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Probably one of the strangest after effects of the 2016 election has been the direction taken by CW’s Supergirl. While the show had previously had a political subtext as a series about immigration, refugees, illegal aliens, and government operations must, season 2 became infinitely more overtly a political allegory. Even though the show never bothered adding a direct Trump allegory it very much became a show about confronting the ugly and bigoted attitudes that’ve come to infect American life in the late 2010s.
So far it’s been unclear if the new season will walk a similar path and while I’m sure they’ll dial things back a bit as they refocus on a new bad guy I also don’t think they can really un-ring that bell. For better or worse Supergirl IS the superhero politics show now the same way Captain America is the superhero politics movie franchise. Now, as the new season looms, the shape of that new era seems to be forming as season 3 adds a new villain in the form of Morgan Edge, played by Adrian Pasdar.
The best way I might describe Morgan Edge is that he’s like if Bill O’Reilly railed about superheroes in addition to all of his other horrible beliefs. At least that’s who he became; initially, Edge was a bit more ambiguous as a character. Morgan Edge was first introduced in the early ‘70s as a media mogul that bought up the Daily Planet with the intent to drag it into the modern era. This was kind of a metaplot in and of itself as the whole idea of a mass media corporation buying out the planet to force its employees to become new media journalists was part of a plan by DC to try and modernize the Superman mythos. Despite clashing with Perry White Morgan was initially portrayed as a good man, albeit not too good as he was also a pretty ruthless capitalist.
Actually, Edge’s twin roles as a media strategist and rich business type put him in the same category as Maxwell Lord, a sponsor of the Justice League and previous Supergirl supporting character back in season 1. In fact, if I was guessing, I’d bet that Morgan Edge is sliding into Supergirl now to act as a replacement for Lord after the actor became too busy/expensive for CW to maintain his contract. I’d actually welcome that because it would necessitate the show address what happened to Maxwell Lord in-universe as, so far, one of the world’s biggest tech billionaires just disappeared at the end Supergirl season 1 and nobody is looking into it.
Beyond simply being a media mogul for modernization of the man of steel Morgan was also connected to the criminal syndicate Intergang. So far Intergang has yet to appear on Supergirl, which seems like a real missed opportunity actually. They’re a high tech band of thieves and organized criminals operating primarily out of Metropolis but with branches across the US and acting as the embedded advanced party for Darkseid, God of Evil. They’re basically a gift-wrapped name to pin on a gang of normal crooks with alien weaponry and ties to a greater evil so if they wanted to have Edge be in bed with them I wouldn’t be surprised.
Intergang is really where Morgan Edge’s identity faces a split. The modern version of Edge maintained his role as a rich media mogul but amped up his ties to Intergang a lot. What was initially an ambiguous connection was made concrete and Edge even ended up serving time for his criminal ties. However, that didn’t slow him down and most recently he became a very public propagandist.
That’s the version of Edge I think we’ll be seeing in Supergirl, a TV talking head whose main talking point is to ban all aliens from the Earth. At the time he was actually working for General Sam Lane, Lois Lane’s evil military father who hates Kryptonians, as part of an anti-Superman media campaign. Sam Lane is another season 1 character who disappeared after the handover from CBS to CW but their shared history is an interesting point regardless.
Along with fellow season 1 missing character Lucy Lane, all three of them were a major part of the New Krypton storyline, in which 2 Kryptonian cities landed on Earth and eventually made their own new planet in a parallel orbit to ours. I don’t think we’ll see that storyline adapted for Supergirl, it seems a little too expensive to pull off and also too similar to the evil Kryptonian stuff from season 1, but a lot of key characters for it have been showing up lately. Guardian, Mon-El, Lucy Lane, Sam Lane, and Morgan Edge were all critical to the storyline so I wouldn’t be totally surprised if they wanted to create some kind of Frankenstein out of various plotlines from it- maybe something with Brainiac or the Bottle City of Kandor.
As to the political side of things, I wouldn’t be surprised if Edge here ends up an indictment of bigoted right-wing media with a special place for the “alt facts” side of the equation. Homeland pulled a similar approach in its most recent season when it decided to get more politically aware of the current climate and it worked pretty well. I like the idea for a Supergirl villain in the same way I like the rich corporate version of Lex Luthor.
It’s a way of zeroing in on the kind of non-physical power that a villain can wield against the hero in the form of money and public opinion. It’d be a nice change of pace overall to give Supergirl an enemy who wasn’t trying to conquer the Earth and that she couldn’t actually have a fist fight with to defeat. Someone who simply hates her out of his own bigotry and whose whole mission is to make the whole world as ugly as they sounds like the perfect antagonist for a character intended to inspire the best in humanity, especially in these difficult times.
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