Courtney desperately works to find a way of averting a crisis in the real world, while Pat and The Shade try their best to find a way out of the Shadowlands.

A fairly focused episode of Stargirl this week, as the action is split between Courtney, Jennie and Todd at the Helix Institute and Pat and The Shade in the Shadowlands. And I’m sorry to say, the writing on either side is slightly hackneyed at best.

On Courtney’s side, there’s plenty of potential, as the show slowly peels the onion of who Nurse Love and Bones really are, what the purpose of the Helix Institute is and how they fit into everything that’s been going on so far. The problem is, it then rather ruins it by making the solution to an impending, world-ending crisis really straightforward.

Worse, it relies on Courtney being the one to supply that solution, rather than the people who have been working at the institute for years with various children with dangerous powers. I get that the idea is to try to show that Courtney can be the hero who saves the day even when she doesn’t have the staff, but this really does just come off as a little lazy, and undermines what could otherwise have been a genuinely interesting set of plot developments.

Meanwhile, Pat and The Shade are navigating their way around the Shadowlands, in a set of scenes which basically replicate the stuff we already saw of the place in the previous season, only swapping the characters out. This if anything is even more criminal because it takes two of the better characters ins the show and harps on flaws and ideas already done to death with both of them.

In the case of The Shade, we get another re-hash of how he finds it difficult to feel anything and therefore effectively cuts himself off from everyone to avoid the possibility of any pain or loss. We’ve done this. The character was supposed to have grown past it through his actions in the last season. Why are we repeating it?

But poor Pat fares no better. Essentially we find that he had a distant, uncaring, actively cruel father which informs why he tries so hard to be better with Courtney but oh wait, he has a son too who he ignores consistently and who’s been desperately trying to get his attention for ages. Yes, again we know this, it’s been obvious since the first season when the poor kid ended up driving through Icicle to try to get someone to notice he exists. This isn’t an arc, it’s a rut, and it undermines all the good qualities of Pat as a character.

Perhaps most frustrating is the sheer lack of stakes to the thing overall. By the end of the episode, the instant crisis is resolved, another suspect behind all the weird stuff going on in Blue Valley has been crossed off the list and essentially this little side quest has been completed so we can return to the ‘A’ plot next week. And our central characters have learned lessons they’ve already been taught many times or worse, they’ve learned nothing because they’ve just magically found a solution to their challenge. I like this show, and I have a lot of goodwill towards these characters, but this is not a good example of what it can do.

Verdict: Poor by the high standards the show has set for itself. 5/10

Greg D. Smith