Little Girl Lost opens with Superman in a mode of alienation scouting through a cavity of space in the hopes of finding some remnant of his people. Almost five minutes are spent in a limbo of the universe, decorated with stars and asteroids, and then on an abandoned planet, as Superman wanders slowly, listlessly, and almost hopelessly. The score is soothing and somber and, with the gradual emergence of the ravaged planet Argos, powerful in communicating the notion of the galaxy as graveyard of haunted subspaces. Superman finds one survivor, whom in the very next scene we find soaring the sunny skies of Smallville in a sweeping pan across a gloriously disorienting landscape that hammers home the bewilderment of the experience of flight.
Little Girl Lost ends with the completion of a videogame objective, wherein space is effortlessly traversed and human stakes are ignored in favor of brisk action. Soon after the initial images of atmospheric grandeur, we find ourselves trapped in a stage-by-stage, connect-the-dots spy thriller, Supergirl no longer a stranger to Earth basking in its unknown wonderment, but a perky youngster eager to solve a mystery. Suddenly all shortcuts about how to convey gender and adolescence are embraced without a second thought. As if drawing from some theoretical crossbreed between Dickens and sci-fi fan fiction, Granny Goodness (delightfully played by Ed Asner), a mainstay of Darkseid’s echelon of evildoers on Apokalips, collects runaways and lost teenagers and dupes them into becoming her tech-savvy minions. Meanwhile, Superman and Lois Lane act the part of curmudgeons out to deny Supergirl, who goes by Kara, and Jimmy any fun, leaving us with popular fiction’s perennially unconvincing stereotypes of teenagers, adults and the supposedly irrevocable line that divides them.
In the vein of The Cat and the Claw, female heroes and villains are treated with special curiosity that denies them any sense of dignity as their own characters. Granny Goodness commands a squadron of ‘Female Furies,’ a gang of vicious warriors banded together solely on the basis of their gender. Supergirl is Superman-lite but with female sex appeal; instead of being afforded her own unique characterization, the writers give her the unexplained schoolgirlish desire of emulating her manly and heroic ‘cousin.’ As with the early appearances of Batgirl, the episode is anchored by the patronizing concept of a young woman awkwardly trying to live up to her adult male counterpart, but while Barbara Gordon acted on impulses and motivations tailored especially for her character, Kara has all the distinguishable qualities of an imperfect clone. Little Girl Lost is essentially the story of how Supergirl comes to be like Superman, and right before hesitantly solidifying her achievement, she reassuringly says to herself, “You always wanted to be a hero.” Given the mystery of her origins and the truncation of story information detailing her assimilation on Earth, the questions I’d like to know the answers to are ‘why?’ and ‘since when?’
These questions are suppressed by axioms about the recklessness and idealism of youth, the end-all justification for why Supergirl is the way she is, so that more time can be spent on the Darkseid subplot. Unlike Apokalips…Now!, a transformative episode for the series that permanently altered continuity and daringly mingled the tenets of grand epic storytelling with tender humanism, Little Girl Lost is inconsequential as a segment of the Darkseid story arc and worthless as an account of human feeling. Darkseid, though never a complex character, can no longer fulfill his obligations as a basic archetype, retreating from the gnashing evil of Superman’s amoral counterpart to a placid warlord content to play villain of the week. His plan to destroy the Earth all but contradicts the long-term schemes we learn about in Legacy (which are also implied in Apokalips…Now!), and does little more than conveniently present Supergirl with an arbitrary mission, the accomplishment of which will validate her worth as a new addition to Earth’s growing roster of super-powered heroes.
Besides the possession of a lot of visual strengths—in addition to the opening scenes there are plenty of fastidiously animated fights, moving background shots and periodic instances of exceptionally good storyboarding—the only positive purpose Little Girl Lost serves is to rest as a continuity bullet point.
1 comment:
Ugh, what a waste this episode was. I was seriously pumped after the first 7 or 8 minutes; it was as epic and as powerful as the show's ever been, from the gorgeous space flight to the tragic Argos flashback to the utterly horrifying image of the decayed corpses in the smashed hypersleep capsules. It looked like they were headed for something just as good as "Last Son of Krypton", possibly more so. Then it just skips right over the most interesting part of the story - Kara coming to terms with her new life on Earth - and drops right into a generic "teenage superhero tries to prove self" romp.
I obviously don't really expect Superman: TAS to go into a deep reflection on PTSD and survivor's guilt, but the DCAU has a reputation for emotional maturity and it seems to me they should have at least partially acknowledged Kara's very real trauma. Unlike Kal-El, she's old enough to remember her previous family and the death of her civilisation, so her experience would have been far more difficult and emotionally challenging than that of Supes. To play down some of these implications is to be expected, but to completely skip over that section of the story seems outright dishonest. And surely Superman had some questions for her as well. Did the Argonians know anything about the Kryptonian people? Jor-El? What about Brainiac?
I agree that Darkseid's involvement seems really half-hearted and inconsistent with what we know about him. I know they were trying to build up him as the DC Big Bad during this period, but screw it - this week's villain should have been Brainiac, to tie it back with the Kryptonian legacy arc. The motivation would work better as well - Let's see.. Brainiac, having failed to gather any data on Argos before its destruction, has been obsessively collecting scattered debris and second-hand information from other sources. When he finds out there's a live Argonian on Earth, he decides she would be a valuable piece for his collection. Bam - it's simple enough to not get in the way of the Superman/Supergirl character-building stuff, but ties into the mythology far better than the generic mid-90s asteroid story they pulled out of their ass.
I did like the scene where Supergirl takes out Darkseid's flying henchmen though. Is that the first time a DCAU hero has killed someone? Makes some sense from a character perspective (she's not a violent character, but she's in a pretty dire situation and she hasn't learned Superman's restraint yet) but it seems she doesn't particular care about what she's done, and neither do the writers - it never comes up again.
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