Relationship Spotlight: Kara Zor-El & Mon-El (Supergirl)

*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.

Relationship Spotlight: Brainiac-5 & Kara Zor-El (Supergirl)

This blog has seen many a Relationship Spotlight featuring Supergirl characters, plenty that involve either Kara or Brainy. But while they don’t get as much traction as, say Kara-Alex, Brainy/Nia, Kara-Lena, or Alex-Brainy, I always enjoy the small glimpses we get of Kara and Brainy’s friendship (a few Kara- and Brainy-related spoilers.)

Brainy’s debut appearance on the show comes at an important moment for Kara, and his first episode finds him helping her on a deeply-personal level. Her first major clash with Reign leaves her in a coma, and Brainy uses some 31^st-century technology to allow his artificial intelligence to interface with Kara’s subconscious. He then enters her “mind palace” and helps guide her toward figuring out how to escape it and regain consciousness. Since Brainy comes from the future, where Supergirl is a legend, he’s a big fanboy, but he also demonstrates a deft hand in helping Kara work through her issues so she can wake up.

That’s a pretty heavy way to meet, but after that, as Kara and Brainy’s friendship develops more in the background of the show (as evidenced by the fact that most of the stills I found of these two together were from Brainy's debut episode,) it generally takes on a much lighter vibe. The first time they cross one another’s paths outside Kara’s mind palace, she notices that Brainy is shorter in real life and Brainy admits he created the illusion of being taller to engender her trust. From there, Kara is friendly and welcoming, particularly once Brainy finds himself unable to return to his own time and has to adjust to life in 21^st-century National City. Kara is scandalized by movie references Brainy doesn’t know (“We never showed you Star Wars? Not a single Star War?”) but later expresses full support of his “mastery” of classic cinema (“Would you work to discuss auteur theory and the works of Ed Wood?”), and she’s always willing to run interference for him when he acts weird in front of someone who doesn’t know he’s an alien A.I. from the future.

When these two have cause to team up on a mission, it’s often a lot of fun. Their “covert” trip to Collinwood with Nia is a blast, from them bickering over how to keep a low profile to Brainy clumsily biting his tongue to keep from revealing Kara’s secret identity to Nia. I also love Brainy designing Kara’s new suit in season 5. Not only does he give her pants (her thrilled reaction to this is adorable,) he also creates a Black-Panther-necklace-style delivery system, this nano-device thing that causes the suit to activate when Kara whips her glasses off.

After that first meeting, they haven’t had as many serious moments together as either gets with other characters, but whenever they do, they bring it. Brainy’s ongoing loyalty to Kara is a nice thread – I like seeing how affected he is when she suffers a serious Kryptonite attack – and she’s there for him in understated ways. I feel like season 5 features even less of them together than usual, but when Brainy’s doppelgängers show up after Crisis, there’s a really lovely scene of her listening to and supporting him as he explains why he started wearing personality inhibitors and how he’s afraid to be fully himself. But then, in classic Brainy-Kara fashion, they mix laughter in with the heart – half a second after he asserts that he needs to handle his unstable, destructive doppelgänger on his own, Brainy adds, “You should come too,” with Kara already nodding vigorously at his heels. Ah, bless.

I understand that, in the comics, Brainiac-5 has been one of Supergirl’s most major love interests, a relationship that’s been depicted in certain animated properties. I’ve really just heard about it, haven’t seen much of it for myself, but I’ll admit, the idea kind of fascinates me. I doubt it would ever happen on Supergirl, for numerous reasons. 1) With the final season coming, the show really hasn’t done any work to set up Kara and Brainy romantically, 2) my guess is the plan is for Brainy and Nia to get back together, and most importantly, 3) I don’t see any real scenario in which Kara dates one of her close friend’s exes. But just as characters themselves, I can see how they’d be a weird match and yet totally work. They get, support, and accept one another and are surprisingly compatible in an odd way. Luckily for all of us, that’s a dynamic that works great as friendship as well. Here’s hoping the show’s last season gives us a few more great moments from these two!

Relationship Spotlight: Kara Danvers & Lena Luthor (Supergirl)

This leisurely Supergirl rewatch is just giving me a chance to write all the posts. This past season was a hard one for Kara and Lena, but going back over the old episodes again reminds me how much I like these two (some Kara-Lena-related spoilers.)

To put it mildly, Kara and Lena is an unlikely friendship (or more, depending on your ship preferences.) There’s of course the fact that Lena is the sister of Superman’s nemesis and basically the only Luthor who’s not virulently anti-alien, but it goes a lot deeper than that. After all, Lena doesn’t even know that Kara is Supergirl until quite a ways into their friendship, so it’s less of a factor on her side. But beyond that, Lena is guarded while Kara is open, Lena cynical and Kara optimistic, and Lena trades in ambiguity while Kara tends to view things as very clear-cut. Theirs is a surprising opposites-attract connection, one that works seemingly against the odds.

It’s Kara’s very openness and optimism that allow her to make inroads into Lena’s regard in the first place. Being a Luthor is an understandably-touchy subject for Lena, and she’s used to being judged for her family name rather than her personal actions. And other characters are quick to assume shady actions or nefarious motivations on her part, but Kara believes Lena when she says she’s trying to get out from under her family’s bad name and be a force for good, giving Lena the grace of good-faith trust in her. Kara fights for Lena when no one else will, and even though she sometimes succumbs to worrying over Lena’s murkier-seeming actions (often when everyone else is insisting to her that Lena can’t be trusted,) she’s able to gradually break through the distance Lena frequently puts between herself and other people.

And so, over time, the two become very genuine friends. Kara has Lena’s back when her mother or brother show up to cause trouble, and Lena is in turn supportive of Kara. Many an episode finds them catching lunch together while they discuss this or that problem, decompressing about personal struggles, or just chatting over boyband nostalgia. Again, not all of Lena’s views are as cut-and-dried as Kara’s, but she can sometimes encourage Kara to exercise more discretion than she’s inclined to, while Kara sometimes gets Lena to recognize when her own views are a little too mercenary.

The ongoing arc of their friendship is complicated by the separate relationship Lena has with Supergirl. They frequently cross paths with one another as Supergirl saves Lena from various threats and Lena assists the DEO with STEM solutions to various crises, and they develop a pretty decent working relationship. However, Lena doesn’t know that her superpowered ally Supergirl is the same person as her close friend Kara, and when a dustup over Kryptonite occurs in season 3, Supergirl and Lena’s relationship takes a hard hit. To Lena, Supergirl is just one more person who assumes the worst of her and treats her like a villain, while Kara is pained at how her two relationships with Lena are diverging so starkly. It’s hard for her to get together with Lena as Kara and listen to her friend complain about Supergirl, and it kills her that she still feels like she has to keep her identity a secret for Lena’s protection. (Side note: whether or not you agree with that idea – Kara doesn’t seem to have too much of an issue revealing her secret identity to plenty of other people – Melissa Benoist’s performance sells you on the fact that she absolutely believes it.)

Naturally, everything comes to a head at the end of season 4 when Lex, magnificent bastard that he is, reveals to Lena that Kara is Supergirl and then rubs her face in the facts that 1) Kara “didn’t trust her enough” to tell her and 2) Lena “wasn’t smart enough” to figure it out on her own. This causes all of Lena’s issues to bubble over, and she takes this secret as a deep betrayal. It kicks off the dark Kara-Lena times of season 5, when these two are unfortunately at odds with one another. I hate seeing how Lena continues to pretend to be Kara’s friend in the early episodes, plotting retribution while Kara is none the wiser. Lena’s hurt causes a lot of damage to Kara, to herself, and to others as well, and Kara beats herself up for her part in the whole thing.

The end of the season brings us around to a very tentative alliance between the two. I like that Kara doesn’t offer instant hugs and forgiveness (Lena goes down some dark paths this season,) but she recognizes that the situation at hand is bigger than their falling-out and they need to put aside their differences and work together. Their relationship isn’t where it once was, and I’m not sure what it will look like as they go forward, but we’ve at least gotten a glimmer of hope where they’re concerned.