Staring At The Sun - Supergirl Season 6

Last night I watched the final episode of the final season of Supergirl. Only three years late. 

For some reason, even though the first five seasons all streamed on Prime in the UK, the sixth, which was slightly delayed by the pandemic and came out in 2021, did not. If it was on another service at the time, which is the usual reason for an unexplained disappearance, I either couldn't find it or didn't want to pay for it. 

I waited for it to come out on DVD and added it to my Christmas list so someone would buy it for me, which they duly did. I imagine my logic was that if I was going to have to pay to watch it I might as well pay to own it and if I was going to do that I might as well have it in a hard copy with a pretty box so I could enjoy looking at it on my shelf rather than as an invisible, intangible, digital file, tucked away somewhere on a hard drive.

And then I followed my usual pattern of not watching it until it did eventually turn up on a streaming service I was paying for anyway. I believe that's at least the fourth or fifth time that's happened and I'm sure it won't be the last. 

In this case, the show finally surfaced on Netflix but only the US version, which is what I've been watching exclusively since I started using a VPN back in the spring. Even then, I didn't start watching it right away. Much though I loved the first four seasons, the fifth wasn't great and I'd lost a little steam with it, plus I had a bunch of other shows to watch that seemed more urgent at the time.

I got through all of those. Supergirl Season Six floated to the top of the watchlist and I started on it a few weeks ago. When I'm watching shows these days I try to stick to a steady tick of one episode per evening, which I find to be the perfect cadence; short enough that I remember exactly what happened in the last episode but not so fast they all blur into one.

Season 6 is twenty episodes so it took me three weeks, give or take. It's been a long three weeks...

I wanted to write this post a week ago. I was so frustrated and annoyed in the middle of the season I felt the need to vent. Had I given in to my irritation and posted, the first line would probably have been something like "Season 6 of "Supergirl" has to be the worst season of any super-hero show I have ever watched!" 

It still may be, although I realize that's a pretty low bar. Having reached the end, though, I do now have a little more perspective, helped to a considerable degree not just by having seen the thing through - and it does pick up after a mid-season slump - but by having read a whole bunch of reviews and discussions afterwards. 

Immediately afterwards, that is. Like, seconds after the final credits ran. I never read commentary or reviews while I'm in the middle of watching something unless it's on the specific episode I've just seen but I frequently dive straight in after the series ends. It's a way to decompress emotionally from that awkward, unpleasant sensation of loss that follows the ending of the para-relationship between the viewer and the viewed, when it sometimes feels like the last day of school, when you know you'll probably never see most of these people again and it feels like you'll really miss them.

Or not, in some cases. I was at a point with The Flash by the end of Season Three when I fervently hoped I'd never have to see any of them again, which is why I stopped watching the show. I'm very happy to say that I don't feel Season 6 of Supergirl soured the good relationships I had with nearly all of the characters up to then. It's more that it made me sorry for the way they'd been let down by some excruciatingly bad writing.

So off I went to the echo chamber of the internet, fully expecting to see my disappointment and disdain faithfully reflected in a clutch of one and two star reviews and angry, impassioned rants... and I didn't really find much of that at all. 

I mean, there was some. I read a couple of low-scoring reviews that made many of the same negative points I would have - the platitudinous vacuity of the dialog, the incoherence of the plot, its derivative and trite structure, the complete breaking of faith with the personalities of most of the characters as established in previous seasons and so on and so on. I read a very good, thoughtful, Reddit thread in which almost everyone thought the Season was terrible but still managed to keep their cool as they explained why it sucked so badly.

Mostly, though, to my complete astonishment, I saw high-scoring reviews and high praise. A lot of people really liked the final season and almost everyone, even those who didn't like anything much else, loved the final episode, a long, emotional wrap-up of the kind we all often complain cancelled series need but don't get.

All of which I found very helpful indeed. Hardly any of it made me think the Season was any better than I'd realized but it did do an awful lot to remind me that most of the meaning happens in the head not on the screen. 

At this point I ought to make a couple of things clear. I am and have always been one hundred per cent on-side with the political attitude of the show. It's been described variously as "leftist", "liberal" and "woke", all of which I take as strong positives. That's what the show has been pretty much from the start and neither the political or social intent or content form any part of my objection to Season 6.

The execution though... Oh, boy...

There are two specific problems with the way the politics are presented in Season 6. The first and most important is the language used. 

Language is in constant flux and all media struggles to capture that pace of change so the risk always exists that what appears on screen or on the page will feel dated or stilted or inauthentic merely through the passage of time - sometimes even small increments of time. Many shows and books and movies are also produced with a specific audience in mind, sometimes by people who would see themselves as part of that demographic, sometimes by outsiders wishing to access or exploit it.

All of this means that it's very easy to look at something and think "No-one speaks like that!" when actually what you mean is "No-one I know speaks like that!" Watching Season 6 I frequently found myself thinking "No-one speaks like that!" pretty much any time anyone opened their mouth. Having read some other opinions and thought about it, I'm slightly worried now that maybe, yes, some people do speak like that after all.

Not exactly like that, of course. The way just about everyone speaks most of the time sounds like the social equivalent of business jargon or, worse still, the kind of New Age cant I associate with the early '90s. Hardly a sentence goes by without a buzz word or an appropriated phrase from some discipline or other. It's hard to listen to even when you agree with the sentiment, which is the second problem.

There's a tipping-point in any discussion, where the sheer determination of one side to get their point across begins to undermine what's being said. My go-to example there is always Richard Dawkins, whose sheer arrogance in expressing his profound contempt for religious belief has probably filled more church pews than Desmond Tutu's affability ever will.

This isn't that bad (Nothing could be.) but it's relentless and wearing. At times - far too many times - it didn't feel like watching a TV show about super-heroes so much as it being cornered at a party and lectured at by a particularly humorless bunch of zealots. It's not just that it's the absolute worst way to convert someone who doesn't already agree with you, it's that it's the best way to make those who do, reconsider their position in case it might mean anyone thinks that's how they come across, too.

Oner thing it also made me wonder, especially in that finale, which I did not warm to in quite the way most viewers seem to have done, is whether a show about DC super-heroes is really the best platform for transmitting these kinds of ideas. 

It should be. There are some huge synergies, particularly with the Superman family side of the house, which has always iconified fairness, equality and progressive thinking. Unfortunately, the ultimate take-away from the final season appears to be that Supergirl feels her role as protector of those unable to protect themselves is not just unnecessary but unwarranted and possibly pernicious. 

The world can do better if she gets out of the way and allows people to help themselves seems to be the message although the messaging in the entire season is so compromised, inconsistent and fractured, it's impossible to know for sure what the intended meaning might be. I think we're supposed to feel proud of Kara for the growth she's achieved by the end but, in common with many commenters, including plenty who liked the whole thing a lot more than I did, all I felt for Supegirl as the credits rolled was sorry.

Sorry she'd been so badly served by her writers, not just in this season but throughout the show. And sorry for Melissa Benoist, the actor whose superb portrayal of Supergirl now has to be seen as the quintessential version of the character, that she was never allowed to fully explore the potential of the role. Or win any good fights.

Seriously, why make a show about a super-hero and then have that super-hero lose most of her battles? She almost only ever wins when she has help. It's been a trope of the entire series and no amount of pretty talk about friendship and having each other's backs makes up for the fact that Supergirl is supposed to be one of the most powerful beings on the planet and yet constantly needs saving like the heroine of a silent movie. She needs to be the prime motivator and key to success in at least 50% of her battles before the one-for-all, all-for-one ethic kicks in.

But then, Supergirl, like all the DC/CW shows, has never been primarily a super-hero show. They're all soap operas at heart, just soaps that happen to have people with powers at the center. I think the best ones, like Stargirl, succeeed by keeping the scale intimate and human rather than universal or, as is now so unfortunately the norm, multiversal.

Season 6 of Supergirl became quite blatant in its desperation to prevent the major characters, heroes and villains, from using more than the small fraction of their powers that would allow the fragile plot to just about hold together. The Big Bad of the season, Nixly, is a 5th Dimensional imp with godlike magic powers that can do just about anything... so Brainiac 5 somehow whips up a wrist-cuff that completely nullifies them and cannot be removed by any means. 

And it never is. It just stays there, incomprehensibly immune to all forms of science or magic. Nixly is still wearing it when the show ends. It's utterly unbelievable as anything other than a deus ex machina to further the plot.

Supergirl, the other supposedly unstoppable force, spends several episodes in the Phantom Zone, where she has no powers at all, and a couple in high-school, before she'd come into her full powers, where she's played as her younger self by a different actress. 

In most of the rest of the episodes she's riven by doubt and indecision and rarely gets to cut loose. Mostly she flies about looking for things. When she lands she usually gets knocked about a lot. I don't recall if she ever actually hits anything or anyone. She certainly doesn't make a habit of it.

Melissa Benoist was pregnant and/or had a newborn child for much of the filming, which explains why she's barely in some episodes but it doesn't explain why she does so little when she is there. Don't get me started on the terrible use of powers in the show in general, though. Absolutely no-one does what you'd expect them to do with the abilities they're supposed to have. They nearly all end up shooting different colored force-beams out of their hands or eyes or just touching their temples and staring really hard. 

All of which (And there's so much more I could say along the same lines... Lena Luthor's a witch, now?) makes it sound like I hated the show. I did not. I love the show and now I've had time to reflect, I don't even hate that final season. At least it made me think about how good the show used to be. I own almost all the seasons on DVD and now I want to go back to the beginning and start over. 

As I said, Melissa Benoist is about the best possible Supergirl and the rest of the cast are all excellent, especially Callista Flockhart, who makes an absolutely scene-stealing return as Cat Grant in the finale, reminding us all just how pivotal she was to the show in the early seasons and why it was never quite as strong again once she left.

I liked Peta Sergeant as Nixly quite a bit, too. Her expressions are delicious. Her mouth seems to be trying to crawl off her face sometimes. Her phrasing is very odd, too, which really adds to the other-dimensional feel of the character. Jon Cryer reprises his amusing, wry take on Lex Luthor enjoyably, too, although whoever came up with the concept of Lex genuinely falling in love needs to go have a lie down.

But then, is Lex really in love or has he just convinced himself he is? The one saving grace of the writing in Season 6 is that, for all the bluster and didacticism, all the preaching and pontificating, all the moral certainty that frequently verges uncomfortably on smugness, it keeps on asking interesting questions.

Are the Super Friends justified in taking unsanctioned, unilateral action to safeguard the people even when it's against the specific direction of the peoples' democratically elected representatives? Does love trump duty? Is responsibility greater to those you know than to those you don't? These and many more moral and ethical concerns get raised, discussed and largely left unanswered, which is entirely in keeping with the argument put forward by Kelly to Alex that she shouldn't try to fix her problems, just be there with her as she lives through them. 

Which brings me back to whether this ought to be a super-hero show at all. If Supergirl isn't in the business of fixing people's problems, then what is she for? The finale ends with her asking herself the same question and I don't believe we ever get an answer.

I suspect next time someone decides to make a Supergirl show - and there will be a next time - it will involve a good deal less introspection and a lot more action. I think this iteration took the interior view about as far as it could reasonably have gone - and then some.

I'll look forward to that next vision of the Maid of Might (Bet they won't be bringing that back.), should it ever come. Meanwhile, I'll happily re-watch this one. I just might stop at the end of Season Five next time, though.