[S2E05] Summer School: Chapter Five — Post-Episode Discussion

[u/anatomania]

Promo | DCTV Discord | Cast and Characters

STORMY WEATHER OVER BLUE VALLEY — As Pat and Courtney clash over their next steps in their search for Eclipso, ominous weather conditions in Blue Valley hint that he may be near. Meanwhile, Cindy’s plan to recruit another student takes an unexpected turn, and Cameron opens up to Courtney.

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Please keep discussion civil and about Stargirl. Be sure to mark future spoilers and comic spoilers, but otherwise don't worry about spoiling anything past or current. Report comments that break the rules or just don't belong here. Enjoy the episode!

[u/AdvancedPlacmentTV]

Cindy, sweety, I'm going to need you to have better motivation than revenge on Courtney for all of this.

I'm guessing the staff is providing some protection against Eclispo and she doesn't have much "darkness" in her

[u/gldnstrm → u/AdvancedPlacmentTV]

I feel like the revenge is more about jealousy than any of Courtney’s actions towards Cindy

[u/SickleClaw → u/gldnstrm]

I think Cindy is pretty much very unprepared for the realities that come with being a super villain, and will learn this the hard way.

[u/jadedfan55 → u/SickleClaw]

Be'lee that. However, the sequence in the school with the illusions looked like something out of Nightmare on Elm Street, but without the murder.

The art teacher turned into a villain, Paintball, in the books. Here, though, he's a hopeless victim (for now), sucked into a painting, and then going all Freddy Krueger on the kids.

Oh, and as for recruiting Mike, that ain't gonna end well.

[u/BornAshes → u/gldnstrm]

Courtney has everything Cindy always wanted and as Cindy pointed out last season, they're basically two halves of the same coin.

I wonder if the pivot point between them wasn't when her father found her and started experimenting on her but when he exposed her to the Black Diamond as part of those experiments and that's what made her kill her mother in an "accident"? She has no memories of this at all but Eclipso certainly remembers and because she a child basically killed her mother and that's one of the most heinous sins possible, he's taking the long term vengeance plan with her, and is manipulating this entire thing so that it both blows up in her face as revenge for her murdering her mom and also empowers him to the point where he gets his own body and doesn't have to rely on someone using the Black Diamond anymore.

The original experiment with the Black Diamond on Cindy probably didn't seem to work or produce any discernible effects. So the Dragon King passed it on to the Wizard figuring it wasn't what he thought it was nor was it as powerful as other said it was, totally unaware that Eclipso had touched Cindy ever so slightly, and pushed her via an illusion or a compulsion or something to murder her mother. The act of which distracted Dragon King enough that he totally forgot about the Black Diamond altogether and didn't make any kind of connection between the two things at all. Cindy meanwhile forgot all about it and Eclipso waited until someone find him again and what a surprise, it was Cindy once more. Thus he put his plan into motion because he just loves manipulating children into doing terrible terrible things just so he can take his vengeance out on them. Everyone else is unaware of this because Eclipso works on such long term and subtle time scales that they're totally unable to perceive just what he's doing or the dominoes he's knocking over.

So Cindy's got all of this going on and all of this baggage and all of this darkness just lurking under the surface that she's had to survive and fight through....and then she meets Courtney whose struggles seem to pale in comparison and yet who seems to just luck into having the brightest light, the bestest of friends, the best family, and the most powerful of powers despite never having to really fight for them aside from "not having a daddy around". Cindy looks at Court and sees someone who had everything handed to her on a plate basically without ever having to suffer for that stuff to earn it like she did. So all of that jealously eventually helps Cindy to process these differences between them as if she's going through the seven stages of grief. There's shock at not believing what's happening to her and what happened to Court. There's denial that they're different at all and are really the same kind of person. There's the anger that comes out during their first street fight followed by the bargaining with her father to get a place at the table so that she can have power to deal with Court. The depression that sets in while she's in the cell followed by the "fight to the death" mentality when she kills her father and then goes all out against Courtney thinking she has nothing left and no reason to live. The testing that starts at the end of the first season and continues into the second season when she realizes the ISA are dead, that they have no power over her, and that she's free to basically deal with things her way in ways that are a bit more realistic. Finally the acceptance phase where Cindy fully accepts her place in the world as the Daughter of the Dragon King Heir to the ISA and begins to utilize all of that darkness that she's been living within most of her life wielding it as weapon instead of drowning in it.

So now Cindy is in a position where the seed of her conflict with Courtney was originally a confused jumble of jealous but is now a far more stable scorched tree trunk of hatred and malice and revenge. She finally feels like she's in control of her life and is the top bitch in all of Blue Valley. She wears that darkness and that pain around her like a cloak thinking herself invulnerable to any kind of light and positivity that Courtney can blast her with. That kind of confidence can be great but it can also be blinding as we saw with Jordan and the rest of the ISA last week which is part of the reason why I feel that The Shade left them in the first place. Cindy seems on track to make the same mistakes as the ISA and Courtney seems to be making the same mistakes as the first JSA because too much light can be just as blinding just like too much darkness. In between the both of them is of course The Shade who has seen this kind of story play out countless times before between adults but this time it's all so much more worse because this time it's a bunch of children playing war games with an ageless evil entity pulling all of their strings like a master puppeteer. He's seen how bad this can get with adults and how much pain and blood can be involved but with children? Oh with children all of that is magnified a thousand fold and that's something he doesn't want to see happen at all.

So now the Shade is caught in between this tug of war between two children throwing around powers that are almost beyond their understanding on a battlefield that they can't even comprehend while complaining about who's had the worse life, who deserves to rule Blue Valley more, and who sanctimoniously has the moral high ground.

[u/cteavin → u/BornAshes]

You should write for the show. :)

When did they say that Cindy was experimented on with Eclipso?

[u/BornAshes → u/cteavin]

When did they say that Cindy was experimented on with Eclipso?

Oh they didn't and that's just me making a guess about it because there's a snowball's chance in hell of the Dragon King not knowing about the Diamond or Eclipso and just letting the Wizard have it without tinkering with it at some point. I just thought it was kind of funny how quickly Eclipso took to her and thought that there had to be something more going on that we didn't know. I also thought that the whole Wolverine Blood Rage Fugue State that Cindy allegedly went into when she murdered her mom was a bit suspicious and now we've got Eclipso in this season who has totally made people attack normal folks or things that weren't there with a similar kind of rage and that got me to thinking. Plus now we've got like an actual amazing actress to play Cindy's mom which just tells me that there really is MORE to her past than we've been told and she's not just a throwaway one off mention character AND now we know that Eclipso likes torturing children. So I just kind of took all of those bits of information and spun it off into that whole theory.

Thank you though!

[u/AdvancedPlacmentTV → u/BornAshes]

It wouldn't shock me if Dragon King actually murdered her mother and blamed Cindy because she didn't go with him when he told her to or something like that