Supergirl Just Made A Big Legion of Super-Heroes Nod and Basically Told Us What's Up With Mon-El

01/23/2017 09:37 pm EST

On tonight's episode of Supergirl, titled "Supergirl Lives," Daxamite playboy Mon-El finally grew up...and along the way, we got a few great clues as to what he's up to.

Will Supergirl bring the Legion of Super-Heroes into the series? It certainly seems like it.

Hell, even director Kevin Smith, who helmed tonight's episode of The CW's hit sophomore series, thinks so. got

Smith has got good reason to believe it: During the course of the episode, at one point a frustrated Mon-El calls out "grife!"

That's basically "Damn it!" In Legion-speak. The 31st Century team naturally have some slang that's particular to them...although it could turn out that's just a common exclamation in Interlac within the TV universe of Supergirl. We've seen Interlac graffiti on the walls in the alien dive bar, proving that the language exists in the present day on Earth-38.

The Legion of Super-Heroes is a team of teen-aged superheroes from a thousand years in the future. Headquartered on Earth, they come from a variety of different worlds and have a variety of different powers (although each of them wields a Legion flight ring, which provides its wearer with a universal translator, the ability to fly, and some other perks).

Inspired by the legend of Superboy, the Legion traveled back in time to recruit Superman as a teenager, and would periodically steal him away to the future to have adventures with them, returning him to Smallville when they were done. At different points, the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superboy (Conner Kent) and Supergirl have also been part of the Legion.

Once one of DC's most successful and popular franchises, the Legion of Super-Heroes have suffered quite a bit since the first line-wide continuity reboot following 1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths. At that time, Superman's backstory was modified so that he was never Superboy and the Legion had to modify its own backstory to accommodate, "invalidating" many of the stories that pre-Crisis Legion fans had loved. The character who took Superboy's place in those retroactively-altered tales, though? Mon-El, the Daxamite hero often known as Valor.

While he did have his own ongoing series set in the present day for a while, and participated in the World of New Krypton storyline which also took place in the then-current DC Universe, most of Mon-El's memorable stories have taken place as part of the Legion of Super-Heroes, so when he came on board, many fans wondered whether it was just a matter of time before we would see the rest of the Legion.

That impression was rooted, in part, in the fact that fans have already seen evidence that the Legion not only exists in the world of Supergirl, but has a relationship with Superman. In the season 1 episode "Fortress," Supergirl headed to Superman's Fortress of Solitude for the first time and one of the first things the audience saw was a Legion of Super-Heroes flight ring (pictured above) mounted on a crystal dais inside.

Lest you think that the "grife" was a clear indicator that Mon-El's long-teased secret is just that he knows of the Legion, that's probably not the case. When a Maaldorian was shooting at him, a Dominator stopped the shot, saying that Mon-El was to be spared. He then gave Mon-El a deep bow.

This, along with Mon-El's comment that "the Prince was no one to look up to, but I want to be" (or something to that effect) seems to indicate that the long-standing theory that Mon-El is the Daxamite prince and not his long-suffering bodyguard as he previously claimed is likely true.

It's hard to know just what will happen first: will Mon-El finally start to come clean about his mysterious past, or will he be outed by those mysterious figures who have been scouring space for him?

Mon-El has also been exposed to lead (a story point which was fairly quickly abandoned when Jeremiah Danvers pulled the bullet out). That could be significant, since in the comics there was a long period of time where the character got lead poisoning and had to be put into stasis, only to be retrieved and cured by the Legion centuries later.

Kevin Smith directed the midseason premiere episode with story by Andrew Kreisberg and teleplay by Eric Carrasco & Jess Kardos. "Supergirl Lives" airs Monday, January 23 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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