TV Review: Stargirl Season 1 Finale

Stargirl Season 1 Episodes 12 & 13 “Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E.”

Directors: Toa Fraser & Greg Beeman

Starring: Brec Bassinger, Yvette Monreal, Anjelika Washington, Cameron Gellman, Trae Romano, Amy Smart, Luke Wilson, Neil Jackson, Neil Hopkins, Joy Osmanski

Rating: TV-PG

Runtime: 81 minutes

Spoilers Follow:

While it’s predictably a little bigger and a little bolder Stargirl‘s two-part season finale mostly encapsulates everything great about the show, along with its few recurring problems. The action and VFX sequences are ambitious and stylish, the villains are intriguing and intimidating, and the development of Courtney Whitmore and her family is moving. But one or two story developments feel random and unnecessary and by the end of it the viewer realizes that the show has pretty much entirely dropped the ball in regard to developing the JSA.

The first episode kicks off with thrilling dual action scenes that again highlight the importance of superhero secret identities. With the ISA now aware of who Stargirl is, Tigress and Sportsmaster are sent to kill her and her family. Tigress bursts into their house and immediately starts firing crossbow bolts at Courtney and Barbara, who were packing to leave town. Meanwhile, Sportsmaster reveals himself to Pat before assaulting him at his garage. I’ve mentioned before how Courtney and Tigress’ acrobatic fighting styles often result in the show’s strongest action choreography and seeing the two of them go up against each other, with the added complication of Courtney and the Cosmic Staff having to simultaneously protect Barbara, is just as fun as you’d expect. The fight between Pat and Sportsmaster is much more one-sided as without the Stripe armor Pat is no match for the evil gym rat. Sportsmaster toys with Pat a lot but he’s also close to beating him to death when he gets a power drill to the back courtesy of Mike, who had returned to the garage after an argument with Pat. The girls’ fight is more impressive stylistically speaking but both sequences are tense and exhilarating and are made even stronger by how they contribute to the characters’ emotional development. Immediately after blasting Tigress out of the window Courtney begins rambling an apology to Barbara, saying she knows what she just did was dangerous before Barbara, in awe of seeing her daughter as the hero she is, says it was amazing. And Mike’s rescue of his father lets him in on the family’s super secret in the most shocking way possible.

After the excellent opening “Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. Part One” unfortunately moves on to spending most of the rest of its runtime on rather dry plot mechanics. The Whitmore/Dugan family, the JSA kids, and Justin hide out at the family’s cabin and once they do the episode stalls. Yes, there are some decent scenes here, like Mike and Courtney making amends and Pat and Barbara agreeing that they hope they can do the same, but it’s clear the episode essentially needed to give the villains time to get their plan up and running before Rick could discover their location thanks to his father’s notebook and the heroes could head out for the final battle. That villainous plan involves hooking Brainwave up to one of Ito’s machines, which essentially seems to be Cerebro from X-Men if it struck the user with electricity every couple seconds. The machine is meant to boost Brainwave’s power so he can brainwash the population of the states Jordan wants to include in his “New America”. After infiltrating the American Dream office with Barbara, Beth discovers the manifesto that details the ideology the ISA plans on spreading and the heroes are surprised to hear that their enemies plan on ending global warming and discrimination and putting universal healthcare into effect. But the heroes’ moral dilemma is cut short when Beth also discovers that a percentage of the population is expected to resist the mental reprogramming, which could lead to 25 million deaths. The fact that Jordan and company actually have moral goals despite their immoral methods has always been interesting but having Courtney and company stop to ponder whether they might be right, even momentarily, is pretty absurd. It shouldn’t have taken the possibility of casualties to convince them they need to stop millions of people from being brainwashed, even if they would be made to believe in moral ideas.

Unfortunately, the heroes are too late to stop the machine being activated but the good news is that it only affects adults. Still that leaves the first half of the finale with quite the cliffhanger, with Pat and Barbara brainwashed and Pat attacking Courtney with the Stripe suit. But the kids still handle this pretty easily. Courtney manages to get Pat to fight the control by referring to herself as his daughter before Beth and the others find some frequency cancelling equipment in the ISA tunnels and manage to completely free him and Justin. Courtney getting through to Pat through the power of love is predictable but no less sweet for it. Their relationship is definitely the most important part of Stargirl’s story and the show’s greatest success has been translating it to live-action thanks to Brec Bassinger and Luke Wilson. The sheer amount of Courtney and Pat material in the finale, and the completely earnest manner in which it’s presented could definitely feel overbearing but it still works more often than not. Things like Pat proudly declaring that he’s waiting for “our daughter” when saving Barbara from Jordan and Courtney giving him a World’s Best Dad mug at the post-victory Christmas party are completely predictable beats that could be horribly cheesy if not handled well but Bassinger and Wilson’s chemistry and the work that’s been done to develop the characters’ relationship to this point are more than enough to make it all work.

That sentiment could be applied to most of the final episode. The outcome of the final battle is never really in question but it’s executed well enough to be exciting. The action sequences are the strongest parts of the final episode other than the core family. The final showdown between the JSA and ISA is more than satisfying and makes good use of almost everyone’s skills and abilities but the episode-stealing spectacle is finally getting to see Solomon Grundy in action for an extended time. Pat uses the Stripe armor to engage the monster and having two CGI-heavy creations is clearly a strain on the budget and no one would say that either look very “real” but the effects are sufficient and the direction captures the destructive energy of the clash. It reminded me of the Hulk vs. Hulkbuster fight in Avengers: Age of Ultron, although obviously on a much smaller budget and scale. Overall, Stargirl deserves a lot of praise for consistently delivering exciting, creative action sequences that replicate the feel of reading a superhero comic.

While the action and central family dynamic are excellent, by the end of the second part I realized how the show has completely failed to develop the JSA kids after their introductions. Which isn’t to say nothing happens to them, because they all have at least one major beat. Beth loses Chuck when Icicle freezes the Mid-Nite goggles, Rick stops himself from beating Grundy to death and lets him go when he realizes he’s just a dumb animal, and Yolanda executes Brainwave as revenge for Henry. The problem is that all of these developments feel rather arbitrary and the only one that even sort of works is Rick’s because there’s been at least some build-up of his quest for vengeance and because Cameron Gellman acts his butt off. But there’s little indication of any of their story arcs causing any lasting change on any of the characters. Yes, Yolanda is a little sullen in some subsequent scenes but by the Christmas party she seems fine. And her and Beth’s presences at the party are indicative of another problem, that being how their family lives are no longer of any concern to the show. I can buy the idea of Pat and Barbara essentially serving as guardians for Rick so he doesn’t have to go back to abusive Matt but Beth and Yolanda’s home lives were essential parts of their stories when they were introduced but have been almost entirely absent since. It’s hard to believe that Yolanda’s very conservative family, for example, would even let her celebrate Christmas with others given how they were treating her in “Wildcat”. Beth’s Chuck arc meanwhile is still just disturbing, made even more so by the fact that she refers to him as her best friend and that rather than using Chuck’s death as a way to force her to strengthen her actual human relationships the show has Courtney and Rick promise to fix the goggles and try to bring him back.

Much more effective are the teases for next season, of which there are three major ones. While fleeing the old ISA headquarters Cindy picks up a purple diamond belonging to JSA enemy Eclipso, who is trapped inside. The Shade is also shown relaxing at Jordan’s lair, gloating to himself of how he always knew the ISA’s plan would fail. Lastly, a man shows up at Pat’s old house and asks the landlord where he can find him. The man is revealed to be Sylvester Pemberton. I’m not surprised that Joel McHale wasn’t cast just for a brief cameo death scene but I’m not really sure what having Sylvester around can bring to the show now that Courtney knows he’s not her father. Of the three teases I feel like the Shade one will excite fans the most, given his connections to James Robinson’s beloved Starman comic.

Again, Stargirl’s finale is characteristic of the first season overall. The main characters, action, and villains are all great but the show needs to figure out what it wants to do with its supporting heroes.

Notes:

• So does Sportsmaster have superpowers? A fight between the two was never going to be even but the way he was flinging Pat around seemed to suggest beyond human strength.
• The show’s devotion to giving almost all its villains personal lives is admirable but the sudden focus on Fiddler and her bullied son was bizarre.
• So Cameron really just disappeared, didn’t he? That’s too bad, he’s much more interesting than any of the JSA kids other than Courtney so far and their burgeoning romance was cute.