Crimes Against James Olson (Supergirl)

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a Crimes Against… post, and it makes me a little sad to write a Crimes Against… about anything involving Supergirl. However, as I’ve said, great shows can still get things wrong, even shows that also get a lot of things right. While I love Supergirl, corniness and all, I recognize the places where it could do or could’ve done better, and James Olson is a big one (some James-related spoilers.)

I started thinking about this earlier this past season, when Mehcad Brooks left the show. It had been clear for a while that the show never really had a grasp on what to do with James after they abruptly cut the romance between him and Kara short, and after like 3-and-a-half seasons of lackluster plots even on the occasions when he did get attention, it was understandable that Brooks was ready to part ways with the series. But it was really rewatching the series from the start that made me want to write this post. Watching a show week to week, year to year, you can gradually acclimate to changes and thus have to work harder to really take notice of them. But when you compress it all into the span of several months, those changes get magnified.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my point: I remembered how much I really liked James in season 1. I like the importance given to his role as a photojournalist, I like his move to reassert himself in National City outside of his association with Superman, and I like the calm, steady presence he brings in many of the scenes he shares with Cat. He’s a man with flaws, because every good character is, but he’s also a man who knows who he is and feels right in his own skin.

In season 2, between the move to the CW and the reversal on Kara/James (how much were the two events tied together?), James gets lost in the shuffle. Even though there are various stabs at giving him his own plots – running Catco, all the Guardian stuff, his relationship with Lena – none of it fully lands for me. Most of it feels like afterthought storytelling, a manifestation of “oh right, we’d better give James something to do!” without putting much effort into considering who he is and what would be organic moves for his character. Post-season-1 storylines for James often feel either 1) so immaterial they could be easily cut from the episode and not be missed, or 2) a lot of time spent on a story that isn’t all that enjoyable.

Worse, these storylines frequently occur almost entirely outside Kara’s sphere. Yes, we want characters to have their own things going on and not just live to support Kara’s plots, but as the protagonist, she lends weight to any storyline she’s in, and if she largely stays out of another character’s plots, their narratives tend to feel decidedly outside the “main” story. When you’re consistently having to leave the A-plot to check in with what James is doing, he’s naturally going to end up feeling like his storylines matter less, which isn’t fair to him and is a far cry from how well-integrated he is into the proceedings in season 1. There, even when he does go off in his plots, they don’t feel so separate, both because they aren’t the only scenes we’re seeing him in and because we also see him talking to Kara about the things that are happening in his life outside of her.

For me, the Guardian storyline is a pretty colossal fumble. To go from a season 1 James who’s secure in knowing that the non-physical ways he contributes to the fight are important, to a season 2 James who’s apparently always had a major case of cape envy and won’t be content until he’s wearing a mask and beating on bad guys? Ugh. I feel like there’s a way that James could’ve been Guardian where it would’ve been palatable, especially if it happened with Kara’s support and blessing, but as it is, it just falls flat. In an unspoken way, it suggests that James can’t handle staying in the female superhero’s shadow and needs to assert his manhood by being a fighter himself, so that’s obviously going to leave a bad taste for a female-driven show. And we go back to the same “worse” mentioned above – not only do a lot of Guardian storylines happen outside of the A-plot, but when they do intersect with Kara, the arc actually sets off a further wedge between Kara and James, first with her not trusting masked-vigilante Guardian and later with her trying to shut down the operation when she finds out it’s James.

It’s weird. In male-driven shows, female characters run the risk of losing some of what makes them them if they get subsumed into a romantic storyline with the lead, but in James’s case, the more the show takes him outside of Kara’s sphere, the more it seems to dim his shine. It’s so unfortunate, because female-driven shows have a real chance to redefine what a love interest looks like, and Supergirl had that chance with James but then swapped it out for something more generic and less interesting, where both James’s character and Kara’s love life were concerned.

Honestly, what happened with Kara/James is a whole other thing, and this post is already long enough. I’ll be back another day to discuss the issues the show created with that relationship.