‘Supergirl’ Ratings Rise For Kevin Smith Directed Episode

This week saw Kevin Smith’s return to Supergirl in the midseason finale episode “Bunker Hill” and it seems like the director brought a ratings bump with him.

Sunday’s episode scaled up for a 0.4 in demographic with 1.26 million viewers, both numbers marking a rise over the previous few episodes, something Smith took to Twitter to celebrate.

“Nice! There was a little ratings bump for the episode of @TheCWSupergirl I was credited with directing! Thanks for watching, all!” Smith wrote.

The episode, which is Smith’s fourth for the series over its four-season run, marked a turning point for Supergirl/Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist) and those closest to her. Not only did Kara’s protege Nia Nal (Nicole Maines) reveal her alien origins to Kara and Brainy (Jesse Rath,) she also began to embrace and use her precognitive powers — a situation that led them directly to Agent Liberty/Ben Lockwood (Sam Witwer). And while it ultimately ended up with Agent Liberty unmasked and arrested for his terroristic hate crimes against aliens in National City, Supergirl may have won the battle against anti-alien sentiment, but not the war. The episode ended with Agent Liberty’s message stronger than ever and Supergirl given an ultimatum to unmask (metaphorically) herself or leave the DEO.

It was quite a story to pause on ahead of the “Elseworlds” crossover that kicks off this upcoming Sunday, but it also had some very cool scenes as well that might have had a little something to do with the uptick in ratings. Smith teased one of them — an incredible moment where Supergirl lifts a whole building and brings it back down simply by flying upward while partially encased in Nth metal — on a podcast episode ahead of the episode.

“There’s some cool sh-t in it, too,” Smith said. “The fifth act of those shows, The CW shows, that’s generally where the big thing happens, aka where they spend the most money. And so, in act five of this episode we have a sequence where they spent a lot of money that I’ve never seen in anything before and I can’t take credit for it, I’m not like ‘I f-cking did it’ because the visual effects company, they’re going to accomplish it. We shot little pieces of it and stuff, but it’s a kind of cool concept that I never thought of. As the guy who was like I want to make a movie, my first movie, I guess I’ll set it here at a convenience store cause this is easy, and I work here and sh-t like, never imagined they’d hand me a script with like ‘make her do this’ and I was like holy sh-t.”

What did you think of Sunday’s episode of Supergirl? Did you like the scene with Supergirl raising the building by flying? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Supergirl airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. The series will temporarily move to Tuesdays for the “Elseworlds, Part 3” on December 11th and then return to its regular time and regular episodes on Sunday, January 20, 2019.