of the time. Kara’s face was barely moving during her conversation with The Kents at the start of the episode, and when she returns home to the empty kitchen it looks incredibly rough. They’re generally solid on the ‘big sexy’ stuff in each episode, such as the sea creatures in the Aquaman episode, and Unity’s gross-out factor here, but it feels like that comes at the expense of them hugely phoning it in where they can. Or perhaps Group TAC do the good bits and Jade do the shit? Anyway, they’re so good at animating Unity that this is easily the best looking episode they’ve turned in, albeit at the last possible opportunity.

It’s just a tremendous script, paced expertly and stuffed full of wonderful little moments. For instance, I really loved Kara tying a bunch of the tentacles into a knot both to immobilise them and make them easier to hit with X-Rays. Or the methodical way in which the two superheroes go about trying to stop the aliens. That nobody ever has to verbalise that hurting one of the Unity drones hurts all the others is a nice touch. Dini & Fogel are just on the top of their game and everything came together to deliver one of the best episodes in the show.

  1. Obsession
  2. The Late Mr. Kent
  3. Brave New Metropolis
  4. Apokalips… Now!
  5. Unity (NEW ENTRY)
  6. World’s Finest
  7. Livewire
  8. Double Dose
  9. Fun and Games
  10. Warrior Queen
  11. Knight Time
  12. Father’s Day
  13. Little Girl Lost
  14. The Hand of Fate
  15. The Last Son of Krypton
  16. Ghost in the Machine
  17. Stolen Memories
  18. Action Figures
  19. The Prometheon
  20. In Brightest Day…
  21. Tools of the Trade
  22. The Main Man
  23. Mxzypixilated
  24. Blasts from the Past
  25. Target
  26. The Way of All Flesh
  27. Solar Power
  28. Where There’s Smoke
  29. Protoype
  30. My Girl
  31. A Little Piece of Home
  32. Feeding Time
  33. New Kids in Town
  34. Superman’s Pal
  35. Little Big Head Man
  36. A Fish Story
  37. Speed Demons
  38. Two’s a Crowd
  39. Absolute Power
  40. Identity Crisis
  41. Heavy Metal
  42. Monkey Fun
  43. Bizarro’s World

Rogues Roundup

Unity (Stephen Root) (first appearance)

I’m obviously packaging all of Unity’s drones and its main mouthpiece, Rev. Howell, up with the creature itself. After all, they are all one.

Superb villain. Belongs in the kinds of schlocky low budget horror movies I grew up watching and miss dearly. Too many jump scares, not enough 90s/00s teen energy. The Faculty, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jeepers Creepers, these kinds of films. It comes with an implied extensive backstory of running this play on multiple worlds before coming to earth, and by possessing people it means it can also gab a little with our heroes and help put the audience on edge. Reverend Howell has a striking enough design and voice actor to have been a villain in his own right, but by making him Unity’s primary method of communication (taking metatextual advantage of the inherent cultural iconography of a midwestern/southern baptist) you really get something.

Even without all that, it’s just really fucking gross and I mean that as the highest of compliments. The tentacles everywhere are one thing, but when they start pulsating, sending lord knows what fluids back and forth between the creature and its drones… deliciously disgusting. Even when Superman rips the Howell Creature in half it just sprouts more tentacles from the wound! And the fucking things melt when hit by X-Rays to boot.

I have no choice but to Stan. It’s a top tier monster design, it’s intellectually engaging, they got a great voice performance to set the thing off and the entire episode – writing, animation and music – serve to elevate Unity. Top 5. Easily. Honestly if Luthor’s final appearance is bad it’s going over him.

Volcana (Peri Gilpin (second appearance)

Shouldn’t even count as an appearance and arguably damages her ‘brand’ given the lack of explanation as to how she escaped her island prison, but hey. She’s fun even for a moment, and serves as a nice way to demonstrate Supergirl’s power.

  1. Livewire
  2. Darkseid
  3. Toyman
  4. Lex Luthor
  5. Unity (NEW ENTRY)
  6. The Joker
  7. Queen Maxima
  8. Parasite
  9. Metallo
  10. Karkull
  11. Brainiac
  12. Mr. Mxyzptlk
  13. Harley Quinn
  14. Granny Goodness
  15. Kalibak
  16. Volcana (–)
  17. The Gotham Rogues
  18. Lobo
  19. Luminus
  20. Sinestro
  21. Project Firestorm
  22. The Female Furies
  23. DeSaad
  24. Detective Bowman
  25. Bruno Mannheim (and Intergang!)
  26. Steppenwolf
  27. The Preserver
  28. Bizarro
  29. Kanto
  30. Mercy Graves
  31. The Prometheon
  32. De’Cine
  33. Mala & Jax-Ur
  34. Corey Mills
  35. Earl Garver
  36. Titano
  37. Weather Wizard

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