Stargirl, Season 1, Episode 4: Wildcat
This is a pretty... all right episode? It seems that Stargirl is going to spend the next couple of episodes basically on a bit of a recruiting spree. All the characters that are going to be in Stargirl's JSA Junior have already essentially shown up (other than maybe Jakeem Thunder, if he's even going to appear this season) but they were all in the background. It's honestly pretty obvious for both comic-book readers and those introduced to these characters for the first time that all these kids that Courtney meets in school would be involved and important somehow. And if it isn't already apparent, this episode makes it so.
There is admittedly the odd, slightly off bit of pacing where episode 3 ended with the gruesome, tragic death of Joey Zarick after he got caught up in Stargirl vs. Icicle, and it's just a bit odd that Courtney is so dead-set on recruiting more teenage students to join her little superhero club... but the writing and earnest acting by Brec Bassinger does sell Courtney's motivation pretty well. And sure, it's a bit hand-wave-y, but Courtney saying that she can't trust adults since they might be Injustice Society members kind of makes sense, I guess. While I don't want this entire episode to be "Courtney is depressed and angsty", it's still kind of jarring just how pushy she is in trying to get Yolanda Montez to become a superhero.
That said, the episode itself is a pretty solid outing. Courtney is insistent and persistent, but, again, the acting and writing does make Courtney end up being charming instead of irritating. More importantly, if the show's going to slowly bring up more and more characters, we're thankfully going to explore who they are. And I feel like the 'origin stories' for these characters are going to be less about how they gain superpowers -- Courtney's superhero McGuffin delivery service duffel bag does that on its own -- but for Yolanda, we get to explore the bits and pieces of her story that's been dropped as an obligatory scene in every episode prior to this.
We learn about why Yolanda is basically being slut-shamed by the entire school into being an angry, anti-social girl who pushes everyone away. And resident alpha-bitch bully Cindy is the genesis of all this, although Yolanda doesn't know this and she instead blames her ex-boyfriend, Henry King Junior, for spreading the nude photographs. There's a pretty nice showcase of Yolanda's perfect life before the spread of the photographs -- her family is supportive, her friends are supportive, her boyfriend is a cool dude, and she's on the run to be the student council president or something. And then because of a couple stupid decisions that teenage kids make -- and because Cindy is an awful human being who ends up engineering that photograph being spread right as Yolanda is giving a speech in front of the school... her life comes crashing down.
We've seen her get bullied throughout the season, and late in the episode we get to see how much her family is essentially treating her like a shame, a stain on the family. It's not explicit, but Courtney's insistence that it's Henry's fault for spreading the nude pictures instead of putting all the blame on Yolanda for taking the photos is probably one of the first times that anyone's really defended her, to spin her situation from her being condemned and vilified as a slut into her being a victim of bullying. And that's probably why the grouchy Yolanda is so willing to get roped into Courtney's crazy superheroing gig. That and the fact that Courtney plays into Yolanda's own anger at Henry. They have what's essentially a common enemy. A common enemy that Yolanda very nearly kills (or maims)... but she stops short of doing it when she sees Henry crying next to the bed of his comatose dad.
And... okay, Yolanda becoming Wildcat is perhaps not the most exciting thing ever, although I did like the Wikipedia search scene. It's nowhere as exciting or magical feeling as, say, Courtney's own discovery of her legacy as Stargirl. The show tries its best to make it feasible that Yolanda isn't just hanging on gymnastics training to be a vigilante, and takes a page out of Marvel's Black Panther movie. The Wildcat armour is form-fitting, presumably armoured a fair bit and has retractable claws. The two of them essentially go straight into trying to figure out the Injustice Society stuff without much of a planning and, honestly, Courtney's basically putting Yolanda in a lot of danger. To the show's credit Yolanda actually realizes this at the end of their own near-disaster of an infiltration sequence -- they didn't have any real plan, they didn't think that a cabal of Illuminati-esque supervillains would be able to cover the tracks of something like hospital visitation records, and if not for the Cosmic Staff actually interfering, they might've even cause a whole ton of damage to the hospital.
Ultimately, Yolanda decides to not be the Wildcat and instead use this little fun superheroine-night-out to embrace herself and get some confidence... only to be immediately shot down by her family. Realizing that Courtney's probably the only person in Blue Valley who believes in her and sees her worth, she decides to be Wildcat at the end of it. Honestly? The entire episode isn't super-duper exciting, neither does it move the plot forwards or whatever. All they discover is the Wildcat suit, and the only real developments is that Principal Bowin plays a violin in Brainwave's room (which may or may not mean that she's the Fiddler) and Beth Chapel might've figured out that Courtney and Yolanda are superheroes. Still, I do like it, for what it's worth. It's a very solid episode that really puts Yolanda's character and backstory in great perspective.
There are a couple of B-plots, of course. Pat mostly takes a backseat and mostly interacts with Denise Zarick, being warned about the creepy people in town... before Pat finding out that Denise has probably been killed off-screen by the Injustice Society since her car and her cat are left in the junkyard. Poor Zaricks, that's very depressing. There's the aforementioned Beth seeing and realizing what's going on with the JSA-junior. And we get to see Icicle meet up with a hooded villain, Dr. "Dragon King" Ito, a mad scientist who wants Wizard's body for his experiments. It's not the best or strongest episode in Stargirl's retinue, but it's an all right one.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Yolanda Montez in the comics is the second Wildcat. Unlike the original Wildcat and her god-father, Ted Grant, Yolanda was an actual metahuman with superhuman reflexes and cat-like claws thanks to experimental drugs given to her mother by a mad gynecologist attempting to create metahumans. During the Crisis of Infinite Earths, Ted Grant was crippled while saving a child, and Yolanda assumed Grant's identity as the Wildcat, joining Infinity Inc and the Shadow Fighters superhero teams before ultimately falling in battle against the supervillain Eclipso.
- Incidentally, I am actually surprised that they made a fake in-universe Wikipedia page for Wildcat that described how the public viewed him within the context of the show's history. I half-expected them to just take Wildcat's actual Wikipedia entry.
- Dragon King, a.k.a. Shiro Ito, was a high-ranking official and scientist in the Japanese government during World War II, most notably battling the All-Star Squadron and weaponizing magical artifacts like the Holy Grail. Dragon King is actually one of the first arc villains in the Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. comic book run, being responsible for infiltrating Courtney's school with robot teachers.
- While it's unclear if Principal Bowin is actually a supervillain at this point, her namesake in the comics, the Fiddler, is a supervillain that used a violin to hypnotize his prey.
- The Shade is revealed to have betrayed the Injustice Society at some point. In the comics, the Shade was always a villain that skirted the line between being a villain and something more of an anti-hero.
- I'm not sure if the "Miss America" jab is actually intended as an easter egg, but it is the name of a Marvel comics superhero.
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