'Supergirl': The Body-Horror Easter Eggs of "Make It Reign"

Tonight's episode of Supergirl -- the penultimate Season Three episode, titled "Make It Reign" -- featured a pair of DC Comics Easter eggs -- and in each case, there was a bit of body horror involved.

Warning: spoilers ahead for "Make it Reign."

Did Josh Trank direct this episode?!

The first of the two references was the rebirth of Reign. Taken out of the picture in recent weeks, the season's big bad re-emerged this week through Kryptonian super-science which gifted energy and a little of Reign's biomatter with life.

...if that sounds familiar to you, then you probably read "The Reign of the Supermen!," the story in which Superman was revived from the grave in 1993.

The Eradicator -- a Kryptonian artificial intelligence with a history of malevolent attempts to terraform Earth into a New Krypton (again -- sound familiar?) -- saw the death of Superman as a catastrophic blow to his prime directive: to protect the sanctity of Kryptonian life at all costs.

After Superman's death, four "Supermen" arrived to try and fill in for the Man of Steel, but none of them quite cut it. One of them was, secretly, The Eradicator. An energy-based life form, he phased into Superman's tomb and created a body for himself using Superman's genetic code and some matter taken from the stone of Superman's crypt.

The image of an energy-based Kryptonian in a fetal position likely felt familiar to a lot of comic book fans as the newsstand cover to Action Comics #678, the first appearance of "The Last Son of Krypton," The Eradicator's Superman.

There was another reference, too: at one point, J'Onn's father M'yrnn talked about sacrificing himself to save the earth by using his shapeshifting powers to become one with the planet itself.

That was J'Onn's fate in DC One Million, a story which took place in the 853rd Century. In that tale, J'Onn had eventually returned home to Mars, and lived forever as part of the planet. That would become a plot point within DC One Million, when Resurrection Man found himself in an endless loop of death and rebirth on Mars, with only J'Onn there to witness and try to help.

Supergirl airs on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. The season three finale, titled "