Check Your Antennae At The Door: The Alien Subculture On Supergirl

[The Crazed Spruce]

Since it's dominating a couple of the episode threads, I kinda thought we could use a dedicated thread for the alien subculture on the show.

[Trini]

Besides the breathable atmosphere, and gullible humans, I have to wonder why all these aliens have chosen* to relocate to Earth, which is clearly much less technologically advanced than... apparently every other planet with interstellar travel capabilities.

*(However, the Fort Rozz escapees didn't have a choice.)

[BkWurm1]

Yeah, we know that at least M'gann didn't arrive via the prison so something must have made Earth desirable.  Actually same with J'onn, though in his case it seems more like he just fled to the nearest inhabitable planet and stayed in exile.  

Mon-el's ship was programmed for earth as was our favorite Kryptonians.  In their cases it makes sense because of the powers they gain but most of the Fort Roz escapees that Kara battled had powers that she knew about from her childhood long before the prisoners were loose on Earth, so it doesn't sound like most aliens got special powers when they came to earth.  J'onn and M'Gann didn't as far as we know.  

In Men in Black Earth was a kind of Switzerland, a neutral haven.  Earth on Supergirl isn't anything so formal, but I suppose alien refugees that were trying to hide would think a planet with only moderate technological levels could be a good place to get lost on. Why they picked National City though?  Nice weather?  Great potstickers?    

[MarkHB]

6 hours ago, BkWurm1 said:

Yeah, we know that at least M'gann didn't arrive via the prison so something must have made Earth desirable.  Actually same with J'onn, though in his case it seems more like he just fled to the nearest inhabitable planet and stayed in exile.

Could have been the same for her as well.  I'm not sure if it was ever established (even in comics) that any Martians had interstellar travel.

[The Crazed Spruce]

Don't know about the show, but if you read between the lines in the comic, their technology was roughly a century behind Earth's, and focused mainly on culture and the arts. J'onn only wound up on Earth because of a teleportation experiment by a human scientist. (To be fair, though, I'm not really familiar with his Nu52/Rebirth backstory.)

Wouldn't surprise me, though, if they changed it in the show to him cobbling together a makeshift rocket or something to get him to the nearest inhabited planet after the aftermath of the war with the White Martians.

[KirkB]

Depending on Martian physiology, J'onn (and M'Gann for that matter) could have flown off Mars under his own power, then shape shifted into something and used his momentum to drift through space until he got to Earth, at which point he transformed again and flew down into the atmosphere.

A bunch of aliens from different worlds coming to Earth is one thing. Especially if it happens to be in the middle of intergalactic space lanes or something. I am more curious about why so many of them seem to have congregated specifically in National City. The bad ones could conceivably have been avoiding Metropolis for obvious reasons (which makes their secondary choice ironic) but what is it about this one city which makes it so attractive? Or are there a bunch of alien bars all over the world no one knows about?

[legaleagle53]

38 minutes ago, KirkB said:

Depending on Martian physiology, J'onn (and M'Gann for that matter) could have flown off Mars under his own power, then shape shifted into something and used his momentum to drift through space until he got to Earth, at which point he transformed again and flew down into the atmosphere.

A bunch of aliens from different worlds coming to Earth is one thing. Especially if it happens to be in the middle of intergalactic space lanes or something. I am more curious about why so many of them seem to have congregated specifically in National City. The bad ones could conceivably have been avoiding Metropolis for obvious reasons (which makes their secondary choice ironic) but what is it about this one city which makes it so attractive? Or are there a bunch of alien bars all over the world no one knows about?

I'm fairly certain that there are alien or alien-friendly bars in at least every major city in the US and other countries, just as gay and gay-friendly bars have existed pretty much everywhere (some more openly than others) for decades.  Or, putting it another way, alien seems to be the new LGBTI on Supergirl's earth.

[The Crazed Spruce]

That's more or less my take, too. There's probably an extensive alien presence in every major city, but with Supergirl as a major alien presence in National City (and probably even moreso with Superman in Metropolis), they might feel more comfortable there, so I can easily see a larger alien community in both cities. 

Besides, we're looking at it from their perspective. The alien community probably looks larger from the inside than the outside.  They are still in the shadows, after all.

[legaleagle53]

1 hour ago, The Crazed Spruce said:

Besides, we're looking at it from their perspective. The alien community probably looks larger from the inside than the outside.  They are still in the shadows, after all.

Very true.  Just because the President granted them legal recognition and basic amnesty in the US doesn't mean that they were automatically granted the same everywhere else in the world, or even that those rights are respected in the US.  The aliens are still being persecuted, even in National City and Metropolis, for example.  

Even though to some the comparison may seem tired, the aliens' struggle for legal recognition and equality has several parallels in our own reality with the struggle of the LGBTI community.  Being granted marriage equality last year certainly didn't end the LGBTI struggle in the US -- if anything, it intensified it somewhat.  That's definitely going to be the case with the aliens, especially once it's discovered that the President herself is an alien.

[Trini]

With the yellow sun, and humans looking identical to them, I can see why Kryptonians would want to go to Earth. However the show hasn't answered the question - why (in the cases of Kal-El, Kara, and the worldkillers) children -infants!- were sent to Earth alone without parents/guardians/adults. I know the comics/movies etc. have various explanations, but I'd like to hear what the reason is in this continuity.

[legaleagle53]

3 hours ago, Trini said:

With the yellow sun, and humans looking identical to them, I can see why Kryptonians would want to go to Earth. However the show hasn't answered the question - why (in the cases of Kal-El, Kara, and the worldkillers) children -infants!- were sent to Earth alone without parents/guardians/adults. I know the comics/movies etc. have various explanations, but I'd like to hear what the reason is in this continuity.

Probably because there wasn't time to build spaceships that would be large enough to accomodate both a child and an adult at the same time. That's why Kara and Kal didn't travel together in the same ship but were launched separately.

[Trini]

I need more than that. Krypton had interstellar travel tech, but only single-passgenger and Fort Rozz sizes?

One reason I can see is that they thought that it would be easier for a baby to integrate into earth culture/etc., but it's still pretty extreme to send off a helpless infant and hope for the best. And that still doesn't prohibit adults from coming too.

It's not that important, (and in season 3 I doubt they'd give an answer) but I'd still love to hear this show's take on it.

Edited January 29, 2018 by Trini

[wilnil]

16 hours ago, Trini said:

I need more than that. Krypton had interstellar travel tech, but only single-passgenger and Fort Rozz sizes?

One reason I can see is that they thought that it would be easier for a baby to integrate into earth culture/etc., but it's still pretty extreme to send off a helpless infant and hope for the best. And that still doesn't prohibit adults from coming too.

It not that important, (and in season 3 I doubt they'd give an answer) but I'd still love to hear this show's take on it.

What I'm cynically suspecting is that the show doesn't have a take on it, especially after they give us the "Fort Rozz" episode in which traveling many light-years to another star system (and not even one of the ones known to be closest to us) is even more trivial than the trip to Mars a while back, and an old Voyager probe can be used (remotely, even!) as an interstellar instant-communications relay.

At least before, we had some hand-waving about wormholes, portals and time-space rifts that could be shortcuts for the immense distances involved. Now it looks like the rule is just "space travel is hard when the plot requires it to be hard, and otherwise it's easy," and the same for building or commandeering starships.

[Trini]

Bumping since this topic may be more relevant this season...

Season 4 looks like it going to have more about civilian aliens living/working/etc. among the humans of Earth, unlike previous seasons where they were mainly criminal threats.

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With the amount of extraterrestrials that have traveled here, you'd think some of them would help us upgrade NASA. ;)

[BaggythePanther]

5 hours ago, Trini said:

Bumping since this topic may be more relevant this season...

Season 4 looks like it going to have more about civilian aliens living/working/etc. among the humans of Earth, unlike previous seasons where they were mainly criminal threats.

---

With the amount of extraterrestrials that have traveled here, you'd think some of them would help us upgrade NASA. ;)

Or at the very least someone at NASA would be working on reverse engineering all the spaceships that have come to Earth. 

And how exactly are they getting here? Did they come in one big spaceship? A bunch of little ones that went undetected? 

[Trini]

On 11/2/2018 at 10:54 PM, BaggythePanther said:

And how exactly are they getting here? Did they come in one big spaceship? A bunch of little ones that went undetected? 

I'm sure most were undetected; Earth's planetary defense system is nonexistent, apparently. Unless the DEO has been keeping track? But I don't think that they've mentioned anything like that.

Although it would be something if they did, because Earth-38 has Men in Black -levels of alien infiltration, except the public actually know about it.

[Trini]

And now we have confirmed human-alien interbreeding (eh, gotta find a better to say that).

[Trini]

On 11/12/2018 at 9:05 PM, Trini said:

And now we have confirmed human-alien interbreeding (eh, gotta find a better to say that).

... And thanks to Ma Danvers, we have "inter-terrestrial" to refer to human/alien 'hybrids'.