Supergirl: Did "Red Dawn" Set Up Brainy for a Villain Turn?

Sunday night's episode of Supergirl gave fans what they've been waiting for all season with the [...]

By Nicole Drum

Sunday night's episode of Supergirl gave fans what they've been waiting for all season with the showdown between Supergirl and her Kasnian clone, Red Daughter. However, while the show's heroine was going toe-to-toe with her Lex Luthor-manipulated double, The CW series may have also been setting things up for a villain turn for someone close to the Girl of Steel -- Brainy.

While Supergirl's fight with Red Daughter was the primary story in "Red Dawn", the episode's secondary plot saw Brainiac-5, aka Brainy, taken into custody by the Children of Liberty who then proceeded to torture him. Now, torture is always bad, but torturing Brainy was a seriously bad move for the Children of Liberty. As Brainy is begging the hate group to spare Dreamer/Nia Nal, they taunt him for his perceived lack of powers and shock him numerous times. The harsh application of electrical current causes Brainy to glitch out. A first he rattles off a string of memories before his words take a dark, dark turn.

"You're just primitives," Brainy says. ""You people forget that time travel is also space travel too... My point is, I'm from the future. What I'm trying to tell you is that my species has ancestral memory -- and my ancestors, very bad people. They were collectors, conquerors. I remember everything!"

Brainy then becomes even more robot-like than he's ever been, and it becomes very clear what's happened: he's more like his evil Brainiac ancestor than ever before, the forced rebooting stripping him of any emotion or humanity he had. He then proceeds to take out each agent, brutally killing them. But murder isn't the full extent of Brainy's emotionless turn. He also doesn't act to save Dreamer. Instead, he instructed her and J'onn to go on through the portal to where the other aliens had been sent. He'd use them to help him liberate the camp, if that's what he ends up doing.

The emotionless aspect Brainy has taken on will remind fans of the classic Superman villain the character is descended from -- Brainiac. In comics, Brainiac is an emotionless villain who captures alien species for his vast catalog -- his "bottle" cities. Brainy has always been shown to be very different, able to experience a wide range of emotions including the love he felt for Dreamer prior to his reboot. Now, with those emotions stripped away, Brainy is so much closer to Brainiac and that could very well mean that when Supergirl heads into Season 5 it may be one of her own allies who she is fighting should Brainy's cold logic take him down the villain path.

What do you think? Did Supergirl just set up for Brainy to go villain? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Supergirl airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.

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