Welcome back all you Supergirl fans! One of these days, I’ll figure out what bothers me about Supergirl in the same way I know what bothered me about Arrow or The Flash. Maybe it’s the relentless, saccharine optimism that crumbles under the slightest bit of scrutiny. Maybe it’s the propensity to rely on platitudes and contrivances to propel the drama forward. Maybe it’s society’s conditioning for me to see shows featuring women and traditionally feminine coded storytelling methods, devices and tropes as inferior.
Maybe I’m just cranky and I wanted to see more cool set pieces but instead got a lot of chatting about obsession. I guess we’ll never know.
As always, spoilers ahead.
1. The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Obsidian North has a new product, it’s called Platinum, making the title of the product Obsidian North Platinum, which is a terrible name for a service since it’s got two different classes of shiny objects in it. Get your act together Rojas!
Seriously though, the rollout of this new VR system is central to the plot of the episode yet it feels like an afterthought. It’s been built up for a few weeks now but now that it’s here, we’re left with a shrug, an admission that maybe it’s a bad idea but also it’s a good one, and a big bad who wants to take it out because their husband became a VR addict and killed himself. That shit’s heavy and we just kind brush past it to get to the punching?
Surprisingly, I wanted the show to slow its roll and let us really consider the ramifications of what’s happening. I know two-parters are seriously out of vogue but what I wouldn’t have given for a more careful, slower episode like shows of old. We’re always running forward at a breakneck pace in Supergirl. Give your characters time to breathe and sit with their problems. Let them consider and debate and have heart to hearts that don’t resolve in 15 seconds with canned answers.
Make me care about these people instead of making it feel like we’re ticking the boxes.
Oh, and Kara’s I Abhor Violence statement made me laugh. I get what she meant but her entire shtick is that she punches bad people really good and worked with a secret, violent tool of the state. Incongruity is expected when our heroes are supposed to stand up to violence while partaking in it but come on y’all, put a little more thought into how you phrase these things.
2. The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
One thing I appreciate about “The Bodyguard” is the parallels drawn between Rojas and Lena. Both feel alone and isolated thanks to their work, both believe they are acting for the good of everyone, and they both refuse to hear otherwise. When Supergirl asks Rojas to slow the rollout to really consider how her new near perfect VR world will affect people, she brushes her off with righteous indignation. Not nearly as much as Lena had back at the start of the season but it’s there, under the “there are more stories than just Sapphire’s,” which, damn, callous considering it was her technology that brought him to the brink.
There is a conversation to be had for where the blame can lie and whether or not she has a responsibility to help those adversely affected by her product. It’s true that her perfect VR did not cause Sapphire to kill himself, it simply provided the catalyst for worsening his depression born of homesickness. It was a tool poorly used.
Because of the argument around VR revolving around the escapism instead of the decisions behind the tech — how are people incentivized to stay, how they are pushed to use the tech, what they are encouraged to do — some may see this as a stand in for video games rather than what it really should be, which is the modern tech industry. For example, Twitter and YouTube’s algorithms aren’t built to give you what you are looking for but to keep you there as long as possible. They often do this by reducing point of egress to other sites, promoting content that is easy to digest and, most crucially, by recommending things that play to your biases or get you angry because those are the emotions that keep you there.
Continued belowVR works differently, and this VR certainly does as well, by providing comfort and places to escape that you do not want to leave. The question of what happens when people stop being able to tell reality from fiction or to stop interacting with others is pretty much the same argument people used for TV, video games, the Internet, hell, even (fiction) books and newspapers were derided in the same way when they were new.
But, as with those arguments, they’re disingenuous, as, yes, they’re forms of escapism, but that’s not inherently bad, though VR is the closest we can get to literally creating fictional worlds so real you can’t tell the difference. Taken to an extreme, when it becomes an addiction that is all consuming, that’s when these things become a real problem and it feels like the episode doesn’t grasp that nuance. It tries, when the villain of the week whose name I’m forgetting is draining Luthor’s battery, she says something to the effect of, Platinum is designed to keep people there, and that’s an idea that shouldn’t be buried in the final act.
The reason I have issues with Rojas’ reaction, and the show’s tip-toeing around it, is that VR is not bad, even though it has the potential to be; it’s that the companies that roll it out aren’t thinking through all the ramifications when they’re being presented with them. This isn’t Facebook circa 2010, who may not have understood how their platform has changed, this is Facebook circa 2017, willfully ignoring the ways it is doing damage by hiding behind the shield of we’re doing this for the betterment of humanity, even as most decisions are made to juice the bottom line and keep people using.
Rojas is admitting that she does not care that her VR replacement for the world could do more harm than good, not in the abstract but by design.
3. Understand
The show almost showed some reflexivity with Lena and I can’t tell if that was on purpose or by accident. Lena goes into human trials for her mind wipe, I mean, do no harm initiative and discovers that maybe her plan was flawed. If my suspension of disbelief hadn’t been shattered for her plot, the setback would have proven to be a real bummer. Lena’s story this week plays out in a traditional B-plot fashion, with the belief in success, the failure, the anger, the pep-talk that leads to a breakthrough, and then the resolution. What’s striking is that I don’t know whether to read this as positive or negative.
The music cues all suggest that Lena succeeding at perfecting the algorithm is great and that when she “cures” Steve of his repressed anger and indignation, which only came to light after the test, she’s doing the right thing. We opened with her being angry that Supergirl never saw her project as a positive and that they assumed she was going to mind control the world, which, uh, 1) that’s not what they thought, 2) if you’d talked to Kara instead of being super fucking sketchy maybe she wouldn’t have assumed the worst and 3) that’s totally what you were going to do by forcing this upon the entire world’s population without even beta-testing it.
However, she has this moment of lucidity in the lab that maybe she’s become deluded in the same way the Lex did, thinking what she was doing was for the betterment of humanity when it was really short-sighted and self-serving and controlling. Then Lex talks her out of it and we get our “touching” end. Lex’s motivations have been established to be far less than altruistic, so this reeks of manipulation to keep her from going back to her friends and making amends, thereby getting out from under his megalomaniacal thumb. But the episode frames it all as positive!
I get that they’re trying to show that Lena thinks she’s right and, possibly, to have her be right but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t set this up like she’s the victim here, that she’s been hurt and betrayed when the text doesn’t bear that out and supports the reading that she is, in fact, deluding herself into thinking she’s doing the right thing for the right reasons at the right time. Remember, she erased Eve Tessmacher without her consent, mind induced Ma’alefa’ak against his will, and tried to do the same to the entire world, again, without their consent.
Continued belowThere is a difference between those and this episode’s trials, especially with Steve, but the show seems content to not address that, which is a mistake. Maybe I’m just jumping the gun but if we end the season with Lena still thinking the only way to make sure humanity stops betraying each other is to erase/repress all violent instincts (including feelings of being wronged which I see lots of problems removing) against their will, then I might just throw my hands up in the air and declare this season a wash.
4. Exhalation
The villain of the week this time around is kinda lackluster, as most have been this season, but we got everyone to talk about how there was pink energy, as if colored energy, like blue energy and fuschia energy were just a thing and not a descriptor. Anyway, it turns out that too much pink energy is dangerous and they have to stop the pink energy wielder from killing Rojas and others. Whoops! You don’t get these kinds of problems with orange energy, I can tell you that.
5. The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
What’s the deal with Leviathan? Before the break, they were a secret cabal, thousands of years old, or, at least a few of the members were, but all we knew was that a couple were aliens, I think. It was all poorly explained in an episode I had to fight to stay awake during every excruciatingly boring minute so when it came up here that Leviathan is apparently a race, I said fine, whatever. It’s better than whatever bullshit Rama Khan was about.
If Leviathan is the name of a race, why the fuck is their organization named that too? And how come Brainy is giving us these basically useless details now as if we all knew them forever? Whatever. Lex is on the inside now so maybe we’ll get some answers soon.
That about does it for now! Let me know what you all thought of the episode! I know I wasn’t too kind to it, and I’m usually not, but after last week’s fun romp through 100 episodes, this was a snore and kinda frustrating. Get ready though, for next week, Dreamer comes into her own against some asshole in a hoodie. Until then, stay super y’all.
Best Line of the Night:
Dreamer: “It’s time to put your toys to bed.”
