Supergirl TV Series

The DEO is supposed to deal with things several leagues above what the police and probably the armed forces have to deal with. Which makes the thing more awkward, to be honest.

Yep. The DEO actually reminds me of ARCHON from Grrl Power, a military/police hybrid organization tasked with dealing with super-level threats. Despite the fact that most of ARCHON consists of supers who can vaporize tanks, they still carry guns around, both for the intimidation factor, and the benefits of having a semi-standardized loadout.

Anyway, I understand what they were going for here, but the DEO wasn't the best place for it. Superhero fiction in general isn't a good place for it, due to the Libertarian themes that pervade the genre.

It's also weird, because the DEO's no guns means they're still going to have alien weaponry could be dozens of times more effective than conventional guns.

I think it'd be best if they just had Winn re-purpose some piece of alien tech into something that knocks out "humans".

Of course its going to be super annoying if they have to keep writing in excuses as to why they don't just shoot human enemies if they have totally non lethal tech.

In fairness, they're not supposed to be fighting humans at all. Even metahumans are technically outside their mandate, though they've supported Supergirl against them before. J'onn noted in his speech that the only reason they got involved this time was because the guns were connected to them.

I was thinking more for situations like that cult, where regular humans get a hold of alien technology

Or any remaining lackeys of Winn's father.

edited 7th Jun '18 10:24:11 PM by 32ndfreeze

If you want to get technical, being a secret government agency whose very existence is kept a secret from the public, legally they don't have the right to be doing . . . well, any of the stuff that they do.

Why are they even a secret anyway? This isn't the Men in Black universe where the government is trying to keep the knowledge of aliens and metahumans a secret, people already know about this stuff. If anything an organization that's dealing such threats would be a comfort to them not a panic.

They are a legal organization. They have government oversight, operating parameters, and a budget. We can argue whether or not they should exist in secret, but the government is allowed to have secret organizations. The CIA started out as one, for example.

That might be an artifact (both in universe and out) of when aliens were secret. They're not any more, but no one has gotten around to declassifying the DEO.

Where's the funding and authorization for the DEO come from, though? If they ever got official approval from Congress, that vote would be a matter of public record.

Although, I suppose the DEO could just be a sub-branch of another government agency that has gotten official approval. They always pose as FBI agents when interacting with the public, so it might make sense if the DEO was really just the part of the FBI that deals with alien related crime.

Honestly, the series seems to play a bit loose with law. Take the president for example. She is an alien and nobody in the entire cast, despite some of them working with the goverment, takes an issue with that, despite her not being eligible for that position according to real life law.

Maybe the system on Earth 38 works slightly different.

THAT stuck out like a sore thumb, especially when we learned about the Mexican wall.

Yeah, that was a wonderful example of a surely well-meant real life commentary....while forgetting that this Earth's president has absolutely no believable reason to go all Trump-like.

I really wish the alien president had been born on Earth. That would have kept her legally eligible, but still been a political bomb that her allies wouldn't want to drop.

Plenty of jackasses have been suggesting the wall before Trump got office. I assumed Maggie's dad was just exaggerating; they aren't actually building a wall, but a lot of people still say they should.

Something like a system watching over anything entering the atmosphere would have been good for the metaphor, but they had to go literal on it.

"We're going to put a forcefield around the Earth and we're going to make the White Martians pay for it."

...you know, except for the part where White Martians really are evil, that would work great as a metaphor. It's a giant, expensive wall that wouldn't work (because shapeshifters) and is therefore a complete waste of time and money. I think if Green Martians were still around and were coming to Earth as refugees, that could have been used.

Still waiting for the leader of the White Martians to turn up looking like Trump. Toothbrush mustache optional.

Hey, why haven't the White Martians conquered Earth? They've got the imperialist spirit. They've got overwhelming physical superiority to humans. And they've had faster-than-light spaceships since at least a century ago. Seems like it would've been pretty easy for them.

They learned a long time ago that quality tv shows just aren't as good when made under imperial slavery.

Not all White martians are evil, as M'gann and her freedom fghters have shown.

So that analogy might work after all.

.. They dont care enough about humans to bother killing them? Both martian "races" were living in entirely artificial ecosystems built in caves.

Then they had a genocidal civil war. But that was about hate, not about living space or territory, because they can always just.. build more of that.

So, the reason Mars has not launched an invasion of earth long ago must simply be that they just do not care enough about humans to hate or even notice them at all.

Damn. Demos got lit up.

Also, poor Coville. Kinda liked him. Anyways, next episode it seems like the entire hero ensemble is gonna fight together. If only they could bring back Superman too....

I'd say he's at home washing his tights, but this Superman doesn't wear underwear on the outside so...

Oh look, the Kryptonite that the DEO kept expressly against Kara's wishes turned out to be useful. It's almost like she's not the only person it's useful against.

Did the writers switch halfway through the season or something? The current writing isn't bad, but it really feels like the tone went in a different direction than it originally intended.