Supergirl Season 3: The Next Evolution of Mon-El

This article contains spoilers for the ending of Supergirl Season 2.

One of the biggest mysteries of Supergirl Season 3 involves the fate of Mon-El whose escape pod vanished into a wormhole as he left Earth to avoid an agonizing death by lead poisoning. There was little doubt that Mon-El would return this season, and with Chris Wood present in the press rooms at San Diego Comic-Con, it’s pretty clear he’ll be around, even though there aren’t any new details about it. But a recurring theme at this year’s SDCC when it came to the assorted superhero shows was actors who simply couldn’t say much (see also: Danielle Panabaker talking Killer Frost on The Flash and pretty much everyone on Arrow).

While Mr. Wood admitted that the cast has only read scripts for the first two episodes of the season so far, he gave thoughtful answers when confronted with some of the criticisms about Mon-El as a character, and he definitely has an idea of where he might be going next as a character, even if it doesn’t include any story specifics.

“I felt very lucky and very happy with the arc that I had in that some of the criticisms early on about the closed-mindedness of Mon-El and where he came from on Daxam, it was easy to jump on as a reader of the scripts early on the ‘this guy sucks’ bandwagon,” Wood said. “But the whole point is finding a way to take a character from a very selfish place to the ultimate sacrifice at the end…That’s the biggest journey you could give any character, which is to have them always do the thing that will protect them and end by doing the thing that sacrifices themselves. For me, that’s the best part of it.”

“Sometimes people are not going to like the character, and sometimes they’re not going to like the decisions that the character makes,” he continued. “But Mon-El is a hero. At the end of the day, in the comics, he’s a hero.”

It’s true that Mon-El took awhile to take truly heroic action on the show, but this next part of Wood’s statement in particular stands out. “The whole point of this character is to watch the evolution of this character who is flawed, going from this mess into donning a cape and looking like an image of purity and heroism. For me, that’s the coolest part of the character.”

Is Chris Wood hinting that we’re finally going to see Mon-El in the red and blue costume in Supergirl Season 3? In a way, this echoes what Finn Jones told us about Danny Rand in Iron Fist and The Defenders, which is that these somewhat immature characters, despite sharing names with superheroic counterparts in the comics, weren’t really ready for that title. But while the costume thing is pure speculation on my part, there’s clearly going to be some kind of shift in Mon-El as a character this year.

“Obviously if and when he comes back, where he’s been, what happened to him, what he carries with him because of whatever experience he had will throw some really cool new dimensions into the show in a way that fans will be pretty excited about,” Wood said. 

At the end of Supergirl‘s second season, I theorized that the wormhole Mon-El’s pod fell into is likely a portal to the Phantom Zone. In the comics, that’s where he had to go in order to escape a fatal case of lead poisoning. He was finally freed 1,000 years in the future by the Legion of Super-Heroes (for more on his twisty turny, timey-wimey comic book history, click here).

Readers of this site know that I’ve been seizing every opportunity to grasp at Legion of Super-Heroes references on these shows (there’s a Legion flight ring in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, for one thing), so please forgive my rampant speculation here. But if Mon-El returns from a stint in the future with a new costume, a flight ring emblazoned with a stylized L, and a newly superheroic attitude, I’m going to be very happy.

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