'Supergirl' EP Andrew Kreisberg On Kara & Maggie's Fight To Save Alex; Rhea & Lena Luthor's Meeting

Alex Danvers is in grave danger on Monday night’s “Supergirl.”

In the new episode, titled “Alex,” Kara’s Earth sister has been kidnapped by someone who is threatening to kill her if Supergirl doesn’t free a dangerous criminal from prison. 

Both Kara and Alex’s love — Maggie Sawyer — will spring into action. And although both of them will fight to save Alex, there will be conflict as they both approach trying to save her in different ways. How do they make good decisions when the life of the person they love is on the line?

“That’s where the episode came from. We’ve done a lot of big episodes with fighting spaceships and aliens and we really wanted to do something just very grounded and very emotional,” “Supergirl” Executive Producer Ander Kreisberg told AccessHollywood.com, noting that Monday’s new episode, puts “Kara in a position where she can’t fight her way out of the problem she’s in. She can’t hit it, she can’t fly fast enough, she can’t heat-vision it. It really is a moral dilemma.”

The episode also came out of wanting to tell a Kara/Maggie story.

“[T]he other thing that episode tackles, which is interesting to us, is the whole episode is sort of about who has jurisdiction? And it starts as a conversation about who has jurisdiction, like in terms of crimes between the police and superheroes,” Kreisberg said. 

Also on “Supergirl,” Lena Luthor is about to get to know Mon-El’s mom, Rhea, who approached her at the end of last week’s episode.

It’s a tough time for Lena, who just lost her ex-boyfriend Jack, following the biomax incident.

So, how vulnerable is Lena as Rhea approaches her?

“I think she’s very vulnerable. I always think it’s so interesting that heroes and villains, especially on our shows, kind of have the same backstory, it’s just one took all the tragedy and sadness that happened to them and [it] had them become a force for good, and the other … [it] leads them down a darker path,” Kreisberg said. “You look at Kara and she lost her birth parents and she lost her world, and she’s lost her adoptive father and all those things have only strengthened her into becoming the hero that she is. You look at Lena whose lost her brother and she’s lost her father and now she’s lost Jack and she’s desperately needing a mother to sort of like help her through it, and her own mother is not up to the task, and along comes Rhea, who herself is suffering the loss of a child, and they sort of become this bizarre mother-daughter duo, which obviously Rhea’s got machinations, but actually, the emotions that they’re providing for each other are actually real. It sort of makes their relationship very interesting.”

Rhea ditched the black robes and Daxam crown when she made her reappearance in last week’s episode, walking into Lena’s office looking like a powerful businesswoman.

“The best villains are the one who are really smart and the best villains are the ones who you really can see the humanity behind them and when we meet her she’s sort of this very regal figure and she’s like the big space queen and she’s a fighter and she stabs her husband and all this sort of like very big space opera kind of stuff. So we thought it was sort of interesting that the next time you see her, she’s the sort of like powerful, fashionable, Earth businesswoman. It’s like, what’s going on? What is she doing?” Kreisberg said, when we brought up Rhea’s new look. “And we just thought it was such a neat twist. And to pair her up with Lena, again, we timed it so that Lena was in a very vulnerable place emotionally so that she would be in a position to possibly fall prey to this very cunning woman who is offering her – well, you’ll see what she’s offering her vis-à-vis business, but she’s also offering her the thing which Lena doesn’t have right now, which is sort of – a mother figure, and somebody who’s there to tell her how great she is and somebody who’s there to support her emotionally in a way her mother isn’t and I think that — it makes Lena sort of the perfect prey at the moment for Rhea’s machinations.”

“Supergirl” continues Monday at 8/7c on The CW. 

Jolie Lash