Spoilers "Supergirl": the 6th and final season

Hence the reason his comment was nonsense; he will never know what it means to truly live as a black man, as his appearance is no more than a mask he has the luxury of removing whenever he chooses. Obviously, black people have a birthright / heritage / generational experience an alien will never share or comprehend, so again, his statement was BS, all for the show to use whatever was laying around to fit into this episode, no matter how inapplicable to the central subject.

 

After Kelly, the privileged saviour, who was just gifted a multi million dollar super hero tech system, the focal black character, the poor and downtrodden, oppressed minority character, was Orlando Davis.

https://arrow.fandom.com/wiki/Orlando_Davis

Dudes an alien.

A black Alien, but he's been on Earth for less than 5 years, given the apparent age of his alien younger brother, and spent most of that time in jail.

How many black people in that building were non human?

Is this a black problem or an alien problem?

Yes, yes, to us aliens are a metaphor for racism, but not to Kelly.

Kelly went all in, telling all the white people, even the white alien and the sometimes black alien, that they suck, that they could never understand the burden of being a black human, when really more than likely neither could those black aliens loaded to bear with alien super powers living in the demolished tenement Kelly was trying to save.

There are nine writers attributed to this three episode story arc, with Davis, and no overlap where any author worked on more than one script.

Is it possible that no one reminded the team on episode three that Davis is an alien?

Oh?

Azie Tesfai wrote Blind Spots?

Kelly wrote a Kelly episode.

Awkward?

 

Why?

 

My assumption is Azie wrote a story where a black community was decimated by a Super hero brawl, and the Super Friends where too busy trying to fight the big bad, to consider helping the people caught in the cross fire.

Everything else in the episode we saw was rewritten by other people to make a trilogy with recurring characters, right down to her story about black people now being about aliens.

Or...

It's awkward that I'm calling out a procrastination of writers for being so incommunicative with each other, that they've creating an entirely disjoint story, when arguably the most important writer there, is a cast member proudly reading her own lines, and if there was a problem, she would have dealt to it months ago.

 

Yeah, that's a lot of assumptions.

 

Still I Rise.

Nicki Holcomb ... (teleplay by) &
Jen Troy ... (teleplay by)

Jessica Kardos ... (story by)

Jessica Kardos ... (executive story editor) (as Jess Kardos)

Nicki Holcomb ... (story editor)

Mxy in the Middle

Elle Lipson ... (teleplay by) &
Chandler Smidt ... (teleplay by)

Rob Wright ... (story by)

Katie Rose Rogers ... (executive story editor)

Nicki Holcomb ... (story editor)

Blind spots

J. Holtham ... (written by) &
Azie Tesfai ... (written by)

Jessica Kardos ... (executive story editor) (as Jess Kardos)

Nicki Holcomb ... (story editor)

...

Okay, so it looks like Jessica Kardos wrote part 1, and then Nicki Holcomb edited it all with help from her boss Jessica Kardos to make the trilogy coherent.

 

Yeah, I'm not gonna pretend to know exactly what those titles mean in the Supergirl writer's room and how they contribute to the storylines.

 

Story editors are close to the bottom of the writing-staff hierarchy -- bottom to top, it's basically staff writer, story editor, executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, and then executive producers of various stripes, including the showrunner.

As a rule, the entire writing staff participates in breaking (plotting) every script, as well as breaking the story arc for the season. Each script is then assigned to a single writer or team, and then the whole staff pitches in on the rewrite process, and the showrunner does the final draft of every script. It's a more extensive collaboration than Guy appears to be assuming. In theory, the credited "written by" or "teleplay by" authors are the ones who contributed the most to the final script in the opinion of the WGA arbitrators. But that isn't always accurate, especially since it's considered inappropriate for the showrunner to put their name on someone else's script, no matter how extensively they rewrote it (since they get paid a steady salary anyway, and sharing the credit would halve the amount the junior writer gets paid).

As for a "story by" credit, that just means the person wrote the initial story outline, which may have been massively reworked by other authors in the screenplay stage. Jessica Kardos does not have a teleplay credit for any of the three listed episodes, only a story credit for the first one.

 

You're forgetting Covid.

The usual free wheeling omnidirectional collaboration of a writers room will have evapourated to Zoom conferences.

Less rewriting from the team as a team.

...

Moreso, there's at least two levels of writers below staff writer, who never see the writers room.

Spec writers, a job that almost does not exist anymore. Randos who send their fanfiction to production companies, and then cross their fingers.

Contract writers, out side talent that are asked to write for a production company.

Azie was a hybrid of the two.

So on one hand she didn't make it to the writers room to participate in the many rewrites, and on the other hand she was the first Arrow verse actor to write for the show, so the next actor who tries to write, might know better, and get in the room.

 

That should tell anyone what was necessary about how insensitive and thoughtless the checkbox Berlanti staff were about the state / plight of black Americans: two of the three people figuring prominently in the script were aliens with no understanding of what it means to be black in America. Much like Berlanti's "creative" dregs cranking out their Very Special Episodes, and those who believe this kind of disrespectful crap was enlightening.

 

Honestly, so much of the dialogue was written as a PSA for how to be an ally and here are all the correct terms and language that needs to be used that, for the first time in a CW show, I felt like I was being preached to rather than watching a story.

 

It didn't feel any preachier to me than Supergirl has been in the past, or than Lucifer's recent episode confronting police racism. If they have to be heavy-handed in expressing these ideas, it's only because we've let them go unaddressed for way too long and they've gotten way too bad as a result.

 

That was my biggest problem with the episode as well. The Kelly/Kara and Kelly/Alex scenes, in particular, seemed assembled entirely from a lexicon of such "terms and language," bearing no resemblance to the way any actual people have talked to each other, ever.

I'm also frustrated that, with only eight episodes to go, there's no sense of a six-year narrative building to any kind of climax or conclusion. Kara has no arc in recent episodes, and barely a role. Nyxly, while entertaining, is just another random villain. The thing with Lena is utterly arbitrary, bizarre, and nonsensical, and diminishes the character rather than strengthening her. Episodes that should be building to an epic series conclusion feel like they're just running out the clock. It's dispiriting.

 

In the past, she'd have fallen in love, and run off somewhere to have babies.

But that's anti-feminist.

Unless she runs off with Lena to have babies?

 

But that makes perfect sense in that context, because the whole thing Kara and Alex were trying to do was to learn about something unfamiliar to them, to listen as Kelly explained it to them. They both understand that they need to learn and need to think carefully about it, so they didn't just wing it like a casual conversation. And Kelly is a psychologist, after all, so it makes perfect sense that she'd explain it in organized terms like that. She's not just "people," she's a specific person.

The problem with the way so-called "actual people" normally talk to each other is that it tends to involve very little listening. That's the whole reason they weren't hearing what Kelly was saying. When they finally wised up and started to listen, naturally it was different from everyday conversation, because it needed to be.

 

The white vampire is eating the black people?

Nope.

That hadn't been uncovered yet.

The building dust is giving everyone a cough.

Is that really a job for Supergirl?

 

I feel that way as well. I really loved this series in its early years, but I think it reached its peak with the 18-19 season, which would have been a solid way to end the show.

 

Fair points, fairly argued.

The 2018-2019 season (the show's fourth) was indeed its peak. Rather than end at that point, however, I would have preferred it keep going with that level of compelling storytelling. Sadly, it wasn't to be.

 

40 black humans and/or Black Aliens go to the hospital and...

They had insurance?

With atypical physiology the human hospitals probably didn't have the facilities or staff to treat nonhumans.

Seriously who paid?

A. Leftover DEO slush fund?

B. Supergirl paid?

C. Kelly paid?

D. The city paid, as part of the tenaments insurance policy?

E. The poor did have superhero insurance, but not health insurance?

F. The poors got into the hospital through the ER, because the hospital can't turn imminently hurting people away, then later they're billed, they default on the payments, their credit scores are trashed, a lean on future income, and bankruptcy...

G. They pawned a spaceship?

 

You were being preached to--the long standing practice of most Berlanti series. Contrary to the opinions of the ill-informed, the issues limply explored on the Supergirl episode in question have been addressed for decades. It is nothing new in media, and certainly not for black people in the real world who have labored, fought and bled on the streets, courts, law offices and police stations for generations. For anyone to even suggest this has been an ignored problem is--frankly--sheltered, or just continuing to push the opportunistic check-boxing BS of a Berlanti TV series.

As noted time and again, the life and plight of black Americans has never been the sociopolitical issue of choice/importance to Berlanti productions, so when an episode drops this 11th Hour, weak attempt to "do a black story" its end result is leaving a sour taste for those who know for Supergirl, this is coming out of nowhere (or pulled out of some other area).

Black Lightning's creators so effectively presented the landscape of black life in America--effortlessly weaving many of those complex issues into the everyday lives of its characters throughout its run. Of course, that was due to people who were the polar opposite of Berlanti and his usual cohorts, but what's worse is that two of the Supergirl episode's main writers were black, yet they were so out of touch, that they wrote like White Liberals trying to stand on a soapbox and seem relevant--shameful to be sure for Azie Tesfai and Holtham. You did not see that kind of lack of insight in the scripts for Black Lightning or The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.