Missing the point. It's not shitty writing because it's physically impossible. It's shitty writing because it made Supergirl look stupid and weak while being completely devoid of tension or excitement, and it did so while totally mangling it's own internal logic. (ie, Indigo wants an apocalypse, yet only launches one missile; Supergirl wants to protect people, yet tries to save National City by just sending the missile in a different direction so it can kill other people, etc.)
Have you seen maps of how the US population is distributed, like
this one? National City is a surrogate for Los Angeles, and there really isn't a lot of population in the American Southwest outside the big cities and their surroundings. If she had succeeded in diverting it from the city, it would've probably gone off in the vast, empty stretches of desert between the cities. You know, like the deserts where a lot of nuclear tests were conducted for decades. (It really boggles the mind to see how empty the western half of the continental US is aside from the West Coast.)
Besides, the fact that Supergirl didn't know how to deal with a missile on her own was part of the point. Part of making smart decisions is being aware of your limitations and asking other smart people to help you. Kara was mad at Hank and the DEO and trying to handle the situation on her own, but it was too much for her, so she realized she needed help after all. Making a mistake is not stupid and weak. What would've been stupid and weak was if she'd refused to admit her mistake and remained stubbornly on the same path until disaster happened. Asking for help and fixing her mistake was smart and strong.
Also, I never understand this complaint that people shouldn't worry about believability in a superhero story, just because other superhero stories have gone off the deep end. Yes, these stories are built on a certain amount of conceit and suspension of disbelief. No, that doesn't mean that every single silly thing that happens should automatically get a pass because it's a comic book movie/show.
On this point, I agree. As I've said before, the full phrase is
willing suspension of disbelief. It's not something the audience is required to do no matter what, it's something they have to want to do. And that means it's up to the writers to earn it -- and to avoid abusing it. You can get away with unbelievable stuff, but you have to sell it, to present it cleverly enough or erect enough of a pretense of credibility around it that the audience is willing to play along. You can get an audience used to a certain level of implausibility, but push them too far too often and you risk losing them.
And one of the best ways to earn suspension of disbelief about the impossible elements in a fantasy story is to surround them with as much believable real-world stuff as possible. The more credibly you present the stuff the audience is familiar with -- the behavior of the characters, the realities of daily life and employment, the operation of real-world institutions -- the more they'll be willing to play along with the blatantly fanciful stuff, because it'll be presented in a way that has an air of verisimilitude about it. There are fans who have more trouble accepting Kara's ability to keep her job while constantly being away from her desk than they do accepting Kara's ability to levitate and fly, because the former is a matter of real-world experience.
The story needs to stand on its own merits, not on some bs grading curve invented out of the idea that comic book movies and shows automatically have to do dumb and blatantly unbelievable things.
Yes. It's an insult to any genre to claim that stories in that genre shouldn't be expected to live up to the same standards of competence and quality that we expect of mainstream fiction. Good work is good work, regardless of the subject matter. There's never an excuse for a professional to deliberately lower one's standards.
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