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.

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.