Mon-El on Supergirl: Why the Season 2 Redemption Arc Has a Problem

Mon-El on Supergirl, explained: the case against him

Season 2 of Supergirl moved the show from CBS to The CW, where it aired on Mondays at 8 p.m. Eastern, and it introduced Mon-El, a Daxamite prince who arrives on Earth and takes a job in Kara Danvers's orbit. Chris Wood plays him. By "Distant Sun", the seventeenth episode, which aired on March 27, 2017, he had been a regular presence for at least a dozen episodes, and the effect on the show was easy to measure by who was missing from it.

A distinction helps here: Kara Danvers is the person, Supergirl is the hero, and the show used to care about both. Kara Danvers, played by Melissa Benoist, had been a woman who needed her friends and her job at Catco to stay grounded. By this point in the season, Mon-El had become the replacement for almost every other relationship she had. James, Alex and J'onn had shrunk to background roles, and episode after episode began and ended with him. A show built around an ensemble and an openly feminist outlook had turned into a two-person story. The danger of renaming it Mon-El & Supergirl was not entirely a joke.

The complaint about the Mon-El Supergirl storyline is not that he does bad things. Many good television characters do. It is that he is written as a replacement for the show's other pleasures, and that what he does when he gets his way matters more to the plot than what Kara does.

The charge sheet

Start with selfishness. Mon-El wants to be better because being better is how he wins Kara, not because of some inner pull toward good. He does not care about endangering other people as long as she is safe. In "Distant Sun" he suggests that the two of them run to another planet to escape the bounty his mother, Queen Rhea, placed on Kara. He does not consider that this would mean abandoning her home, her family and the city that needs her.

Then there is respect. In "Star-Crossed", the episode before, he asks Kara to tell him how to fix their relationship because, according to his research, she should have forgiven him already. Kara does not give in, and she has reason: he has not listened to her. She told him that a hero trusts her and protects civilians, and he ignored her. She asked him to fetch Alex so she could save the humans kidnapped on Maldoria, and he ignored her. She asked him not to announce their relationship, and he did within seconds. When she disagrees with him, he lashes out and calls her self-righteous and attention-seeking.

Trust is the third count. Even after months of watching Kara work, he tells her to be careful as she goes to face enemies who are his enemies, and when she answers that she always is, he replies, "Respectfully disagree." In "Distant Sun" he treats her plan to talk to Queen Rhea as hopeless before she has tried it. His reflex under pressure is violence, and his claim to be a hero outruns anything the show has actually let him do for strangers.

The structure of "Distant Sun" makes the problem plain. Queen Rhea, played by Teri Hatcher, is the threat, and the bounty on Kara is her move. The family trouble is Mon-El's, yet the job of solving it falls to Kara. He offers no insight into how to take his parents down. He only reminds her that her plans will not work, which he does in most tense situations on the show.

The defense of Mon-El

None of this means the character was a mistake on paper. A prince raised to expect that the world arranges itself around him is a promising starting point for a story about learning otherwise. The issue is what the Mon-El Supergirl writing does with that start. The case for him deserves a hearing. Much of what makes him look bad in "Star-Crossed", the flashbacks to his flight from Daxam, is forgivable. He was a pampered royal, yes, but the escape was chaotic: asteroids falling, a guard pulling him from bed and throwing him into a shuttle. His devotion is also real. He gave himself up to his parents to save Kara's life, and nobody doubts that he would do nearly anything for her. That is selflessness with a single address, however, and a hero is someone who would make the same sacrifice for a stranger. It is also fair that he hid his identity at first from Kara and the DEO. He did not know them, and royalty is safest when quiet.

The harder question is what happened later. When invaders began asking for him and threatened Earth, he should have spoken up. By staying silent, he put everyone at risk. He also grew up in a household with an entitled father and a mother whose obsession with her son is plainly unhealthy, and that is a real explanation. It is not a license. Lena Luthor, played by Katie McGrath, also comes from a manipulative home, and she became a hero in her own right because it was right, not because she wanted Kara's affection.

None of this is a vote in the shipping war between Karamel and Supercorp. The argument holds whichever pairing a viewer prefers, or if Kara is single or back with James. The actor is not the problem either. Wood plays the part with excellent comic timing, and the complaint is with the Daxamite, not the man.

What Mon-El has taken from the rest of the cast

• James: reduced to a background figure after Kara ends things with him.
• Alex: the sister who once went into Kara's nightmare to rescue her, now leaving Kara's care to Mon-El.
• J'onn: barely a line per episode in the stretch leading up to "Distant Sun".
• Game nights and Catco: the friend-group scenes that grounded Kara have mostly disappeared.

Can the Mon-El redemption arc work? A verdict

The Mon-El Supergirl redemption question is really a question about what the show wants to be. Television loves the douchebag redemption arc. A jerky boyfriend is shown to be a good guy underneath, and the audience is asked to wait. Steve Harrington in the first season of Stranger Things is the usual proof that it can work. Steve's problem was more his friends than his own spoiled nature, and he never pressured Nancy or manipulated her into staying, so he and Mon-El are not the same case. But the similarities are enough to show that Mon-El can be rehabilitated.

What worked for Steve was distance. He had to live without the person he wanted, and without an audience for his good behavior. Mon-El needs the same. Ask the honest question about the season so far: which of his flaws are improving while he spends time with Kara and repeats that he loves her? None of them. He has no reason to change. Kara broke up with him and was back with him within a day. She has defended him at every turn, followed him onto an unknown warship, stood up to his parents and faced Kryptonite twice.

If he wants to be better for her, he has to leave and find out who he is without Kara Danvers. He needs to clean up his own messes because they are messes, not because Kara is watching. The writers can still do it. They would also be doing the character a favor, since a redemption that Kara hands him is not one he earned.

Three changes, listed below, would do most of the work, and none of them requires removing him from the show.

Until then, this is a character who has been given everything and asked for nothing, a plain imbalance, in a show that used to be about a hero who gives everything.

Three fixes for the Mon-El storyline

1. 01Give him a stretch away from Kara. Redemption needs a test that she is not part of, with him choosing the right thing when nobody he loves is watching.
2. 02Let him fail while she is not there to forgive him. Consequences that land on him, not on her, are the only way a viewer can believe the change.
3. 03Give the friends their scenes back. James, Alex and J'onn are what made Kara's world, and a Kara who has them again is a Kara the show can build a story around.

Sources

• Supergirl (TV series), Wikipedia — season 2 cast, characters and episode list