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Supergirl gets political with episode on radicalization

The recent cancellations of Iron Fist and Luke Cage have kept this column focused on the Marvel side of pop culture, but now that the new broadcast season is underway in earnest, all the DC shows have returned – and a couple of them are really worth talking about.

With Arrow and The Flash content to dig ever deeper into their master plots of moral corruption and tangled speedster bloodlines, and Black Lightning still trying to figure out what sort of show it wants to be, Supergirl and Legends Of Tomorrow have gotten political.

In its fourth season, Supergirl (which airs Sundays at 8 pm on Showcase and streams on showcase.ca) has decided to wade head-on into the polarized state of Donald Trump’s America. Trump himself isn’t around instead, the alt-right of this alternate Earth has organized itself over a different sort of alien immigration: the revelation that extraterrestrials live and work among humans.

The metaphor’s a little clunky, but the bigotry and xenophobia is the same: people fear what they don’t understand, and Supergirl (played by Melissa Benoist) – who is determined to see the good in people and work to encourage them to be their best selves – has been slow to see the poison seeping into the discourse.

Supergirl has long flirted with political commentary. Last season saw Adrian Pasdar brought in as alpha-male mogul Morgan Edge, now presented as the Trumpian embodiment of toxic masculinity and it featured an episode focused on the representational value of Black superheroes, in which Mehcad Brooks’s James Olsen debates whether to unmask himself as the vigilante crime-fighter Guardian. (Olsen sums up his motivation with a monologue in which he discussed the racial abuse he experienced as a child – an incident drawn from Brooks’s own life.)

This season feels different. The writers are struggling with the reality that America isn’t especially optimistic or welcoming these days.

An early episode forced Supergirl to confront the fact that, as an alien who can pass for a member of the human racial majority, she’s never had to deal with the targeted hatred of being a visible minority. This week’s episode focused on the season’s Big Bad, Agent Liberty (Sam Witwer), tracing his transformation from liberal history professor Ben Lockwood to radicalized, murderous masked villain through glancing encounters with Supergirl and a few other extraterrestrials.

It was a daring move to put Witwer front and centre for the entire hour, but the Being Human star was up to the challenge, giving Lockwood an edge of frustrated entitlement that grew angrier and less rational with each new setback – letting us see how he talks himself into making one bad choice after another, always insisting that his failure to learn is someone else’s fault.

The show’s writers clearly studied the way Spider-Man: Homecoming handled Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, and gave Lockwood even more room to breathe. And their calling out of patriotism and economic anxiety as bullshit excuses used by bigots to justify self-serving actions felt like a statement of principle: yes, there will still be flying and punching and explosions and Kryptonite, but Supergirl is going to be about something this year. I’m here for it.

Also about something, but considerably sillier in the manner in which it will go about it, is Legends Of Tomorrow (Mondays at 9 pm on Space streaming on space.ca). Originally conceived as a place to put all the secondary supers from the Arrowverse – Sara Lance, aka White Canary (Caity Lotz), Firestorm (Victor Garber, Franz Drameh), The Atom (Brandon Routh), Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell) and Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) – and send them on time-travel adventures, the show overcame a shaky first season to perfect its formula as a properly ridiculous comic-book adventure about a squabbling family of super-powered doofuses who break history as often as they fix it.

But over the last couple of years – right around the same time Supergirl’s politics started to come to the forefront of its storytelling – the show’s also developed a progressive, subversive point of view.

 Last season was about defeating a demonic dimensional menace this year, the team discovers that doing so (by temporarily transforming themselves into a large blue stuffed animal – it’s a long story) accidentally released dozens of mystical creatures into the timestream.

Look, all you really need to know is that this year they’re fighting monsters instead of immortal despots. The season premiere sees the Legends stopping a unicorn from massacring thousands at the original Woodstock festival Monday’s episode has a fairy godmother straight out of the Disney backlot sending a murder of crows down onto the Salem witch trials.

So where are the politics? Well, one of the newer cast members is Zari Tomaz (Tala Ashe), a Muslim-American woman plucked from 2042, when America was sliding towards full dystopia. Her family was killed because they refused to recant their religious beliefs, and she’s tortured by the knowledge that they’re alive in the Legends’ home era of 2018 – where she’s forbidden to warn or save them.

Put Zari in front of the magistrates at Salem – a dark-skinned woman trying to persuade white Puritan men that they’re giving in to misogyny and fear – and every scene is loaded with additional social context. And it gives us the heartbreaking moment when a teenager whose mother is on trial asks Zari if the people of the future are any better, and Zari has to tell her they aren’t. It’s a great moment for the show – and for Ashe, who’s fit into the series’ very specific tone since her very first appearance.

Elsewhere, though, Legends is doing its part to make the future better by giving us the complicated relationship between Sara Lance and Jes Macallan’s Ava Sharpe, director of the Time Bureau that oversees the Legends’ temporal do-gooding. Introduced as adversaries, the pair’s chemistry quickly becomes romantic, and the season premiere sees them contemplating moving in together.

In the middle of all the Woodstock foolishness, Legends Of Tomorrow takes a few minutes for a calm domestic scene where a same-sex couple discusses their living situation in their kitchen, and it was kind of wonderful to see these characters together just as people.

The scene even passes the Bechdel test – until John Constantine (Matt Ryan) shows up with his bag of enchanted knuckle bones, anyway. (Not a euphemism.) But there will be more of these moments going forward, and that in itself is a stand. Representation matters, even on Earth-1.

Read previous Superhero Nonsense columns here.

movies@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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