Loved It? Hated It? What did you think of "The Faithful?"

[KSiteTV]

What did you think?

[KSiteTV]

Meh, the cult stuff was kind of off-putting to be honest. I'm happy to see James given something to do again this season, though.

[Aurora Moon]

I actually liked the cult stuff. last ep it was all about martian culture and beliefs, so I thought it was nice that we got to see some background on Kryptonian culture this ep. It adds a little bit of nice world building beyond earth in this universe.

I think it's often too easy for writers to act like Kara and Clark is just a bunch of superpowered human beings. which leads people to forget that they are in fact alien beings with a whole different culture. In clark's case it was more forgivable because he arrived as an baby and thus didn't remember any of that stuff. with Kara it's less forgivable.
So it's nice that they had Kara acknowledged that she hadn't forgotten anything even as she grew up on earth.

The cult also highlights the fact that it's pretty easy for people to see Kara and Clark as gods, because of all the superpowers they had. I thought it was pretty realistic.

I also enjoyed all the interactions between Lena, Regin, and the other women.

There was a few moments that I didn't like, such as the "wanna have a kid" melodrama moment. But overall the ep was pretty enjoyable so it was forgivable.

[JDBentz]

I ended up putting my review in the live discussion thread. But I didn't give it a score, so I would give this one an 8/10.

[DJ Doena]

I think it's often too easy for writers to act like Kara and Clark is just a bunch of superpowered human beings. which leads people to forget that they are in fact alien beings with a whole different culture. In clark's case it was more forgivable because he arrived as an baby and thus didn't remember any of that stuff. with Kara it's less forgivable.

Yes and no. I was born behind the "Iron Curtain" and was 12 when the wall fell. So I actually do remember my life in East Germany. But now I'm 40 and that life is very far away. Kara was roughly my age when she left Krypton and has now lived 14(?) years on Earth. But that also means that she's spend more years on Earth already than she ever spend on Krypton and we all know that you pretty much remember nothing from before the age of four.

I became 26 in 2003. By then I had my degree in computer science and had been working in my professional career for more than a year. I had moved away to a part of Germany that was formerly "west". Even back then East Germany seemed far away.

[Aurora Moon]

That's the thing though. Krypton was probably nothing like east Germany back then.... and now that Kara is part of an endangered species, it's all the more important to her that she remembers the culture of her people.

I mean, if you knew that your people was in danger of dying out as an species... wouldn't you want to remember and keep the cultures of your people, even if some parts of it wasn't as ideal as you would had liked? I mean, this was pretty much a reoccurring theme in the background of each season...but especially the season with all the evil Kryptonains.

[DJ Doena]

I mean, if you knew that your people was in danger of dying out as an species... wouldn't you want to remember and keep the cultures of your people, even if some parts of it wasn't as ideal as you would had liked?

The problem with that is that Kryptonians were never portrayed as that much different than Humans. Sure they were technically advanced, but their moral values and their conflicts over them are pretty much the same as Humans'. If anything the cultural difference between Krypton and National City appears to be smaller than that of Pakistan and the US. As for her species going extinct, yes that will have left a deep emotional scar on her soul. But due to her appearance people do not regard her as a stranger, especially not in her day job. She's only been Supergirl for 2 years now and even that is part-time. Fot the previous 12 years she was treated like a North-American millenial young woman, because she looks the part. Judging by the way that Cat Grant goes through her other assistants, she had respect for Kara even before the show began even though she can't show it directly. Kara's made friends with at least Winn. It's not like her life on Earth is a daily reminder of what she's lost.

[Aurora Moon]

In that that's where we disagree. Sure on a surface level they would seem the same in terms of morals and things like wars over territory, etc.
but the thing is, I've been able to piece together what Krypton was like though years of comic reading, etc.

Krypton had:
1) A Caste system, and that caste system also affected their fashions. Think the caste system of India for an earth equivalent. Kryptonians could climb their way up if they were truly exceptional enough, but for most their lives were largely predestined by the lives their parents and great-parents led. Clark and Kara was born into the upper class, and so were cut off from the lower castes and that's why you saw everyone dress mostly the same instead of seeing a mixture of poor, middle class and upper class fashions.

2) While Kryptonians developed similarly to humans, they also didn't have the same exact issues that humans had. For one thing, Slavery had never existed in the same fashion that it did on Earth. Sure, they had things like indentured servants but they never saw other Kryptonians as property like human beings did to other humans.
So culturally Kryptonians are already different than Earthlings in this respect. They can understand the concept of things like prejudice based on class, social standing, etc. They can understand racism against other species, but not the idea of racism against their own kind just on skin color alone.
Seeing that slavery never existed in their history I can imagine how much of a culture shock Kara had when she first learned of that concept.

There was a lot of issues that humans had to deal with, that the Kryptonians never had to deal with. So naturally their culture would still be different in a lot of ways even if they look and act similar to humans. It's one of the reasons why I'm looking forward to the Krypton show on syfy, I want to see how they deal with that.