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TV REVIEWS: FTN Reviews Stargirl Season 2 Episode 6

September 15th, 2021 by Todd Black Comments

First off, I want to note that they seem to be going out of their way to NOT use Stripe this season outside of it standing in the garage. Just saying. Second…yeah, that happened.

There was a lot going on in this episode, but whether a lot of it was good or not is honestly going to depend on how you view the progression of this story. Because we did get one major development…at the cost of a building plot line.

Mainly, this was the episode where Shiv decided to go and “get revenge” on Stargirl for…um…what did she want revenge for again? Getting embarrassed in that one school fight? Because that’s the only real slight that Courtney did to her and…that seems lame.

Just as lame was her plan for revenge. She noted in her phone call that she wanted to “hurt her slowly” and yet the crux of the plan was a team battle where…Shiv went right after Stargirl so…did she not want to hurt her slowly?

Just as important, she put two battle untested people in The Fiddler V3 and Artemis against a group that actually had a lot of combat experience, but she didn’t even have the numbers advantage. Granted, one of those numbers was Beth, whose major contribution to the fight was distracting Artemis with holograms…and then freeing Mike…and that’s it.

On the team battle front, there were some major inconsistencies here in terms of what these heroes and villains could and couldn’t do. Rick has the power to go up against Solomon Grundy, and yet he couldn’t beat Artemis without help? The Fiddler could control minds as we witnessed via Isaac’s mother…and yet now they can do air blasts? And apparently he is powerful enough to withstand multiple blows to head and get back up? Ok…

The camera angles for the fight didn’t help matters. They were cutting between fights like a cheesy action movie instead of letting the attacks feel real and powerful. And then lo and behold, Stargirl was able to basically take them all down without issue (because of course she did) and suddenly it was 2 on 4 thanks to Isaac’s violin getting destroyed.

In short, Eclipso couldn’t have come fast enough, and then when he did…even more questions were raised. His look was honestly pretty good, and he was very animalistic in demeanor which made him feel very monstrous. His killing of Isaac and Cindy was well done…except they kind of framed it like we were supposed to care about their deaths…and yet…should we have? Isaac had virtually no character development since we met him and Cindi…well…her actions speak for themselves, wouldn’t you say?

And his confrontation with Shade was cool at first…but then Eclipso did away with him easily…and yet left the others to go and live. Why? He clearly had power to spare, why not kill them all right there instead of running away?

Adding to the confusion of it was the aftermath where Mike was stating, “I need to up my training”. WHAT TRAINING?!?!?! What part of “you are not a hero” did you NOT understand? Even when Beth saved him his first words were, “Took you long enough!” Are you kidding me right now?

Going off of that reaction, I was cringing so hard during Beth’s talk with her father. Because he SAID that he loved her…but does he? Because if you recall last episode, they said that they would go and have a chat about everything once they got home from work. And then he repeated that SAME LINE to her in this episode and yet clearly that didn’t happen. So…does he really love her? Because between Season 1 & 2 there was no indication of that actually being the case.

In the end, this episode brought a major villain to life…but now things are arguably on even thinner ice than they were before…and doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?

Todd Black is reader of comics, a watch of TV (a LOT of TV), and a writer of many different mediums. He's written teleplays, fan-fictions, and currently writes a comic book called Guardians (guardians-comic.com). He dreams of working at Nintendo, writing a SHAZAM! TV series, and working on Guardians for a very long time!