Listener Email: Lena and James’ Break Up
28 Feb. 2019

Listener Email: Lena and James’ Break Up


Elaine wrote in with some thoughts about the Supergirl season four episode titled, “Menagerie”!

Hello Rebecca and Morgan,

You girls like to talk about Lena Luthor,so I’m going to talk about Lena and the interesting story choices for her and James from “Menagerie”. I realize this was a belated Valentine’s Day episode, but for an episode dedicated to a holiday about love, the parts with Lena and James were depressing.

I feel like the arc with James and Lena was really oddly written. Mostly, I think it comes from the acting direction, or whoever was in charge of giving directions to Katie. We open with James giving Lena a lovely black and white photo of her sleeping. And then, Lena says on a whim that they should go Paris. This is a really romantic gesture, but before she says this, Lena looks really disturbed about something and I have no idea for the remainder of the episode what the hell that something is.

Then, there’s the moment between Lena and James in the limo, on the way to the airport to catch a plane to Paris when Lena drops the bombshell about Colonel Haley visiting and her needs to militarize Lena’s research. I understand that there’s been something that has been really troubling Lena because she looked at her phone and it’s probably something bad, but we don’t get to see what it was that she looked at! That really bugs me. Lena breaks up with James because he doesn’t support her research; while James makes valid points that her hooking up with the government could mean really bad things.

I’ve seen weak break up scenes before (I occasionally watch soap operas), but in the amidst of the break up scene, I still don’t know what was bothering Lena at the beginning of the episode and what she was looking at on her phone and it’s really distracting and unnerving.

– Elaine

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One Response

  1. daryl washington says:

    speaking of the conversation in the car just speaking for myself but the more i listened to it the more it took leaps i just couldn’t follow