Many of the adversaries Kara Zor-El faces on Supergirl are ones her famous cousin deals with in the comics. Over the past nine episodes, her enemies have included Vartox, Livewire and Non, and there are more of Superman’s rogues coming. Toyman and Silver Banshee were announced earlier this season, and when the show returns next year, Kara will also find herself facing the demented super-copy Bizarro.
During his recent visit to the Fatman on Batman podcast, Supergirl executive producer Andrew Kreisberg listed off some of the villains who are set to appear later this season, and Bizarro was casually mentioned. You can hear his full remarks starting at the 51:40 mark, but Kreisberg didn’t elaborate on when we’ll see the villain or how he’ll be introduced. Outside of the comics, Bizarro has appeared in animated shows like Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited, and was last played in live action by Tom Welling in several Smallville episodes.
Although Bizarro has been around since 1958, his comic book origins have varied. Sometimes he’s a scientific creation, other times he hails from a planet called Bizarro World. What each iteration of the character has in common is his monstrous, humanoid appearance and backwards speech pattern (up is down, good is bad, etc). While Bizarro shares some of the same abilities as Superman, like super strength and flight, some of his power set is reversed, like having freeze vision instead of heat vision.
While Supergirl is obviously alien-heavy, I’m personally leaning towards the show eschewing Bizarro coming from another planet and instead making him a scientific creation. Perhaps there’s an experiment that’s trying to replicate Superman’s DNA, and as per usual, something goes horribly wrong. That’s something that would be right up Maxwell Lord’s alley. After all, he’s essentially serving as the Girl of Steel’s Lex Luthor on the series, and with all the resources at his disposal, it’s not hard to imagine him getting ahold of some Krytponian genetic material and trying to create his own clone for sinister purposes.
It’s also worth noting that the Bizarro we’ll see on Supergirl may not be the male one Superman fights regularly. There have been other Bizarro copies of DC heroes over the years, and in the pre-New 52 Supergirl comic book, writer Sterling Gates introduced Bizarro-Girl, an inhabitant of Bizarro World. Like the Superman Bizarro, Bizarro-Girl had some “opposite powers” (instead of X-ray vision, she had rock vision), but she fought Supergirl out of fear rather than ill intent. So if the show goes the science experiment route, we could see Melissa Benoist pulling double duty as Kara and her copy.
Supergirl will return from his hiatus on January 4 at 8 p.m. EST on CBS.
