Supergirl

[Greywind]

http://comicbook.com/2016/03/16/first-teaser-for-supergirl-/

[Bazza]

Two Classic DC Characters Cast For CBS's SUPERGIRL

http://www.newsarama.com/28292-two-classic-dc-characters-cast-for-cbs-s-supergirl.html

 

The Guardian is Coming to Supergirl

http://comicbook.com/2016/03/15/the-guardian-is-coming-to-supergirl/

[Bazza]

Supergirl and The Flash Crossover Photos Debut Silver Banshee
http://www.tvguide.com/news/supergirl-and-the-flash-crossover-photos-debut-silver-banshee/

[FrankL]

I always liked the old comics where red K affected the Kryptonian differently each exposure, but that's just me.

[Greywind]

Like Smallville where all it did was turn him into an ass?

[FrankL]

Well, I recall a Superboy comic where it turned him into a super PITA and a Superman where it gave him an Achilles Heel. The RK made his right heel vulnerable and any boot he put on also became penetrable. In another he got amnesia after RK exposure.

[Hermit]

early on in the comics, Red Kryptonite did a lot of funky ####

 

[Starlord]

IMO the weirdest is Pink Kryptonite...which temporarily turns you homosexual. 

 

Look it up.

[bigdamnhero]

Finally made time to watch Monday's episode, and thought it was one of the show's best to date. And wow does Melissa Benoist do one hell of a Mean Girl, while also really selling her despair at the end of the episode.

 

I personally don't care for the Public Turns Its Back Overnight on Superhero Who Makes A Mistake trope. I guess the whole of National City is as fickle and shallow as Cat Grant.

It's not my favorite superhero trope either, but to be fair

throwing Cat off a skyscaper

counts as more than "a mistake." It's not like in the early episode where she made a couple genuine rookie mistakes and everyone came down on her; here she gave people every reason to believe she'd truly gone Dark Side. The little girl throwing the costume in the trash was perhaps a titch over the top, but overall I thought they handled it well. I liked how the things Evil Kara said/did really felt like they came from a place deep inside Kara and had more truth in them than Good Kara wanted to admit, and how her friends recognized that. And I loved how her words & actions had consequences that didn't end when her Red K Crazy did, instead of them just waving the "mind control, sorry" card and having everyone love her again by the end of the episode.

[zslane]

Well, I think it is only fair (by the Code of Mediocre Writing) that if everyone is going to kick her to the curb in less than one episode, they can certainly love her again by the end of it.

[Twilight]

IMO the weirdest is Pink Kryptonite...which temporarily turns you homosexual. 

 

Look it up.

I thought it reversed your sexual preference? Thus it made Superman gay, because he's straight.

[wcw43921]

I did like the flashbacks in the most recent episode--it explained a great deal about Kara's early history on Earth, and why she chose to hide her powers and wear glasses.  And as someone who remembers when Lucy Lane was a flight attendant, I found it nifty to see her back in uniform, albeit a very different sort of one.

[zslane]

I just have to keep checking my adult expectations at the door. I realize that it is very comic-booky to have the official U.S. military's response to the public outing of Jonn J'onzz be radicalized and fascistic in sentiment, but it bugs me just the same. It also bugs me that Superman knows about Cadmus but has never tried to hunt it down and destroy it. I am also tired of smart, reasonable characters forced to behave in the most petty, despicable ways just so they can learn a valuable life lesson and change their spots somewhere down the road. It's as if tv shows like this must balance out decent writing with dumbed-down material only suitable for tweens.

 

Lucy Lane was really getting on my nerves, but then they saved her from becoming a completely worthless character by the end of the episode. My only remaining issue with her is that she is played by the distractingly unattractive (to me) JDT.

 

I am also rather curious about:

 

So presumably Siobahn is a metahuman like Livewire, right? I mean, the show hasn't come out and given a label to these characters whose powers come from "physics gone wrong" (or "science run amok" as in the case of Bizarro), but presumably they are in the same class of beings as the "metahumans" on The Flash.

 

[DasBroot]

I just have to keep checking my adult expectations at the door. I realize that it is very comic-booky to have the official U.S. military's response to the public outing of Jonn J'onzz be radicalized and fascistic in sentiment, but it bugs me just the same. It also bugs me that Superman knows about Cadmus but has never tried to hunt it down and destroy it. I am also tired of smart, reasonable characters forced to behave in the most petty, despicable ways just so they can learn a valuable life lesson and change their spots somewhere down the road. It's as if tv shows like this must balance out decent writing with dumbed-down material only suitable for tweens.

 

Lucy Lane was really getting on my nerves, but then they saved her from becoming a completely worthless character by the end of the episode. My only remaining issue with her is that she is played by the distractingly unattractive (to me) JDT.

 

I am also rather curious about:

 

So presumably Siobahn is a metahuman like Livewire, right? I mean, the show hasn't come out and given a label to these characters whose powers come from "physics gone wrong" (or "science run amok" as in the case of Bizarro), but presumably they are in the same class of beings as the "metahumans" on The Flash.

 

 

The US government is always like this in comics.  Nothing surprising.  Though in this case, to be fair, they really did give top secret level clearance and practically unlimited authority to an illegal alien (literally).

 

If I were a doctor trained in India and couldn't get my licence in the US because I wasn't here legally it really wouldn't matter if I was the greatest doctor in the world and had saved hundreds of lives on the operating table when the authorities finally caught up to me.

 

Superman not working for the government because of Cadmus but not doing anything to shut it down annoyed me, as well.  

 

 

Siobahn is Silver Banshee (Probably not the classic 'cursed by a witch' version).  I was hoping they'd use the relationship that Siobahn and Kara had in the most recent Supergirl comic series - Siobahn was her room-mate and best friend (they didn't know of each other's heroic/villainous identities and the series was cancelled before it could be ascertained if Siobahn truly was 'good' or 'bad' in the New 52 continuity) .  That could have been fun.

 

 

I want to dislike Lucy but frankly she hasn't really been wrong - "James" is a jerk when it comes to their relationship.

[Starlord]

It does seem like the US Government is more often portrayed like Primus rather than like UNTIL.  If UNTIL were real it would probably be the only thing I liked about the United Nations.

[DasBroot]

It's a sad state of affairs that one of the biggest plot twists in my current Champion's campaign is that the US government and its superhuman affairs department aren't evil.  It broke my player's brains - they spent entire sessions trying to reverse engineer the ulterior motives behind super-powered FBI agents helping them with intel and field assistance in apprehending a very powerful super-villain. 

[Lord Liaden]

It's interesting to me that we've lately been getting a slate of American television shows which do depict some government agents as "good;" but they're almost invariably pitted against another faction of the government that's secretly "bad."

[Pattern Ghost]

Just like real life!

[zslane]

Yeah, but Harper's job wasn't to merely remove J'onzz from his post at the DEO (a reasonable action), but to find anyone who knew about it and prosecute them all as if they were terrorists so that the government would have a pretense to haul J'onnz off to Cadmus (disappearing anyone who might sympathize or resist).

 

I'm just more than a little tired of our own government and military being portrayed as villains that are every bit as awful, corrupt, and malevolent as world-conquering Kryptonian exiles or evil high-tech corporate masterminds. That might have been fresh and sobering in the 1960s and 1970s after Camelot fell and comics had to turn the U.S. government into villains just to remain culturally relevent. But half a century later that trope is just plain worn out, at least for me.

[Greywind]

Hilary Clinton...

[Hermit]

For those finding the movie DC verse looking too grumpy...

The small screen cross over looks like it will be fun

 

 

If a girl that pretty said "YES" like that every time I got her ice cream, I'd be fetching fast too

[wcw43921]

I'm glad they had the two heroes hit it off so well.  I especially like the look they came up with for Silver Banshee--very faithful to the comic version from what I could tell.  (Although I do wish Supergirl would get her own villains, instead of borrowing from Superman's rogues gallery all the time.)

 

Still, looks like a great episode.  I look forward to it.

[Ranxerox]

Hilary Clinton...

 

Whom I'm going to be happily voting for in the June 6th California primary.  Still, you seem to have gotten lost on your way to 2016 election thread.

[bigdamnhero]

Good episode overall, with a number of "Whoa!" surprises I did not see coming. I lost count of the number of game-changing reveals in this one episode - has there ever been a TV show so eager to shake up their own status quo this quickly/often? And I got literal chills down my geek boy spine when they said they were taking them to Cadmus.

 

I do wish they hadn't overplayed the Evil Government card. Honestly, finding out that the person running a top secret agency is an imposter *is* a significant security threat even without it being an alien powerful enough to take down Supergirl. Pile on shapeshifting and mind control and you have a recipe for justified paranoia. But then they play the Cadmus card and it's all about evil military bigotry. I know it's genre-consistent, but I think they had a real opportunity to explore genuine issues and I would've rather seen that episode.

 

OTOH, the motorcycle rescue was so perfectly ridiculous...

 

The flashbacks were interesting. I've always been bugged by the whole "and so I hid my powers..." thing, not just on this show but in general. How many people died because you were just trying to fit in? It's one thing as a kid, but once you're a grown up there is literally only one other person on the planet who can do what you do, and the fact that she was willing to hide it for so long for me really undercuts the character's nobility that they so desperately want to sell us on. [/rant]

 

Multiple interesting twists with Lucy, a character I haven't really had much of an opinion about because she has so far seemed to be defined only by her pining for James. We'll see what she can do when they give her more to work with.

 

And Siobhan...part of me is kindof embarrassed I didn't see that coming.

 

Looking forward to the Big Crossover!

[zslane]

I kind of feel we have to cut god-like heroes some slack. If we go too far with the whole "Think of all the people who died because you took time away from superheroing; they're blood is on your hands!" attitude, then we put a completely unfair burden on them, and by extension, anyone with the ability to do good but an unwillingness to spend their entire waking lives doing it.

 

Maybe my libertarian roots are showing, but I think every hero has a right to decide for themselves when, where, and how they are going to help people. Or maybe it's because I didn't grow up in a household or culture in which guilt trips are turned into high sport, but I have zero desire to castigate Kara for not heroing sooner (or more often), nor do I feel morally entitled to do so. When Cat Grant tried to play that card, I just wanted to slap her in her CG-enhanced face.