*Some Kara and Mon-El spoilers.*
During my rewatch of Supergirl, I tossed in some new write-ups based on revisiting the early seasons. I didn’t do this one at the time, but now that the show has wrapped up, I want to swing back around to it.
When it comes to season 2 additions to Supergirl, I know that Mon-El is contended much more than Maggie, but personally, I’m a fan. While I think 1) the bait-and-switch with James is still shady and 2) Kara’s friendship-and-maybe-more with the new arrival from Daxam could have benefitted from a slower burn, I do think these two had a lot of storytelling potential and the kind of chemistry showrunners pray for.
Kara is drawn to Mon-El from the moment she recovers his pod. Given her history, it’s no wonder—although Kara has adapted well to life on Earth, makes it her home, and clearly claims Alex as family, she still feels a pull toward Krypton and all she lost. It’s no coincidence that she’s faced with the possibility of another surviving Kryptonian right around the time Superman is in town and she’s basking in the joy of being with her cousin. She’s been living for her life as it is now, but she can’t deny that call for the past she once knew, and an apparent Kryptonian dropping out of the sky has to feel like fate.
However, it’s when she’s pushing back against anti-alien sentiment in the city that Mon-El finally wakes up, and this is also quite timely. Because, as it happens, he’s not a Kryptonian. He’s a Daxamite, hailing from Krypton’s neighboring planet. Kara may have been only a child when she left, but she was still old enough to learn Kryptonian prejudices from her parents and her society, and her immediate assumption is that Mon-El has hostile intentions toward them. Even though I don’t like to see this sort of kneejerk animosity from Kara – obviously! – it’s good to see her confront her own biases and realize she has some work she needs to do on herself. It’s startling to see her bristle so much at the thought of Mon-El, and in a season where plenty of the villians are anti-alien bigots, I appreciate the acknowledgment that being one of the “good guys” doesn’t mean you have a spotless track record that’s free of prejudice (shades of Zootopia there.)
As Mon-El challenges Kara’s assumptions about him (while simultaneously making a few not-so-flattering ones about her,) Kara starts to analyze her own thinking more—again, this process is a bit too quick and a bit too smooth for my taste, but I like that it’s there. She makes a concerted effort to do better, recognizing the ways Mon-El is like her as she once was: a newcomer to Earth who doesn’t understand the culture around him or the new powers he has here. She undertakes to be his guide to acclimating on Earth, and she’s kind of hilariously terrible at it. Obviously, getting him an internship at Catco when he doesn’t know how to use a phone is an awful idea, particularly when he’s mostly left to his own devices and Kara isn’t keeping a constant watch over him, but the thing is, I don’t think she realizes how much she’s throwing him into the deep end. It speaks to how at home she now feels on Earth and all the little things she’s forgotten she ever needed to learn. I really enjoy Mon-El’s cheerful cluelessness about things and the way he’s so confidently wrong about everything (casually handing Kara a bag full of stuffing from his mattress when he comes to Thanksgiving dinner is awesome.)
As I said, I’d have liked to see matters move a little more slowly between these two, and I wish we lingered more on the angle of Mon-El as a vehicle for exploring Kara’s own past as an alien refugee on Earth. But I’m not opposed to the romantic route things take. While it’s true that the show’s execution of it leaves an awful lot to be desired – the portrayal of Mon-El as a frat boy living below his potential until Kara inspires him to clean up his act, the whiplash with which things start and stop between them when they eventually get together, and so forth – there’s still something I like about it, and I think that ultimately comes down to the spark between them. Obviously, Melissa Benoist and Chris Wood went on to get married, so there was nothing manufactured about that chemistry. And that’s what keeps me rooting for them despite some iffy writing, the way they light up around one another. After their initial combative dynamic (a classic love/hate scenario,) it’s nice to see Kara unwind around Mon-El, watching them have fun together and seeing how he makes her smile.
As it is, I’m all right with these two not ending up together. I’m sad for both of them when they’re forced apart at the end of season 2, and the time shenanigans of season 3 provide decent fodder for romantic drama (although I’m most grateful to those time shenanigans for the introduction of Brainy, who’s tied with Kara for my favorite character.) And then, after all that tampering and Mon-El leaving the show outside of brief guest appearances, I’m not left yearning for him or their relationship. So it doesn’t surprise me that these two aren’t thrown back together at the last minute when Mon-El returns in the finale. They had their moment, but that time is past now and it wouldn’t have made sense to me as an ending for the show.
There’s a lot I would do differently when it comes to this relationship, as I’ve written about before, and I unfortunately think the show squanders a lot of good potential here. But throughout, Benoist and Wood make it work to the point that I do root for their relationship in season 2, which is no small thing. The show really lucked out there, and I just wish they would’ve taken full advantage of it by making more interesting choices.
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