Nightmare Fuel / Supergirl (2015)

Girl of Steel... no more.

Warning: Spoilers Off applies to Nightmare Fuel pages. Proceed at your own risk.

Season 1

Episode 1 - Pilot

• For Kara, she had to live through and see her planet's destruction while in an escape pod. Can you imagine being aware of getting stuck in space for twenty-four years, and there's nothing that you can do about it?

Episode 2 - Stronger Together

• The Hellgrammite's insectoid mouth is disturbing enough as it is. But the moment two hapless chemical workers walk in on him, they're killed without warning.
• Imagine the amount of collateral damage Supergirl has done through inexperience. An oil spill that causes everlasting damage to the environment can definitely bring nightmares to the city that are forced to clean up her mess through taxpayer's money. If Kara didn't listen to Cat's criticism about Supergirl's reckless heroics, National City would be destroyed by the Girl of Steel.

Episode 3 - Fight or Flight

• You know Reactron is a nightmare to face when not even Superman himself could defeat a deranged Nuclear Mutant.
• Of all the villains seen on the show so far, with the possible exception of the Black Mercy, Reactron is the one who has come the closest to killing Supergirl and, and according to James, he once even came close to killing Superman, and that's despite the fact that he's just a guy in a suit.
• Reactron's backstory reveals how his wife was killed in a nuclear accident, thus scarring him both physically and emotionally. It's even worse when Reactron's dying from the radiation poisoning.

Episode 4 - How Does She Do It?

• There are two bombs: One in National City's airport, the other on Maxwell Lord's newest train. Supergirl is only fast enough to disarm one bomb while the other goes off. If you know you're near the bomb site but you don't know if Supergirl can save you on time, wouldn't that be frightening?
  • Adding more to the fear is Cat's son Carter unwittingly got on Lord's newest train, unaware that there is a bomb planted aboard the train. Imagine if the train exploded with Carter inside, Cat would be devastated as a mother.
• Knox himself is revealed to be the bomber of the city, and he did so because he couldn't pay medical bills for his sick daughter. Poor man just couldn't face his family again after committing a mass bombing, so he suicide-bombed parts of the train.

Episode 5 - Livewire

• A mugger attempted to rape Leslie while she's trying to figure out how to use her newfound powers. If Leslie didn't have her electrokinesis, she would be just like the vulnerable and helpless women getting robbed and raped in a dark corner of an alleyway.

Episode 6 - Red Faced

• Kara unleashing her years of pent-up rage on Red Tornado with her heat vision is disturbing for two reasons. One, the raw anger Kara shows when unleashing her power on the android, in particular the feral scream that she lets loose, coupled with her overall visage. Second, it is disconcerting to imagine a world where the Girl of Steel is not fettered by her morals and decides to kill her enemies, as it would be all too easy for her to do so.

Episode 7 - Human for A Day

• Kara's depowered, and it's a terrible timing for her to be human due to National City experiencing an earthquake. Without Supergirl, crime has run rampant, and the people that needed her the most are still waiting for their savior.

Episode 8 - Hostile Takeover

• Cat is cornered by a blackmail that threatens her position as a CEO. Imagine someone digging up dirt on you, and they can exploit all the worth you have built over the years of struggling to make ends meet.

Episode 9 - Blood Bonds

• James being captured by Maxwell Lord and receiving a beatdown. When Lord holds up a giant wrench, James flinches for the incoming smackdown, only for his camera to be destroyed. Lord then warns James that the next time he catches the photographer, it won't be just the camera that gets smashed by the wrench.
• General Lane tortures Astra with a concentrated dose of Kryptonite injections as a means of interrogation. You can hear both Kara and Astra scream from the agonizing radiation the Kryptonite emits.

Episode 10 - Childish Things

• Simply to start with, Toyman is, quite simply, terrifying. The idea of taking things that would normally be seen as light and innocent and turning them into violent, deadly weapons is just jarring. Combine this with a sociopathic and indiscriminate disregard for human life, as well as a mind brilliant enough to almost casually outwit both police and Supergirl, and you have one of the scariest villains on this show to date.
• J'onn is revealed to have the ability to remove memories, which is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique since he can't adjust it at all and it's a complete wipe every time. This is the reason he's so reluctant to use any of his abilities even now that Kara knows about him.
  • Maxwell Lord's aide notes that there's severe tissue damage in the unlucky guard's brain. This implies that J'onn used his intangibility power to physically scramble his brain from the inside.
• The ending: Lord slipped a camera onto Alex's shoes when they were together and thus witnessed her and Kara talking about Kara being Supergirl. On top of that, he also overheard them talk about J'onn disguising himself as Hank Henshaw.

Episode 11 - Strange Visitor from Another Planet

• We're introduced to the White Martians, who enslaved and then exterminated the entire Green Martian race except for J'onn J'onzz. J'onn twice freezes up at the intensity of the memories when one of them comes looking for him, and they have the same camouflage abilities that let them appear to be anyone. And while this one ends up captured, it promises that thousands more are on their way.
  • J'onn's flashback reveals how the Green Martians were oppressed, tortured, and then killed by the White Martians. The most terrifying trauma for J'onn is that he personally witnessed his wife and two daughters being sent to the furnace and burned until they died. Not to mention the Holocaust imagery.

Episode 12 - Bizarro

• Bizarro's face after the Kryptonite turns it chalk-white with dark grey spots where she was shot.

• Maxwell Lord's behavior around Bizarro is more subtle, but it includes him kissing her hand, stroking her, and going into a state of Tranquil Fury when she's disfigured by the Kryptonite. He's all but getting off on the fact that he has his own personal Supergirl that will do whatever he wants.
• The thing is that landed in Kara's apartment. Any fan of Alan Moore will recognize that thing. And it's definitely Nightmare Fuel material.
• Melissa Benoist's chilling performance as Bizarro. She only ever says a few words at a time, yet it's immediately clear that she lacks any of the warmth we've come to expect from Kara. And to make it worse, this was once a human girl that Lord turned into a science experiment.
  • And he has done this to six other girls, the implication being that Bizarro was the only one to survive the procedure.

Episode 13 - For the Girl Who Has Everything

• The Black Mercy parasite is so deadly that once the victim is fully immersed into their ideal world, there is no way to remove the plant until death.

Episode 14 - Truth, Justice, and the American Way

• It's one thing to be incarcerated in a galactic prison; it's another to have a murderous vigilante who plays judge, jury, and executioner on helpless aliens. Sure, the executed aliens did indeed commit crimes in the past, but we have seen at least one alien former prisoner who reformed and wishes nothing more than peaceful living.

Episode 15 - Solitude

• Indigo demonstrates how dangerously reliant National City is on computers. Not only does Indigo hack into a confidential adult affair website, she spreads chaos as she disrupts traffic lights, infiltrates a general's smartphone, and transports herself from one computer screen to another. She is a cyber terrorist at a completely different caliber, and who knows how much havoc she could spread if she actually succeeded in causing a nuclear fallout?

Episode 16 - Falling

• Kara gets hit with Red Kryptonite, letting us see just how dangerous an evil Supergirl would be. All those powers basically let her hold the entire city hostage, with stunts ranging from flicking peanuts with lethal velocity to throwing Cat off her balcony, all simply because It Amused Me. Maxwell Lord is actually moved to put his full effort toward fixing the mess he created when he sees how bad it is, and the situation finally becomes so dire that J'onn reveals himself to the world to stop it.
• Even worse is Kara's own realization that the Red K didn't turn her evil; it just unleashed all the base impulses she's always felt, meaning deep down, she really did enjoy misusing her powers and especially her harsh words to Alex and Jimmy.
  • Meaning she's probably fantasized about murdering Cat at least a few times, as well.
• J'onn reveals himself to stop Kara. His reward? His own organization has to arrest and put him in prison simply for being an alien.

Episode 17 - Manhunter

• Wherever Project Cadmus is, Colonel Harper makes it clear that it's not a typical boogey place like Area 51. Instead, it's a secret facility designed to experiment on aliens in all inhumane methods possible for the sake of weaponizing any alien abilities. If J'onn's Mind Rape powers are successfully replicated, who knows how much more terrifying the U.S. Army can be in terms of arsenal?
• Invoked by Harper during his interrogation of J'onn, given that the alien has pretended to be his best friend for years, even going inside his house and hanging out around his children.
• Kara's first attempt at heroism worked out well. However, lacking experience with Super-Strength, her method was to pull the mother out of the car and hurl her aside in order to get to the trapped baby. It's quite incredible fortune that nothing went wrong with that; had anything gone slightly worse, Kara would have ended up associating the use of her powers not with helping people but paralyzing or killing them.

Episode 18 - Worlds Finest

• It's bad enough that Supergirl has to deal with one metahuman criminal, and it's even worse when there are two of them who are after her blood.
• Apparently, Siobhan and her family are cursed by a banshee's hatred to the point where people will suffer; if any of the Smythe women ever felt wronged, the curse will grow until the person who caused the grief dies. In fact, Siobhan's aunt implied that killing someone that is the source of her anger is the only way to quell the banshee curse, and Siobhan's got a dead uncle to prove that it works...
• The people of National City may form a protective wall around Supergirl, but can you imagine what would happen to all of them if Supergirl didn't wake up in time to stop Livewire and Silver Banshee?
• Barry can now jump between dimensions on his own. Because Zoom is faster than Barry, Zoom probably can jump worlds, too. (Flash has been stating Zoom uses the now-closed portals, but that may be false.) In fact, probably the only reason why Zoom hasn't jumped to National City is Kara's powers don't come from the Speed Force.
• By the end of the episode, we finally get a glimpse of Project Myriad: Everybody, save for Kara, falls into a trance and silently marches with army-like precision to god knows where. That includes James, who Kara just kissed.

Episode 19 - Myriad

• We get to see Myriad in full effect, and it is horrifying. The entire city, except for Kara, Maxwell Lord, and Cat (the latter two protected by Lord's technology), has been reduced to mindless drones bound to do Non's bidding. And then we see it even affect Superman...
  • Non demonstrates his power by making Winn, James, and another co-worker jump off the CatCo balconies, forcing Kara into a Sadistic Choice.
• Lord's big plan to stop Myriad? Set off the equivalent of a Kryptonite nuke, which will kill all Kryptonians in the city, render it inhospitable to them for fifty years, and oh yeah, kill roughly 8 percent of the human population. Which, as Cat points out, is over 300,000 people.

Episode 20 - Better Angels

• Non's plan from "Myriad" gets taken up to eleven. Before, he was just planning to mind-control everybody on Earth. This time, he means to commit genocide (which would leave only the aliens with Super-Toughness alive) and leave Kara and J'onn alone on a dead planet (again).
• General Lane giving Maxwell Lord an Omegahedron.

Season 2

Episode 1 - The Adventures of Supergirl

• Lena Luthor's life as the new CEO of LuthorCorp is a rough start for her. Not only is her company in a PR crisis due to her brother Lex's criminal activities, her life's constantly endangered by Lex's hired gun John Corben. If it wasn't for Superman and Supergirl saving her, Lena would not even live long enough for this episode.

Episode 2 - The Last Children of Krypton

• The show really, really does Metallo justice, as he becomes the darkest, most brutal of the villains so far. He's not only vicious in some of the crushing attacks he makes against both Superman and Supergirl, but he is still John Corben, professional assassin, with cold blue eyes and a self-assured sneer.
• The Cadmus scientist played by Brenda Strong is a chilling Mad Scientist, almost bordering on Giggling Villain. Want more NF? Her son was Superman's greatest villain.
• Cadmus has access to technology that can augment people so much they can each take on two super-powered beings. How did they get it? The DEO has a mole.
• One Cadmus scientist protests making a second Metallo as they don't have any volunteers. His boss smiles she has "the perfect candidate" in mind. The poor scientist is then grabbed by security and dragged off screaming. At least Corben was dying and had no idea what was going to happen; this poor guy is aware of it.
• Subtle, but still definitely nightmarish: At one point, Superman and J'onn look they're about to get into an actual fight in the middle of the DEO. Sure, Winn is busy squeeing, but imagine being a normal human in that situation.

Episode 3 - Welcome to Earth

• Lena's alien detector may have been invented out of good intentions, but having that device available in the mass public can potentially cause discrimination towards the exposed aliens living in peace. It's bad enough that humans are racists towards each other; who's to say that the innocent aliens won't be the next targets for lynch mobs?

Episode 4 - Survivors

• The entire premise of the episode, really. There's a secret, illegal fighting circuit, attended by National City's most powerful, where they make aliens fight to the death. It's so well-funded they have their own hit squads, and Roulette is out within hours of being arrested.
• As M'gann recounts her experience at the White Martians' concentration camps, J'onn understands that she needs more time to cope with being the last survivor of Mars. Little did he know that M'gann herself is a White Martian, the same species that nearly wiped out the Green Martians to near extinction.
  • M'gann's White Martian form is terrifying.
• Daxam being hit by thousands of meteorites raining down from Krypton's destruction.

Episode 5 - Crossfire

• Cadmus strikes once again by terrorizing National City through their fear propaganda. This time, they claim street criminals armed with high-tech guns are the result of aliens invading the planet and their technology has fallen into the wrong hands. This reflects on the controversies that America's Second Amendment brought up; one of the CatCo reporters comments on how he feels safer if he could arm himself with the same gun to protect himself.

Episode 6 - Changing

• So much to choose from in an episode that forgot it wasn't a horror movie. A few memorable moments include:
  • The Nothing Is Scarier nature of the attack that left Dr. Jones the sole survivor. You don't know what's attacking everyone, you just know that they can't stop it, and that when it gets you, there will be screaming. Much screaming.
  • The alien creature inside Jones forcing its way out of his mouth isn't pretty. Forcing its way back into his body through the ear later is less pretty.
  • At this point, you relax when you find out it's merely Jones sucking the Life Energy out of people. However, instead of simply weakening until they die (yes, he does get to kill people), they visibly wither and decay. Even Supergirl is left looking like a withered near-corpse until she can recover. Also, this version is much more powerful than in most adaptations. Kara takes days to heal, and J'onn is left barely alive, and it didn't take a long time for two of the strongest heroes in The DCU to be left in that condition.
  • Then, Jones's final transformation comes. The change is far from a pretty sight, and it doesnot end with a purple guy with white spandex. He becomes a ten-foot Humanoid Abomination with too many mouths and two tongues in the central one, ever-shifting as he constantly mutates.
  • Let's not mince words: someone on the Supergirl staff had just seen The Thing (1982), and thought it could be adapted into a nifty episode (or two, see below).

Episode 7 - The Darkest Place

• Every moment in Project Cadmus, and every line by Lillian Luthor. The episode is appropriately named.
• Cyborg Superman. Not the fact he's a nigh-unstoppable monster, but Hank's personality. The pure hate from his attitude and deep, metallic voice is just chilling.
• J'onn being told by M'gann that he's turning into a White Martian and can't do anything about it.

Episode 8 - Medusa

• Mon-El has apparently pissed off a seriously dangerous group of aliens, and they want him "no matter how many stars [they have to] burn".
• J'onn transforming into a White-Green Martian hybrid. The initial transformation is scary enough to Kara, but when he goes all-out, even Henshaw is terrified.
  J'onn: You're finally right, Henshaw. I am a monster.

Episode 9 - Supergirl Lives

• Oh, you thought because the crossover was done that we'd never meet the Dominators again? Well, the one that shows up in this episode to buy off humans as SLAVES would like to disprove that notion.

Episode 11 - The Martian Chronicles

• The episode is a Whole-Plot Reference to the legendarily terrifying The Thing (1982), with a White Martian infiltrating the DEO and able to take on any shape after the staff locks themselves inside with it. And then it turns out there's two of them.
  • And unlike most situations with shapeshifting infiltrators, due to their telepathic link with the person they're duplicating, most of the Spot the Imposter tricks based on knowing the person won't work.
  • "You got me" is a small but extremely chilling moment that is a testament to Jeremy Jordan's acting.

Episode 12 - Luthors

• When Metallo is reaching closer and closer to meltdown, both Alex and Winn realize they are completely helpless in deterring Kara from running away from a Kryptonite blast that would kill her.
• Given that a strange man materializes in her apartment declaring his love and proposing to her outright, all while in front of Mon-El as well, Kara's shock is heavily warranted.

Episode 13 - Mr. & Mrs. Mxyzptlk

• Mxyzptlk animating the crystalline statue of Jor-El is a Mood Whiplash for the generally silly tone of the episode.
• Considering the fact that Mxyzptlk is a full-on Reality Warper, Mon-El's worry is entirely justified. One shudders to think of what he could've done to Mon-El and to Earth if he were more vengeful and less mischievous.
• Even worse than all of that? This is just one member of an entire species. One interdimensional imp did all that and Kara is only able to beat him by exploiting his crush on her. Imagine if the species as a whole ever decided to conquer the universe. Earth and probably every other planet in existence would be screwed.

Episode 15 - Exodus

• The opening scene has a police officer stop a family of aliens for an allegedly broken taillight, then has Cadmus agents physically grab the aliens and toss them into the back of a truck while they are screaming for help.
• Alex going completely Jack Bauer on the Cadmus guard. One wonders if Alex would have stopped had J'onn not intervened...

Episode 18 - Ace Reporter

• The nanobots have a dangerous defect that overrides human free will.
• If Lena does end up pulling a Face–Heel Turn, this episode shows that it would be bad for literally everyone. And given the next episode, that possibility seems to be looking more likely...

Episode 19 - Alex

• The person you love most in the world is kidnapped and being held hostage. Meanwhile, the other person, who loves her just as much as you, is constantly getting in the way of the proper way of getting her back. It also may or may not be your fault. What a nightmare.
• Being forced into a Sadistic Choice between saving your sister/girlfriend and letting a murderer go free of jail is pretty nasty.
• How close Alex was to drowning when Maggie and Kara saved her. If they'd been just a minute later, the ending would have looked very different...

Season 3

Episode 2 - Triggers

• The episode's villain, Psy, is essentially Pennywise, able to call up anyone's greatest fear. In Kara's case, this results in an extended POV shot of her escape from the exploding Krypton, volcanic eruptions all around, followed by the pod starting to spin out of control so she gets some good looks at the whole thing going up.

Episode 4 - The Faithful

• Samantha's vision. One second, she's just minding her own business in the bathroom, looking into the mirror. The next, she suddenly sees Kryptonian symbols all over her face and a creepy, hooded monstrous woman looming over her while speaking cryptically.

Episode 8 - Crisis On Earth-X, Part 1

• See Crisis on Earth-X

Episode 9 - Reign

• Reign slaughters a gang of drug dealers in horrifically brutal fashion. It's shot in flashes and shadows including a look at one guy from the point of view of Reign as it all turns red to fry him.
• Reign does her take on the iconic shirt-opening... and it's chilling.
• The entire thing, really. Samantha clearly has no idea what her other persona is up to and not realizing she's being used for mass murder and even going after one of her closest friends.
  • And her daughter unaware of her mother turning into this monster.
• Reign beats the living crap out of Supergirl in a way that no antagonist has managed to do in any other episode. She beats her fair and square, no trickery, no Kryptonite, nothing. Kara is actually bleeding and she's barely alive.

Season 4

Episode 1 - American Alien

• Supergirl finds the Graves siblings' base and discovers, to her shock and horror, a bunch of internet chat-rooms full of anti-alien humans. One, who is a mother, asks for instructions on how to make a bomb in the most casual matter. Another post talks about ways to attack a school that has an alien enrolled. As Kara notes to J'onn later on, these aren't the supervillains she deals with; these are regular people, the type of people that Kara saves as Supergirl on a daily basis.
  • Also a frightening case of Truth in Television as chat-rooms like these sadly do exist in real life for all kinds of racists.

Episode 2 - Fallout

• Even some members of the DEO hate Marsdin after she's outed as an alien. That a group who worked for a Martian and with a Kryptonian and a Daxamite can turn on a whim like that shows the problems are greater than Kara or Alex can handle.
• Kara says she believes people will always lean toward the better side of things. Alex responds by showing her that in one day after Marsdin was outed as an alien, the number of alien hate websites across the country has tripled.
• Brainy is ordering pizza from a place he's been at several times and the owner welcoming him easily. When Brainy's image inducer fails, the owner, without hesitation, calls in a bunch of guys to take out this "traitor."

Episode 3 - Man of Steel

• Watching as some truly bad breaks, and the need to blame someone for them all, transforms the decent Ben Lockwood into a anti-alien fanatic.

Episode 5 - Parasite Lost

• Colonel Haley revealing her Fantastic Racism toward aliens at the end, which also makes one wonder if President Baker, who appointed Haley in the first place, is actually anti-alien himself.

Episode 6 - Call to Action

• We get to see what is essentially the Supergirl equivalent of Kristallnacht, with Malevolent Masked Men clandestinely marking alien houses to then lynch on Thanksgiving night. The most horrific example is a young child seeing as her father is assaulted by the men, in their own home! Good thing Spike shows up.

Episode 15 - O Brother, Where Art Thou?

• For three seasons, we've known of Lex Luthor in the background, the specter of him only intensifying once Lena debuted. Eventually, it was announced we'd get an Earth-38 Lex, catching everyone off-guard with the casting of Jon Cryer, known to that point as being Lenny Luthor, the comic relief of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. In interviews, Cryer said he took the role to try and make up for Superman IV... and he delivered. Boy, did he deliver. This isn't the Villain with Good Publicity Lex, he of politics or real estate. This isn't the Smallville Lex at his Start of Darkness. This is The Unfettered Mad Scientist Lex; defined by his hatred for Superman, having lost his reputation and his company, he has nothing to lose. We see it all on display in the flashback that opens the episode. What's his Evil Plan? Turning Earth's sun red just so he can kill one person regardless of how it'll endanger the rest of the planet. This is unquestionably one of the darkest versions of Lex Luthor ever put to a visual medium.
• In the present, Lex is behind the attack on James, to push Lena to finish her Harun-El cure. When shooting James wasn't enough to motivate his half-sister, he arranges for the hospital to suffer a blackout. Because he doesn't want to test an unstable cure on himself.

Episode 16 - The House of L

• In a flashback, Lex is being convicted of mass murder and various other crimes. The judge is sentencing him to "thirty-one consecutive life sentences" when she starts coughing. Lex dryly states "Maybe we should make it thirty-two?" At which point, the judge, jury, and prosecutors also start coughing and collapsing as it becomes clear Lex poisoned the entire courtroom just out of spite.

Episode 19 - American Dreamer

• The Children of Liberty have gone from being an analogue to modern nazi sympathizers to full-on nazi soldiers and police thanks to their deputization. People are hiding and squatting in their workplaces and in businesses to escape them, making the parallel even stronger, especially since they're targeting every alien, including those that just have links to aliens.
• Dreamer fights off the Children of Liberty at the bar...but the aliens living there are so jaded that they fully expect them to return the next day.
• James was locked inside a coffin as a child by some particularly sadistic bullies, who laughed with glee at the notion of his dying inside there on the day of his father's funeral. That's just fucked up.
• George, beginning to see the error of his ways since he nearly hurt his own friend at the bar, tries to find support in his mother...only for her to praise the hunting down of "roaches" and glorifying his father. He's trapped in this vehemently anti-alien life and has no true friends to turn towards.

Season 5

Episode 2 - Stranger Beside Me

• Eve masqueraded as Lena's loyal assistant for months before pulling a gun on her at Lex's request. There is no question this should make her the scary one. Except when Lena kidnaps her, keeps her locked in her lab, starts threatening her, not for revenge or because it's useful or for her own protection but because she's become paranoid after too many betrayals and has become obsessed with finding out why Eve did it. Lena brutally rejects Eve's Freudian Excuse, and when a genuinely remorseful Eve forgoes an occasion to escape, apologizes, and expresses the wish to be better, Lena twists this as a justification to use her nanites to do Brainwashing for the Greater Good, essentially turning the horrified Eve into a slave and host for her IA assistant Hope.
• Worse still, Lena plans to do this to all humans, and while she says nothing about forcing them, her actions with Eve don't bode well for her respect of their consent. This shows a clear difference in her stance compared to 4x07, where she insisted to have Adam's consent for a dangerous experiment.

Episode 3 - Blurred Lines

• Turns out Eve isn't just brainwashed; Hope has completely taken over her body!
• The Aurafacian. Imagine a spider-like thing going into your body and killing you from the inside, without any signs of violence.

Episode 5 - Dangerous Liaisons

• Brainy being possessed by the Aurafacian. Its wild, animalistic mannerisms and bizarre manner of speech are much creepier when delivered by Jesse Rath. Hell, calling it "creepy" almost doesn't do it justice.

Episode 13 - It's a Super Life

• In the universe where Kara told Lena about her secret identity early on, their friendship inspired a cult.
• In the universe where Kara never befriended Lena, Lena has ended up a tyrant who rules National City with an iron fist, with Brainiac and Reign as her lieutenants.

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