Crimes Against James/Kara (Supergirl)

More on Supergirl and how the show squandered what they had with James Olson. As I said last time, there’s plenty to love about Supergirl, but it’s also fallen short in places, and those aren’t insignificant. Today, I’m looking at how the show torched Kara/James (Kara/James-related spoilers.)

While the beats of the romance/love triangle in season 1 can be trite – so much will-they-won’t-they, Lucy as a stopgap, the jealous rivalry between James and Winn – the actual dynamic between James and Kara is just lovely. He’s positioned a little bit as a mentor to her, given that Clark nudged James toward National City in the hopes that he’d befriend and help Kara, but their relationship doesn’t come across as significantly imbalanced, and even though James is generally cast in a supportive role to Kara, he doesn’t feel like he stops existing when he’s not onscreen with her. I like that James is caring and encouraging, that he trusts Kara’s strength, and that he doesn’t mind contributing to the fight in his own way.

One of my favorite moments in the story of Kara/James is when Bizarro kidnaps James in order to hurt Kara. At that point, neither Kara nor James are open about their feelings for one another, but of course Bizarro knows how Kara feels and tells James as much, revealing her plan to get to Kara by hurting the person she loves. Over the course of his capture, James admits his own love for Kara to Bizarro as, rather than try to fight his way out, he keeps her talking, doing what he can to connect and empathize with her. In this way, he’s able to stay alive until Kara comes to rescue him.

Despite any aforementioned triteness in the triangle plot, the heart of the Kara/James ship is steered firmly in the right direction, and when they finally get together in the season 1 finale, all signs point to the coming romance between them. But then, the show was canceled on CBS and subsequently picked up by the CW, and somewhere in that changeover, the entire trajectory of Kara’s love life shifted.

Because, even though season 2 begins at literally the same moment season 1 ends, the show somehow manages to give Kara a complete change of heart. She denies, even to herself, that that’s what’s going on at first, but as she and James plan their first date, Alex immediately pegs that she’s pretending to be more excited about it than she is. Kara dances around the issue for a good chunk of the season 2 premiere before coming to the conclusion that she needs to do some work on herself, with the corollary that she’s now convinced that she and James are “best as friends.”

Not only does this revelation come pretty much out of nowhere, it’s also strongly undermined by the fact that that very episode also gives us our first glimpse of Mon-El, who will be Kara’s next love interest. True, they won’t actually get together until a fair amount later in the season, but it adds such insult to injury that the show lays the groundwork for Kara’s new beau in practically the same breath that she cuts things short with James because she needs to do some self-reflection on her own, without guys.

It makes me mad because there’s a lot I like about Kara/Mon-El (even though, as with James, there are a number of cliché missteps in bringing their romance about – the show really struggles to write strong romantic plots for Kara,) but my enjoyment of it is also tainted by how they tossed James aside to bring it about. Like I said in my Crimes Against James post, James’s screentime and focus as a character never recovered after Kara broke things off with him, and then it was only a matter of time before Mehcad Brooks was ready to move on to other opportunities.