Courtney begins her recruitment drive for a new Justice Society of America. Pat has an odd conversation with one of the town’s residents that leaves him wondering.

Stargirl’s fourth episode decides that the death of an actual child at the hands of a supervillain last week wasn’t quite dark enough, branching out into the story behind the isolation and bullying of loner Yolanda. And it isn’t a pretty one. Strap yourselves in, kids, for a CW DC comic book show taking on the issue of teen slut-shaming.

Yes, that’s right, turns out that three months ago, Yolanda was a model student from a catholic family standing for… some sort of position in the school – it’s never quite made clear but let’s guess student president. Then she sent an intimate photograph to her boyfriend (Henry, the son of Brainwave) and it inevitably ended up being broadcast to the whole school. Cue shame from all her fellow students, deep shame from her parents and her current life of misery.

Courtney’s decision to recruit Yolanda as the first member of her new JSA seems, on the surface, well-meaning. But I’m not convinced that the show itself handles the subject all that well. While Yolanda has a lot of pent-up anger about what happened to her, she still seems to believe, deep down, that she ‘made a mistake’ which is deserving somehow of punishment. There is no indication that Henry has been punished for this at all, either by the school or his peers, nor that her parents feel anything but disgust that she has brought shame on the family.

There’s a strange turning point too, where Yolanda actually makes a powerful declaration about needing to be herself again before she can be something else, and the way in which Courtney ultimately responds to this suggests that she is not a person who considers boundaries all that much, nor who really gets what Yolanda has been through. That the show then goes on to make a further set of odd decisions with the character just adds to my unease at how they have handled the whole subject.

It’s bad enough that the show goes so overboard in setting up the fall in flashback – like it’s because she was a model student, Catholic etc that is why what happened to her was so terrible. Incidents like this are commonplace for all sorts of young women, and they themselves should not be made to feel that they are at fault. At worst, they have mistakenly trusted someone they should not have. The whole set up here feels like it’s giving the surface appearance of sympathy while quietly judging Yolanda for her choices.

That said, the adventures that Cortney and Yolanda get to have together as Stargirl and Wildcat are fun enough, and it’ll be nice to see how the dynamic of the show alters as it moves forward. Aside from all this, we have Pat slowly putting more pieces of the Blue Valley puzzle together, and a new villain in town to meet with Icicle. Still not really any clearer on what the New America project is though, and how concerned we should be.

Verdict: Takes a subject it could have done good things with as a backdrop but really fluffs it quite badly from start to finish. A show with this sort of general balance of heart, humour and seriousness should be able to do better than this. 6/10

Greg D. Smith