President Wonder Woman. Yay!
Mon-El*
Miss Martian
A more interesting Jimmy Olsen
A Snapper Carr who has journalistic ethics
But on the hand,
A thuddingly painfully ham-fisted pro-immigration message (which I sort-of agree with) but geez. Could it have been more over the top?**
Jimmy who needs half an episode to let his balls drop. Snapper should have been suspended/fired in that first meeting. Right there. Instantly. A mid-level editor at (say) Time Magazine doesn’t go to the CEO of Time-Warner (which is what Jimmy is right now) and talk to him that way.
A lack of easter eggs–this is a minor one, but instead of whateverthehell drink Mon-El wanted, it would have been cooler if he’d asked for Kono Juice or Silverale. Ditto with all the generic aliens. Just use DC names. A minor quibble but one that bugged me.
As an aside, so who WAS the Human Torchette? I thought (given that Mon-El, plus the upcoming Dominators plot that will lead to the Arrowverse crossover plus the rumors of Booster Gold in Legends) she would have been Inferno or Beauty Blaze or whateverthehell her name was. But apparently she’s just a fire-alien?
*Not Lar-Gand? I wonder if they’ll make Mon a distant cousin of Kara/Kal?
**Unless the point was that Pres. Wonder Woman is really a Martian and this is a huge set-up for an invasion. And that was a great reveal at the very end.
I don’t understand writers/producers. Do they really think being so heavy handed with their political views help the show? There is not one person out there not watching the show who is now going to tune in because of the pro-immigration statement made by the show, but there is at least 1 who will no longer watch.
It did really bother me that the only person who was against “alien immigration” was a freakin’ alien. If the writers wanted to do a story about immigration and integration, they missed a huge opportunity- they could have had a series of episodes featuring a group of humans who violently opposed it.
And Lena Luthor. Also, Lena should have psychic powers and look like the character in the first panel here (I think all of us–pro Illegal Space-Alien Immigration and anti Space-Alien Immigration folks can come together and agree that Supergirl needs to have an “alien space-brain” added to the cast.)
I also think they were dumb to time this episode so close to the election. I think everyone’s fairly sick of politics at this point.
Good casting on Superman, awful costume (not nearly as bad as the current movies, though how could it be?)
Terrible awful casting on Snapper Carr and Maggie Sawyer. Are they just drawing names from a hat?
Decent casting on Mon-El, but he shouldn’t be called that, Lar Gand only got that name due to amnesiac interactions with Superboy, which he clearly hasn’t done here.
A major character was missing in the last episode. Did anyone notice? No, not Cat Grant. Her absence already has huge effects on the show. Snapper Carr is poor replacement; he has all of her acerbicness and none of her charm. No, the major character I’m talking about is James Olsen. I didn’t miss them at all, which just speaks to how superfluous the character is.
That being said, I didn’t particularly like the episode. The alien fight club was a cool concept, but was poorly executed. Miss Martian’s motivations for participating weren’t terribly well presented, and yet again there’s another character keeping secrets. The high point was Winn and Mon-el’s night out. We need to see more of the that.
I wish there was a bit more thought put into plausibility and logic of the world. OK, fine, suddenly there are so many aliens hanging around National City that there’s an entire underground subculture of them. And plenty of human beings know all about them. And some of them are tough enough to beat up Supergirl, and yet instead of getting jobs as, I dunno, emergency firefighters, or super-soldiers, they have nothing better to do than fight in underground fight clubs. Sure. Whatever.
And there’s a well connected woman who gets away with running the fight club because she has friends in high places. Sure.
But how highly placed are her friends that she can KIDNAP THE HEAD OF A US GOVERNMENT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY AND MAKE HIM FIGHT TO THE DEATH and her friends can still get her off the hook? Supergirl is besties with the fucking president, doesn’t that outrank whatever contacts evil fightclub lady has?
Stupid, stupid writing.
It’s a shame that Melissa Benoist is so adorable, because she keeps drawing me back into what is otherwise a fundamentally stupid, stupid show.
None of the comic book shows, and most comic books, cannot stand up to any sort of logical thinking. One must suspend one’s disbelief watching these shows, but the problem is which illogical straw will be the one to break one’s suspension of disbelief. And there are so, so many illogical straws.
Sadly, the break happened long ago for me, but I’m just so damn happy to see superheroes being given some prime time respect that I continue to watch. I’ve spent over 4 decades following some of these characters, through the good writing and the bad.
I think that illogical straws come in different flavors.
For instance, none of the powers that any of these superheros have actually obey the laws of physics (obviously). So I’m certainly not constantly saying “wait, she can fly just because she’s on a planet with a different sun? Wtf?”. But I’m also willing to cut at least one and maybe two levels of additional slack around that… first of all, I don’t worry about things like “wait, how can she hear when she’s flying… wouldn’t the rushing wind deafen her” or “when she comes to a stop after flying, shouldn’t there be a big sonic boom that blows out all the windows” and things like that. And I’m even willing to ignore “wait, if she stopped and used her powers with a teeny bit more intelligence, she would easily defeat almost all her foes” (this is one that The Flash is particularly bad about).
There’s also established mythology that goes along with these characters, which isn’t necessarily directly related to their powers, but which I’m OK with. How does no one ever recognize that Supergirl is Kara, just from looking at her face? Whatevs, that’s how it is.
All of the above are going to be shared by any but the most hard-sci-fi approach to a superhero story.
But then we get to the next level of suspension of disbelief, which is “how would the existence of superheroes change the world, change society, making it different than our world”. This is a place that a lot of well respected stuff like Watchmen has focused. But it’s also something that a lot of shows deliberately ignore, just because something happening in “our world” is more relatable. And I’m basically OK with that. Why isn’t there a religion that forms around worship of Supergirl? Why isn’t there system in place to summon Superman and Supergirl to other cities and other countries when there are sufficiently large emergencies? There just aren’t.
I also accept that if anything scientific-sounding is said, it will be correct only by complete accident. You point a dish at Krypton and send a transmission and expect to get a response shortly? Sure, why not, the speed of light is boring anyhow.
And finally superhero stories are fictional stories told for entertainment, meaning that they have all the usual cliches where the mysterious bad guy is always someone we’ve already met before, coincidences happen at a vastly higher rate than in real life, the good guys almost always survive, messes are always cleaned up by next week (unless the ongoing mess is a storyline), etc, etc.
I’m OK with all of the above. They’re basically the price you pay for telling superhero stories.
But none of those excuse the extreme idiocy of the alien fight club kidnapping Hank. And the really irritating thing is, just a few minor script changes would make it 1000 times better:
(1) Hank, knowing that he’s publicly famous, shapeshifts into a different human form for all of his interactions with Megan
(2) Roulette does have friends in high places which is why she’s confident that she’s arrest-proof. But then when she does in fact go too far, she gets away via escaping from custody using a mysterious alien gadget, not via hilariously overpowered friends-in-high-places.
Presto, vastly better, and you can still tell exactly the same story with the same political message etc. And that took me all of 5 seconds of thinking.
Supergirl, more than the other superhero shows, seems particularly bad about following whatever real-world conventions or expectations it’s already established. We never got a hint of there being any Gotham-style corruption in National City. So the NCPD letting Roulette go due to powerful friends came out of left field. (You know, Chekhov’s gun and all that.) On the other hand, it underscores just how powerful her friends are, and now we’ve got another known baddie on the loose. She’s doubtless going to turn up again, maybe even involved with the big 4-way crossover.
Meanwhile, over on Legends of Tomorrow, they seem to throw all consistency and logic to the wind, but that somehow seems more forgivable on that show. They never really had much consistency and logic to begin with. I consider it to be more of an action-comedy ensemble show, and so the Rule of Funny and the Rule of Cool both apply.
See, for me, even before it gets to the Fight Club, I was having issues. Roulette’s henchmen have weapons that can take down a Martian. Martians can go mano-a-mano with Kryptonians. Why run a fight club instead of just licensing those weapons? Pretty much ends the other-worldly menace one one starts mass producing that stuff, and it would be legal and insanely profitable. But as I noted, my suspension of disbelief has been unsuspended so many times that now when it happens it is like kicking a dead horse.
(And has anyone explained yet why there are so many aliens on Earth, or is that just their way of handling super-powered people? I think the latter, but it is yet another horrible explanation.)
The aliens were all previously incarcerated in Fort Roz, which crashed in the desert outside National City. This explains why most of the aliens we see are not particularly desirable elements of society, including Non and Kara’s Aunt Astra. This also explains why the DEO seems to make its base in National City. It doesn’t explain why Superman wouldn’t get involved (until the last minute) in fighting a Kryptonian plot to take over the world.
Superman was busy…that always has to be the explanation. Couldn’t have been Luthor or the Toyman or Metallo though. And I’m sure Brainiac will turn up this season or next, so not him. Maybe he was off on War World. It also explains why Flash doesn’t handle Arrow’s Tobias Church problem. Flash is busy, too busy to take the 15 minutes it would take to help out his friend.
Didn’t the goons just knock over the Federal Reserve? If so, why go rob some rich people? Hell, why rob rich people in any case? Go take out Ft Knox or something.
The “Supergirl’s sis might be gay” thing was telegraphed last week and unconvincing this week. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the angst was too fast–this one needed to be spread over a few weeks.
Also, the person they got to play Maggie Sawyer should be over on Gotham playing Renee Montoya. The two characters are both lesbian but decidedly not interchangeable. And every characteristic Supergirl’s “Maggie Sawyer” has belongs to Renee Montoya (and not just physical/nationality). I’m not liking this season’s tendency to just throw names at random people regardless of how well they fit (Snapper isn’t a 50 year old grumpy guy, and apparently next week the Cyborg Superman will be showing up which makes Hank “Martian Manhunter” Henshaw’s name a problem.
Oh, and
A) I hate how they’re playing Mon El. He’s not a himbo. He shouldn’t BE a himbo. Want a himbo with his power-set? Give us Ultra Boy.
B) If they’re going to give him a civilian id, why not use his comic book id? “Bob Cobb” (he doesn’t have to be a “brush salesman” though.)
C) Are they ever going to explain his last name? He should be Lar Gand. If he’s Mon El, he’s probably related to Superman/girl.
I love how they keep working in references to Chyler Leigh’s earlier roles, of which there are many. Alex’s “strange punk rock phase” was actually a reference to Chyler’s stint on the short-lived That 80s Show, where she played a punk rocker.
I thought Chyler played her character’s confusion and realization quite well. Sure, it’s been blatantly telegraphed to the viewers, but this whole “coming out” phase is a lot more nuanced than what I’ve come to expect from a CW show. It’s not just a matter of Alex stepping out of the closet and saying, “Surprise! I’m gay!”
