Favorite Characters: Brainiac-5 (Supergirl)

Sometimes, I’ll start out with a mildly-positive, or even indifferent reaction to a character on a show, and then as time goes on, they’ll suddenly emerge as a surprise favorite of mine (see also:  Charming on Once Upon a Time, Marnie on The Hour.)  That’s been the case for me with Supergirl’s Brainiac-5.  When Brainy was introduced last season as a recurring character, I liked him well enough, but I’m loving him as a regular this year (some Brainy-related spoilers.)

Last season, the show brought in the Legion of Superheroes, a 31^st-century team of Earth-based heroes traveling back to our time on a mission to save Earth’s future by changing its past.  While all the Legion members are aliens, Mon-El and Imra are human-passing, but Brainy is the one who explicitly looks alien.  A techno-organic native of Colu, Brainy is an artificial intelligence in a living body.

Being from the 31^st century would put Brainy way ahead of the technological curve anyway – he frequently points out how primitive 21^st-century tech is – but even in his own time, he’s not a mind to mess with.  He has massive processing power, which comes in handy for anything techy or sciency, and additionally, he’s incredibly logic-drive, instantly calculating probabilities of success or failure for various strategies in the field.  (He also has some other abilities that are more action-oriented, like the “flight ring” he uses for, well, flight, but his intellectual prowess is his chief asset to the team.)

Like so many genre-show tech geniuses before him, especially those of the non-human variety, Brainy’s out-of-control brilliance doesn’t extend to his social skills.  His rarefied status as a “Twelfth Level Intellect” makes him prone to arrogance, and being so logic-oriented can result in some calculated-but-mercenary decisions that put him at odds with more outwardly-compassionate members of the Supergirl crew.  In all things, he tends to think of his intellectual superiority as a fact (rather than condescending) and his detached reasoning as practical (rather than heartless,) but most people don’t see it that way.  Whether he’s talking down to Winn, countermanding Alex’s orders because he sees a more logical move, or leaving someone in danger because the probability of a successful rescue is too low, he has a talent for annoying or angering those around him.

It’s interesting to see Brainy clash with our heroes as they all figure out how to work together effectively, but things kick up a notch when the new timeline created by the Legion and Team Supergirl renders the 31^st century inhospitable to AIs.  Suddenly, he’s no longer on a mission to the “primitive” 21^st century – he’s stranded there, as the rest of the Legion returns to his time without him.  Stuck in what, from his perspective, is Earth’s distant past, Brainy is forced to adapt to 21^st-century society in ways he didn’t have to when he was just passing through.  He needs to collaborate with Kara and the DEO without the other Legion members, who were more used to the way he operates and could sometimes smooth out conflicts.  In particular, the growing pains of his professional relationship with Alex are great to see – their scenes are fast becoming some of my favorites this season.  Plus, in addition to being surrounded by medieval technology, Brainy also finds himself in a volatile time for human/alien relations, facing prejudices he didn’t really experience in the more inclusive 31^st century.

All these challenges put Brainy’s logic-dominated processing at odds with his less rational emotions, something he hasn’t dealt with much before.  Already this season, we’ve gotten some great examples of him struggling with this.  He uses an image inducer to generate a human-looking holographic “skin” for himself, but a temporary failure of the device results in a hostile run-in with some humans he’d previously considered himself friendly with.  The experience leaves him shaken and unable to think/process clearly, which perplexes and frustrates him.  Similarly, when Kara is put out of commission due to a particularly insidious attack, Brainy struggles to come up with a solution, his feelings of both helplessness and anger crowding out his usually-dispassionate thoughts.  Even though we’re only a handful of episodes into season 4, Brainy is experiencing and changing a lot.  I love watching him adjust to 21^st-century Earth and develop more complex relationships with the other characters, and I can’t wait to see where the show takes him next.