Stargirl Season 2 review: Eclipso, Sin, Guilt and Missing the Mark
The moral case for coming to terms with guilt and sin.
Guilt is a powerful emotion.
If you do something wrong, particularly if you're the one who thinks you did something wrong, it is probably going to be one of the first things you feel after it happens. To what extent you do feel guilt usually depends on what you've done and what you think is wrong. Some people will feel a lot of guilt over saying something which isn't necessarily true, whereas others won't feel guilty unless you're doing something major like hurting another person. For most people, hurting another person can give you so much guilt, this can be a physical response.
It can overwhelm a person. There are whole books on the subject of it and how to deal with it because of how destructive it can be. It's such a powerful emotion that there's almost a religious belief in the consequences of it. This is seen in a religious sense as the concept of sin. A mark of what you've done so permanent that you might pay for it after you die. However, there's an interesting idea behind the idea of sin. The original Greek word on which sin is based is hamartia.
Hamartia means to miss the mark or to commit an error. Which is a way of understanding the concept of guilt and sin that many might not consider. A person who feels guilt or feels sinful feels as though they have missed the mark. They're on the wrong path. And this is exactly what Eclipso is all about. Creating corruption of a person so that they can no longer see where it is that they want to go. They can no longer see the correct path forward. As a result, they can only really make bad decisions. Things that will end badly for them.
He's the literal embodiment of what makes people unable to see, the darkness. He obscures people's abilities to see and that's reflected in how he interacts with others.
This is one of the more interesting aspects of what Stargirl has been doing this season. Exploring the idea of being pulled off the right path through the type of corruption he creates by his presence. Yolanda in particular has been struggling to deal with this, but it's far from only her problem. Even characters like Cindy, someone who has done pretty terrible things and shows no real guilt for her actions, can't properly handle it.
This was most obviously shown in how Cindy's step mother was tricked into attacking her daughter and ultimately dying because of what Cindy was forced to do. Getting taken off the path isn't just limited to good people with what's seen as proper moral judgment. Even someone who enjoys hurting other people can be taken off the path by someone like Eclipso.
There are so many different really interesting and nuanced aspects that are playing out in the show this season, it'll be interesting to see how it continues.
Check out Stargirl on the CW app in the United States and Amazon elsewhere.
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