Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Melissa Benoist, Chyler Leigh, Katie McGrath, Jesse Rath, Nicole Maines, Azie Tesfai, Julie Gonzalo, Staz Nair, Peta Sergeant, David Harwood, Jon Cryer, Brenda Strong, Sharon Leal, Claude Knowlton, Jason Behr, Matt Baram, Jhaleil Swaby, Mila Jones, Calista Flockhart, Mechad Brooks, Jeremy Jordan, Chris Wood, Helen Slater.

There are finales that leave you breathless, there are finales that make you question your beliefs, and there are endings in which the length of time invested in a particular television series leaves you understandably devastated by its removal from your timetable and television schedule that it can hit you like a bereavement, not of the physical, but of the declared love you have shown it.

Endings though can often come as a blessed relief, the invested time that sustained you, thrilled you, gave you hope and raised the spirits, sometimes comes crashing down hard enough that you wonder if a series went on one season too long, and if the cast and creatives had finally left their glittering and powerful persuasion at home; if they were all just itching to get on with their lives and start something new.

The problem with the sixth and final series of Supergirl perhaps stems from many buds that were all trying to flower at once, not least the issues raised by the ongoing health crisis around the world, not only because of the way that Melissa Benoist, one of the most engaging actors to have appeared in earnest in the last decade, suddenly seemed to have lost all her love for the character and with scripts allowing her to feel the brunt force of what arguably is a kind of burn out, but also for the complete U-turn feel of what made the series a huge and beautiful success in the first place.

The swift decay of the series was avoidable, the casting of Nicole Maines in the series was of one of absolute brilliance, her reading of the character Nia Nal/Dreamer was from the heart and soul, and she took her rightful place as one of the widely appreciated actors to have appeared in the Arrow Universe, the same goes for the ever embracing Jon Cryer as Lex Luthor, arguably one of the great personifications of the arch enemy of all things Krypton to have been captured on screen; and yet the feeling of being left alone with a fading giant is never far from the minds of the fan, and it is telling that it came with too many strands of storytelling being thrust into the series and not enough episodes to develop them all.

Too large a cast, a final series without a truly terrifying villain of the peice, an overall arc that was allowed to whimper, and most destructive of all leaving Melissa Benoist to leave an impression, which was obviously not the intention, that she wasn’t having fun with the character anymore. It is then with sadness and disappointment, and no matter how well intentioned the series was, it did not compete with all that went before, in fact it was a pale shadow, a regret, that reminds the viewer that not all things in the universe ends with a bang, but instead in a whimper.

Ian D. Hall