Spoilers follow for My Adventures with Superman Season 2, Episode 10.

"My Adventures with Supergirl"

At ten episodes, this season of My Adventures with Superman felt short by at least a full episode, if not more. It's not that the ending of this episode was unsatisfying--quite the opposite. But with the season in our rear-view, it's clear how much this season struggled with pacing.

This episode itself was a lot of fun to watch. We've been waiting since the moment we met this incarnation of Kara to see her and her cousin team up. The fight between the two Kryptonians and Brainiac ended up being as epic as we could've hoped for, and these moments really put the anime influences front and center--the forcefield behind Brainiac's ship had the feel of an AT Field from Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the missiles that Brainiac fires with the red trail felt like a cross between Darkseid's Omega Beams and Macross' infamous scattering missile clusters. Of course, there's the moment when Kara flies so hard that her suit changes to the blue-and-red worn by Clark.

The battle is the centerpiece of the episode, but we still get time to deal with the aftermath of all of it, including seeing Kara start to grapple with the idea that Earth is her home and that she indeed has a home there despite coming there as an extraterrestrial invader.

The season overall, though, suffers from some pretty frustrating pacing issues. Until Kara showed up, the first episodes were slow and disconnected. This isn't a big issue in shows with longer seasons; slower episodes help break up the pacing of the story and can give the story room to breathe and live in our heads a little bit. We got a few slow episodes, and then Kara showed up and things sped up, only to be slowed to a halt in episode 8 when we zipped backward in time for Olsen's Eleven, before speeding back up. The Olsen's Eleven episode was fun but felt like the writers slamming the brakes right as the show was about to hit super-speed.

In the process, other things suffered. Sam Lane disappeared for the back half of the season after playing a significant role in the first half. The police state that Waller and Luthor created was little more than set dressing for the heist episode and didn't serve a real function in the story other than to make Jimmy and Clark feel bad. John Henry Irons was introduced early on and then completely disappeared until he showed up to help out briefly in the finale. I would love to have seen more depth in those spaces.

With that said, there were other things I liked, too. The criminals Superman jailed showing up to help him could've felt corny, but it's the kind of thing I'd like to see in more of these stories. When the very world is at stake and people know it, they will set aside their differences and work together. And that goes for Superman, too; he sees the value in being chill about these genuinely dangerous escaped felons helping him and doesn't stop to even wag his finger at them. They're there to help, and everyone knows where everyone stands. Instead of feeling corny, it makes all the characters look smart and practical, and I love it when characters behave like smart people instead of drama idiots--which is what Lois and Clark were doing for the first half of the season.

While I'm not quite as high on My Adventures with Superman Season 2 as I was with Season 1, it's still one of my favorite takes on Superman, embracing his humanity and love for everyone on Earth as two of his greatest superpowers. Sure, I'm excited that he and Supergirl beat up Brainiac, but the show takes the time to make us believe that they're there because they need and want to be, rather than telling us to assume.