We won't cover every episode of 'Supergirl' here on the Quirky Muffin, and may not even venture into the second season at all. 'Stronger Together' is the first episode of the regular run, though, so it's a good place to pick up on the progress. This is a great improvement on the pilot episode, which ditches some of the melodrama and picks up on new threads, but still disappointingly jumps into meaningless fight scenes for very little reason indeed. That, more than anything else is disappointing. It's cheap and unimaginative to do brawls. Any show, and any series, can do fights. However, it takes an imaginative one to have Supergirl pulling an oil tanker out of its dock to avoid a fire, and then accidentally pulling off the end of the ship and having a spill. That's a massive plus, with not a fist thrown.
This season first season could potentially be the best season of a superhero show I've ever seen. Melissa Benoist is perfect as Kara Zor-El, Mehcad Brooks is great as James (Jimmy Olsen), and the rest of the cast is running between wooden to average as of 'Stronger Together'. It's nice to see a novitiate period, where someone actually learns how to use their powers on the job, which of course fits thematically in with the series do the same thing.
This series seems to be pulling its building blocks from interesting places. It has a hologrammatic parent, as in the Richard Donner 'Superman' movies, solving of ordinary day to day and work problems much as in the first season of 'Lois and Clark', some unnecessarily thumping landings a la 'Iron Man', and the aforementioned boring violence as seen in practically every modern superhero movie, whether they be DC or Marvel. (I'm still thanking the stars that 'Man of Steel' and 'Batman vs Superman' went by unseen.)
The show does split heavily into two pieces, though. There is the half that deals with Kara and her job at CatCo, which is pretty good, and the other half at the alien investigating DEO, which is often problematic. It makes for a very difficult contrast. Perhaps that will work out in the end. For now, it's nice to have daring rescues, character interaction, and not to have to worry about network meddling. The 'Super' projects have always had network meddling of the worst kind. 'The Adventures Of Superman' was nobbled and converted into colour and a kiddies show a decade before colour hit television officially, the 'Superman' movies were destroyed by avaricious producers, 'Lois and Clark' was ruined by network meddling, 'Superman Returns' was denied sequels due to idiocy, and then we have the modern 'Superman' movies... You're lucky to even get one good example in any given iteration! Even the Fleischer animated shorts were disrupted by Fleischer Studios going out of business and having the remaining cartoons converted into propaganda pieces. The Big S doesn't get any luck.
'Stronger Together' is a good building episode. We get some back history on 'S' symbol, some confidence building for Kara, some soul searching for James, and some other stuff that doesn't matter. Let's see how it goes.
O.
No comments:
Post a Comment