Spoilers Supergirl - Season 2
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Supergirl
"City of Lost Children"--
SG/Kara: Not much to do. Clearly, the final two episodes of the season will focus on her fight against Mama-El and grinning at Cat.
Lena: "Like having a mentor." I thought that was pushing Rhea's influence (she's not all in as much as the writers would have anyone believe), because you just know what's around the corner....
Rhea: "You're smarter than Lex" Supergirl's version of Palpatine's seduction / manipulation of Anakin. I can almost hear her give a "narrow minded view of the Jed--uh--that man, Lex!"
Mon-El: I see a big "choice" moment coming for Mon-El. It cannot end with his deciding to commit matricide, and have a "hurt hero" session. Will his fight to rid earth of his people lead to his exit from the series? Something has to be sacrificed in tis plot, and it would be too clean if Rhea is the only casualty. I just hope he does not discover how his father died through something as contrived as a ship security video; leaving any evidence would make Rhea seem like anything other than a mastermind adversary type.
J'onn: He was total ass to James--uncharacteristic and shoehorned in this episode, all to sell this "James is the only one! He has a purpose!" dreck.
NOTES:
James/Guardian: "All I'm doing is beating people up," "I had no idea what to do," Alex with her "Thank God Supergirl was there" and J'onn essentially giving James a rather emasculating spanking & time-out...sigh. Yes, that's the obvious "I feel so useless next to Supergirl" catapult for James to find some (heavy-handed) self worth. The character has been so tossed around and screwed over that he's lost all of the confidence and purpose seen in season one.
Next to no moments between the series leads. Typical.
Wait--the citizens fear the Guardian? Are they (the showrunners) kidding? He's no Batman, where in certain eras, the population thought he was a shadowy threat. His consistent record is one of fighting crime (and does not pretend to be a criminal who happens to do good, like the Green Hornet), so this "fear" business is forced. The episode was a glorified PSA for the Big Brother program that's more of a benefit for the older than the younger half.
The scattered James plots can go in any direction, but I would not be surprised if James goes all the way in "seeing the light" of the Guardian plot, and drops the character completely in favor of playing social worker / Big Brother (to anyone), and decides Catco is not fulfilling, especially after J'onn's little speech....and Winn screaming "That is a hero without a suit!"
Come on. Can they be so obvious?
Way to plant options that can write him out of the series.
DC created and promoted a successful non-powered character who operated among super-beings for generations, yet the writers of SG (in their attempt to give James something to do) could not...mmmm...read a comic (gasp) to figure out how to manage the story of a guy putting on a suit and making it work, even in the face of being an average human next to superheroes.
"By trusting... that wall came down." gee I wonder what the second half of that double meaning was...
So Cat returns? ...and she's going to serve a purpose during an alien invasion...how?
GRADE: D
"City of Lost Children"--
SG/Kara: Not much to do. Clearly, the final two episodes of the season will focus on her fight against Mama-El and grinning at Cat.
Lena: "Like having a mentor." I thought that was pushing Rhea's influence (she's not all in as much as the writers would have anyone believe), because you just know what's around the corner....
Rhea: "You're smarter than Lex" Supergirl's version of Palpatine's seduction / manipulation of Anakin. I can almost hear her give a "narrow minded view of the Jed--uh--that man, Lex!"
Mon-El: I see a big "choice" moment coming for Mon-El. It cannot end with his deciding to commit matricide, and have a "hurt hero" session. Will his fight to rid earth of his people lead to his exit from the series? Something has to be sacrificed in tis plot, and it would be too clean if Rhea is the only casualty. I just hope he does not discover how his father died through something as contrived as a ship security video; leaving any evidence would make Rhea seem like anything other than a mastermind adversary type.
J'onn: He was total ass to James--uncharacteristic and shoehorned in this episode, all to sell this "James is the only one! He has a purpose!" dreck.
NOTES:
James/Guardian: "All I'm doing is beating people up," "I had no idea what to do," Alex with her "Thank God Supergirl was there" and J'onn essentially giving James a rather emasculating spanking & time-out...sigh. Yes, that's the obvious "I feel so useless next to Supergirl" catapult for James to find some (heavy-handed) self worth. The character has been so tossed around and screwed over that he's lost all of the confidence and purpose seen in season one.
Next to no moments between the series leads. Typical.
Wait--the citizens fear the Guardian? Are they (the showrunners) kidding? He's no Batman, where in certain eras, the population thought he was a shadowy threat. His consistent record is one of fighting crime (and does not pretend to be a criminal who happens to do good, like the Green Hornet), so this "fear" business is forced. The episode was a glorified PSA for the Big Brother program that's more of a benefit for the older than the younger half.
The scattered James plots can go in any direction, but I would not be surprised if James goes all the way in "seeing the light" of the Guardian plot, and drops the character completely in favor of playing social worker / Big Brother (to anyone), and decides Catco is not fulfilling, especially after J'onn's little speech....and Winn screaming "That is a hero without a suit!"
Come on. Can they be so obvious?
Way to plant options that can write him out of the series.
DC created and promoted a successful non-powered character who operated among super-beings for generations, yet the writers of SG (in their attempt to give James something to do) could not...mmmm...read a comic (gasp) to figure out how to manage the story of a guy putting on a suit and making it work, even in the face of being an average human next to superheroes.
"By trusting... that wall came down." gee I wonder what the second half of that double meaning was...
So Cat returns? ...and she's going to serve a purpose during an alien invasion...how?
GRADE: D
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Well, somebody's a fan of Stargate...
And if all those Daxamites survived, how come no Kryptonians did beyond the Fort Rozz prisoners and two kids? I wish the show would address the question of how a Krypton that had routine interstellar travel had essentially none of its population offworld at the time of its destruction.
Anyway, it's nice to get a focus on James again, and interesting that he's getting dissatisfied with the Guardian thing. I'm hoping that his desire to be less scary and more inspiring will lead to a costume redesign more like the classic Guardian -- gold and blue, with a helmet that shows the lower face so it's more humanizing. He could also do with a Supergirl team-up adventure, get some good publicity from that.
And we get another vague Batman allusion courtesy of James and Winn.
The CatCo building looked totally trashed. Will Supergirl reassemble it in her spare time, or are the producers planning to abandon that location after all?
And if all those Daxamites survived, how come no Kryptonians did beyond the Fort Rozz prisoners and two kids? I wish the show would address the question of how a Krypton that had routine interstellar travel had essentially none of its population offworld at the time of its destruction.
Anyway, it's nice to get a focus on James again, and interesting that he's getting dissatisfied with the Guardian thing. I'm hoping that his desire to be less scary and more inspiring will lead to a costume redesign more like the classic Guardian -- gold and blue, with a helmet that shows the lower face so it's more humanizing. He could also do with a Supergirl team-up adventure, get some good publicity from that.
And we get another vague Batman allusion courtesy of James and Winn.
The CatCo building looked totally trashed. Will Supergirl reassemble it in her spare time, or are the producers planning to abandon that location after all?
Episode started out slow but It got stronger as it went. It did some nice character work for James. Now we have urgency and the end was pretty cool. Nice set up for the final two episodes.
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Yeah, it's kind of like "have you watched TV?"
In the comics, Kryptonians did not travel off world that much. The population had no clue that their planet was doomed--only Jor-El knew, and he told Zor-El. Jor-El tried to warn the leaders of Krypton but they blew him off.
They didn't escape because they didn't know it was coming.
Daxam was badly damaged, but not destroyed. And they may have had a different attitude about going off world.
Either way, they would have had time.
They didn't escape because they didn't know it was coming.
Daxam was badly damaged, but not destroyed. And they may have had a different attitude about going off world.
Either way, they would have had time.
I know that, but the comics are a separate reality, so that's irrelevant here. I'm talking about what the Earth-38 reality has established about Krypton, which is hard to reconcile with the usual story. In the original comics, Krypton had limited spaceflight capability at best, which is why the only available evacuation rocket was a single prototype only big enough to hold one infant. In that version, it made sense for Krypton to have only one or two survivors. But in the show's version, in the Earth-38 continuity, Krypton did have active, regular interstellar travel. Aliens from many worlds lived on Krypton (and had inmates in Fort Rozz), and Kara herself had traveled to ten other planets in her first twelve years of life. (She said in a season 1 episode that she'd been to a dozen planets, and Krypton and Earth would be two of them.) So in that reality, it's an established fact that Kryptonians traveled to other worlds routinely. That's what makes it a paradox that there aren't more Kryptonian survivors. And revealing that their sister planet Daxam had thousands of survivors only compounds the issue.
Hmm...
Indeed.
The entire James plot was just slapped together to "fix" the way he has been mishandled (shortchanged) since the beginning of this season. The showrunners' "See? we're doing something with James" plot was topped off by Winn screaming "That is a hero without a suit!" Either that happens as part of natural character development, or its dropped into the show--connected to a two-ton rock, as in the case of every line of James' self-doubt, every word of praise for anyone other than James, and finally, the force-fed (to the audience) pep talks to give James a reason to breathe.
I agree with Christopher. Krypton should have more survivors since they were an interstellar civilization. The only other explanation would be that despite having interstellar travel capability, the entire Kryptonian civilization decided to remain a single planet civilization. But that would be really odd. Surely, there would be small colonies on other planets, or trading posts or research stations or just Kryptonian ships on missions of trade or exploration at the time of Krypton's demise. There should be more survivors even if the number is small. I think the show should admit that there are a bunch of other survivors and do some stories where we meet them. Surely, some creative writers could come up with some interesting stories.
This episode was pretty good. I think Supergirl needs to be more serialized. I feel like it does better when it has a cliffhanger and a story arc.
In the comics from the 80s, "regular" Kryptonians were genetically encoded to die if they went offworld.
In almost every version of Superman's origin, Jor-El "invented" the rocket that took Kal-El to earth, or re-invented space flight after Krypton abandoned it. Which is a little comparable to America fighting wars with Drones these days.
http://www.avclub.com/article/jukebox-superhero-26-songs-about-superman-99044
In almost every version of Superman's origin, Jor-El "invented" the rocket that took Kal-El to earth, or re-invented space flight after Krypton abandoned it. Which is a little comparable to America fighting wars with Drones these days.
http://www.avclub.com/article/jukebox-superhero-26-songs-about-superman-99044
There are almost no other surviving Kryptonians has long been a part of the Superman Lore hence the "last son of Krypton" monika so why should it be necessary to introduce more?
rather ironic that some-one is getting pendantic over the lack of other survivors from Krypton when it's been that way for over half a century.
It's certainly a fair argument as to why there aren't more surviving Kryptonians. I guess they should establish that maybe they became xenophobic and made interstellar travel illegal, and the people, being law abiding, followed the law.
I personally have no problem with Superman lore on this. The issue is that Supergirl itself seems to have raised some questions about it. When you have a show that says that Krypton is an interstellar culture, it is going to raise questions as to how there could only be 2 survivors.
Yes. It's the exact same problem as the 2009 Star Trek implying that there were no Vulcan survivors beyond the thousands who escaped the planet's destruction when it happened. What about offworld colonists, immigrants, scientists, diplomats, tourists, all the people who would logically have been elsewhere at the time? It's contradictory to say that a culture has the ability to leave its homeland routinely while also claiming that its entire population was present in the homeland at a given moment.
You're hearing our complaints the wrong way around. What you're saying is that it should be true to the source, and that's essentially the point. If you want to be true to the usual version of the premise, then it's a mistake to change one of the key details that makes that premise possible. Like, imagine an adaptation where Wolverine had no healing factor but still had adamantium claws. That's a contradiction, because his healing factor was the only thing that let him survive the adamantium graft. Or imagine an adaptation where, say, the governor-general knows that Don Diego is Zorro, but Don Diego is still free to lead his double life as in earlier versions of the story. That doesn't work, because if that were known, Diego would be arrested right away and the normal status quo would be impossible. What we're objecting to is not the standard, traditional story element -- what we're objecting to is the newly added detail that conflicts with it and undermines it.
In this case, if they wanted Krypton to have only two survivors as usual, then it's a flaw in the worldbuilding to portray Krypton as a civilization with routine interstellar travel. That creates an internal contradiction that needs to be explained. And the longer they go without explaining it, the more it undermines the credibility of the show's premise.
More fundamentally, regardless of whether a work of fiction is an adaptation or an original tale, the most important thing is whether it holds together internally, purely as its own self-contained entity. A story's internal logic needs consistency. Ignore all the history of the Superman mythos. Look at this show exclusively on its own terms. This is a show that claims an alien world had regular interstellar travel yet no expatriate population. Surely you can see that that's a logic flaw.
When Kurt Busiek wrote on the Superman comics about 10 years ago he introduced the idea that in the distant past Kryptonians had explored space. But over time their culture isolated itself from the rest of the galaxy and became xenophobic. So that by the time of Jor-El space travel had been long abandoned and outlawed and he had to he discover it on his own. None of that fits with this show if Kara was traveling to other planets in her youth.
How many million Krytonians thrive in the bottle city of Kandor?
Was the New Krypton story line resolved, or did Flashpoint take care of that?
We find out in the latest Dark Knight Returns series from Frank Miller, that the Kandorians are huge assholes.
Shouldn't Krypto count as a son of Krypton?
^Of course there have been many different versions of Krypton in the past, but the problem is within the show's own distinct reality, and so the only explanation that would be useful is one that also exists within the show's reality, that comes up in dialogue in an actual episode. Until the show itself reconciles the issue, the problem remains. Either they need to tell us why there were no Kryptonians offworld, or they need to establish that there is a Kryptonian refugee/immigrant population elsewhere in the galaxy after all (while also explaining why Superman and Supergirl have been unaware of it for all these years).
I understand Christopher's argument, but am not sure we can conclusively say that there were no survivors of Krypton outside of Fort Rozz, even if we haven't heard of there being any.
In the long publishing history of Superman in comics rarely has the label "Last Son of Krypton" truly been reflective of what is shown in the actual stories. The first story I known of that revealed other survivors is as early as 1950. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mala_(Kryptonian) Three Kryptonian criminals survived not in the Phantom Zone, which had not been created by the writers yet, but because they had placed in suspended animation in space. The most significant period when DC enforced Superman being the last Kryptonian started with the 1986 reboot. That fully ended in 2004 with a reintroduction of a new version of Kara.
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