The recent Supergirl episode made a top military commander look way too incompetent. I mean, their plan was unbelievably stupid.
Step 1: Create a super powerful android intended to take down the likes of Superman.
Step 2: Give the weapon a stealth mode that makes it undetectable even to the people meant to wield it.
Step 3: Make sure not to include any way of shutting the thing down in case it becomes dangerous to the public.
Step 4: Enable automatic self-preservation that renders this killing machine at least temporarily uncontrollable in the event that it sustains significant damage.
Step 5: Get an executive order to compel one of the most powerful beings in the world to beta test the android by attempting to cause it significant damage.
Step 6: When the android is damaged and subsequently escapes, thus endangering the general public, immediately fire the one person who is most qualified to track it down and bring it back in line.
I mean, it's just totally ridiculous from start to finish.
Also, the episode is just full of people blaming Supergirl for doing the right thing.
1. Supergirl saves a bus-load of children from two cartoonishly idiotic drivers. One such driver is dim-witted enough to take a swing at the alien with super-strength because she had the gall to stop him from committing multiple acts of manslaughter. And when this guy gets hurt because Supergirl blocked his punch, obviously Supergirl is in the wrong here. Obviously.
They try to put Supergirl in the wrong by having the children be frightened, but it's a hollow rationale.
2. The military forces Supergirl to fight their superweapon which lacks basic safety features. She does as instructed and takes down their prototype... which promptly goes rogue because they designed it to do exactly that. Of course this is all Supergirl's fault, since she defeated the weapon that was designed to kill her kind. Not at all the fault of the people who built the thing to stealth-mode away and go on a rampage.
They try to shift blame this time by emphasizing Supergirl's continued attack after being told to stand down, but that's a much smaller factor if you actually stop to think.
3. After Supergirl actually saves General Lane's life, Red Tornado creates a tornado that endangers dozens (hundreds?) of people. Supergirl stops the (un)natural disaster. General Lane shows zero gratitude and actually blames her for prioritizing innocent lives and letting the menace escape.
At least this time the show played it as the General being unreasonable, instead of making it out to be an example of it somehow being an actual problem with Kara.
Some other things that bugged me:
- The random scientist fights on par with a highly trained DEO agent while simultaneously controlling a weapon that is fighting on par with Supergirl.
- Red Tornado apparently has a highly sophisticated GPS system... that the military can't access to pinpoint its location?
- Hank Henshaw's eyes just glow red randomly. It's a teaser for the audience, but it's a major flaw in his cover if anybody else ever saw it happen.
- Lucy Lane doesn't wonder at all why Winn said "your cousin" for "Superman".
- A media company's IT guy (who hasn't been sold as somebody with the supreme skills of, say, Felicity Smoak) is able to singlehandedly hack into the system of a secret organization with access to advanced alien technology.
- Hank Henshaw (or whatever is pretending to be him) went to the trouble of redacting and burying a document about an incident without bothering to redact his own name. That said, why not destroy the document entirely?
- Red Tornado has this whole self-preservation thing but just stands there and takes the sustained heat vision eye lasers.