There’s a New Girl in Town

There’s a classic character in traditional adventure fiction: The Girl who’s the love interest for The Hero. She’s young, she’s beautiful, and she says, “Be careful, John,” a lot.* She may be the CEO of a major corporation at 23, but she still needs him to rescue her often. And sometimes she needs to die so he can feel incredible pain (aka “fridging”) and then go out and beat up the bad guys. I don’t know why there’s such a pervasive idea that the Hero’s Girlfriend has to be a helpless, boneless, gormless doorstop of a character, but it’s everywhere, especially on TV.

The Girl annoys the hell out of me.

WARNING: Massive Spoilers for Arrow, The Flash, Gotham, Grimm, Luther and Sleepy Hollow ahead.

Female protagonists have been getting stronger (although they’re still too damn rare) while the supporting character Girls have remained mostly accessories and plot devices. But something interesting has been happening in the past couple of years: TV audiences have been rejecting The Girl on a regular basis. Internet comments like “Can we put Laurel/Katrina/Juliette/Barbara/Iris on an island someplace and lose the map?” are generally followed with some variation of “She’s boring, she’s annoying, she’s whiny, she’s stupid.” Much of this is not The Girl’s fault: when you only exist as an object of desire for the hero in order to make his life more difficult and angst-ridden, you’re gonna end up boring, annoying, whiny, and stupid enough to walk into the bad guy’s clutches on a regular basis. Then add to that network casting that tends to fall back on model-beautiful actresses at the expense of personality and verve, and The Girl is pretty much stuck. I still don’t like her, but there’s not a lot you can do when “vapid” is baked into your character description.

The poster Girl for this failed trope is Arrow’s Laurel Lance, The Girl the Green Arrow was destined to marry except the audience said, “Oh, just no.” Laurel had the added burden of being riddled with bitterness and recrimination, stripping out all the softness and supportive gazes that serve the hero so well, and that pretty much left her not only useless but toxic. But Laurel was not alone.

There’s Barbara on Gotham, rich, beautiful, and prone to being an idiot, which makes Jim Gordon’s life even more hellish, and on Gotham that’s saying something.

There’s Iris on The Flash, beautiful, loving, and so devoted to the hero that she starts a blog about him while remaining unattainable, in no small part because Barry (aka The Flash) has grown up as her foster brother. (The actors have great sibling chemistry, but there’s something a little squicky about a carnal connection there since they both call the same guy “Dad.”) Iris also suffered from the “Don’t Tell The Girl The Secret To Protect Her Because We All Treat Her Like She’s Four-Years-Old” Syndrome.

Juliette on Grimm suffered from that, too, with an emphasis on “suffered,” since supernatural beings routinely trashed her living room and menaced her while she screamed, “What’s going on?” and her hero boyfriend, Nick the Grimm, dismissed it with increasingly lame excuses (“That huge window at the front of the house broke when a bird flew into it. And then escaped.”)

And then there was The Girl from the Past, Ichabod Crane’s colonial wife, Katrina, the Amish heiress-freedom fighter-witch, who dressed like Barbie at the Black Magic Prom. Sleepy Hollow‘s relationship with reality is always distant, but Katrina, moaning through a mirror at Ichabod because she was stuck in purgatory but could still stop by for a chat, was just a bride too far.

These characters range from pleasantly useless to the story (Iris) to downright dislikable (Laurel) but they all share the same basic problem: they have no agency and they must scream for help to make the hero’s life more difficult because he lurves them, even though readers/viewers keep asking, “WHY? Why in God’s name are you obsessed with this woman?” As if in answer, shows have been addressing the problem in three ways:

1. Giving The Girl agency by making her an Evil Girl. This still leaves her defined by the hero and existing to create his problems, but instead of being menaced, she gets to do the menacing. HUGE improvement. Downside: She tends to get killed, but hey, eggs/omelet.

2. Replacing The Girl with The Working Woman, aka The Felicity Smoak Solution. Bring in somebody the hero isn’t obsessed with, a woman he can work with as a partner and an equal until he recognizes her as his soulmate and kicks The Girl to the curb.

3. Making The Girl into a Working Woman. This one’s harder because it means evolving The Girl’s character, and she didn’t have much to begin with, so it’s generally only semi-successful. But good for the writers for giving it a try.

Let’s look at these fixes a little more closely.

I must confess, I love the Evil Girls. Barbara went crazy because she (maybe?) killed her parents (no, I don’t get that one, either). Juliette turned into a Hexenbiest because Nick accidentally slept with a witch (you had to be there). Katrina went bad because her son, Death, united with the demon Moloch to corrupt her (really, you had to be there). In all cases, they instantly became fun to watch. Barbara in particular is having a damn good time, but I also enjoyed the hell out of Juliette getting over her horror at what she’d become and taking on everybody who’d lied to her, patronized her, and tried to kill her; it was especially fun watching the supernatural go at her thinking she was The Girl and getting their asses handed to them. She and Katrina are dead now–Agency Kills–and Barbara just fell out of the window of a church tower, but her fall was broken by the pouffy (but beautiful) wedding dress she was wearing, so she only broke many bones and is still completely batshit and still destined to bear Jim Gordon’s baby. That should be interesting.

But my favorite Evil Girl is Alice Morgan of Luther. I could watch Alice for hours, starting with her Cute Meet with Detective John Luther, when he arrives at the house of her murdered parents and finds her outside, covered with blood and sobbing with grief. Sounds like a typical Girl, doesn’t she? Yeah, it’s not long before Luther realizes Alice offed her parents, and they play a cat and mouse game for the rest of the episode, at the end of which Alice walks away free, just too damn smart to be caught. But that’s not the end of it; sociopathic genius Alice is now obsessed with Luther, the smartest man she’s ever met, stalking him and his ex-wife, trying to understand him, falling in love with him, helping to save him when he’s arrested for his ex-wife’s murder, and drawing him to her with her insights into his cases and her willingness to do damn near anything just for the hell of it. For three seasons, Alice is an intermittent undercurrent in the story until the final episode, when she comes through for him, violently, of course. She’s arrested for murder again, escapes again, and disappears. But the final scene is the lawgiver Luther meeting the lawbreaker Alice on a bridge, a place that’s neither one side or other, a place they once threatened to kill each other. When Alice says, “You really do need to lose the coat,” referring to the jacket he’s worn throughout the series and that, like Columbo’s trenchcoat, symbolizes everything his life has been, he takes it off and throws it into the river before walking off into the sunset with his Evil Girl Genius. I love Alice. So she’s a murderous sociopath: nobody’s perfect and Alice is always, always, always fascinating.

Also good is the other approach to agency, equality with the hero:

No surprise: I love the Working Woman.

The gold standard here is Felicity Smoak of Arrow, who was supposed to be a minor character IT girl but so charmed the audience and the Arrow that she was moved up to regular. She started out with the being-lied-to thing, but with one important difference: she knew she was being lied to and decided to roll with it. Halfway through the first season, Oliver came clean about being the Arrow (he had to, he was bleeding to death in the back of her car) and she joined the team. By Season Two, he was telling her she was his partner, not his employee. By Season Three, he was in love with her and the writers tried to devolve her into a Girl: she spent a lot of time crying. Now Season Four is here, she and Oliver are living together, and she runs a major corporation and the Arrow team, regularly kicking ass and giving orders, which Oliver accepts because Felicity is smart. She is the icon of the Working Woman, so I hope to hell they don’t screw her up with angst and Big Misunderstandings. She cried enough last year for the entire run of the series, even if it goes twenty years.

Then there’s Patty Spivot, aka the Felicity of The Flash. She’s a police detective who really wants to chase meta-humans and ends up as the only member of Barry’s foster father’s metahuman task force. She’s tough, she’s active, she runs into danger because she’s a cop, but mostly she embraces life with gusto. The best thing that happened to her all week was running into a Sharkman (aka King Shark) as he tried to kill the Flash; the second best thing was her date with Barry who was pretending he could see her even though he’d been temporarily blinded in a fight. They were both awkward but happy to be together until halfway through dinner when Patty said, “You can’t see me, can you?” effectively torpedoing that lie, and after that they were just happy. It was the kind of scene you can’t help but smile all the way through, right up to the great kiss at the end. Then they both got calls on their phones to go fight crime and headed back into action separately to plot lines of their own. I bear Iris no ill will, but Patty is a lot more fun to watch because she’s not All About The Flash. She’s not even All About Barry. She’s more All About Embracing Life And Bonus: Barry’s A Good Kisser.

Sleepy Hollow‘s Working Woman isn’t a girlfriend, she’s one of leads: Lieutenant Abbie Mills is a kick-ass, no-nonsense cop headed for the FBI when she sees the Headless Horseman decapitate her sheriff/surrogate father and shortly thereafter runs into the colonial Ichabod Crane, risen from the grave to fight evil with her, whether she likes it or not. Abbie may be my favorite TV cop right now since Joss Carter is no longer with us; she’s so smart, so practical, so open-minded, so driven . . . so Abbie. Like Felicity, she wasn’t supposed to be a love interest–the writers would have to be idiots to marry Ichabod off if they wanted him to end up with Abbie–but Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison have ridiculous chemistry and nobody liked Katrina anyway, so no tears were shed when Evil Katrina tried to kill Abbie and Ichabod shot her. I have no idea if there will ever be an Abbie/Ichabod romance and I don’t care, I just want to watch them fight the undead every week, with Ichabod pontificating on how things really happened back in the day and trying to cope with the modern world, and Abbie giving him side-eye and saving everybody’s butt on a regular basis. Abbie gives the best side-eye on television making her the Protagonist/Working Woman least likely to be lied to with any success.

But because I am perverse and love an Oh-Hell-Not-You love story, the Working Woman I’m most interested in right now is Adalind on Grimm. Adalind is a Hexenbiest (bad witch) lawyer: smart, selfish, murderous, and irresistible in her can-do approach to evil. Like Felicity and Abbie, she didn’t start out as a love interest, she was an antagonist our hero Nick loathed. (I find it interesting that Adalind was not supposed to be a recurring character but, like Felicity, was brought back and finally made a regular because she’s just that much fun to watch. Emily Bett Rickards and Claire Coffee deserve a lot of credit for bringing so much intelligence, verve and wit to their performances that they remade The Girl in spite of their shows’ plans.) I disliked Adalind because of the things she did to characters I liked, but I loved every moment she was on screen; there was just something about her enthusiastic, hardworking, implacable approach to evil, a Corporate Barbie from Hell. Then she had a baby and turned into a devoted mama for the few days before other forces of evil stole her infant, at which point she became the Destroying Mother, and whatever holds she’d barred before got tossed as she cut a swath of terror through Europe and the Pacific Northwest looking for her baby. I was pretty much Team Adalind at that point, even when she cast a spell so she looked like Juliette and slept with Nick to take his Grimm powers; after all, he’d help take her daughter away from her. Then she found out she was pregnant with Nick’s baby–which is when I stood up and said “I LOVE THIS SHOW”–and Evil Juliette got shot by another Grimm because she was trying to kill Nick, and now Nick’s stuck with Adalind as his baby momma, and they have the same enemies, and she named the baby after his mother whom she really did like, so he’s moved them into an old warehouse that’s a fortress because Hexenbiest or not, she’s his son’s mother and he’s going to protect them both, but Adalind’s thinking about going back to work as a lawyer. . . So much potential there.

One big worry: Adalind just told Rosalie, the closest thing she has to a friend (Rosalie would disagree), that she doesn’t want to be a Hexenbiest any more, which means there’s a real danger she’ll devolve into The Girl. DO NOT DO THIS, GRIMM. You’ll be undercutting one of the oldest romance tropes there is, the Opposites Attract (aka Rake and Virgin, Beauty and Beast) which in this case is a Grimm (killer of witches) and a Hexenbiest (witch). Come on, Buffy the Vampire Slayer made this work with two different vampires; let Adalind be an Evil Working Girl and keep her edge. She’s so much fun with all that power.

That’s the thing about both the Evil Girl and the Working Woman: they’re fun to watch because they’re powerful and they do things. They’re part of the main plot and not just as a barrier or a complication, they’re in there pitching and fighting equally with or against the hero. They’re fully realized characters on their own with their own goals and motivations. Why every show doesn’t deep six The Girl love interest for The Evil Girl or The Working Woman is beyond me: they’re fabulous.

Instead, some of them are trying to reboot The Girl as a Working Woman, my least favorite solution to the problem. Laurel Lance is now the Black Canary, fighting crime with the Arrow Team and no longer casting smoldering looks at Oliver, except when she’s whining at him for not treating her as an equal. (You’re not his equal, Laurel, get over yourself.) She’s still the same Girl, she’s just dressed in black leather and a bad blonde wig now. Annoying. I think they may also be trying this with Iris, accelerating her journalism career and having her hang out at Star Labs to give the Flash team advice, but basically Iris is still just a really nice Girl. I have nothing against her, but I don’t particularly want to watch her. It’s telling that the writers don’t know what to do with her emotionally since I routinely tear up when Barry and Joe have one of their fatherly discussions on the show, and I am not a sucker for father-son dynamics in the least. But Iris? Such a nice girl. Where’s Patty? (I feel the same way about Caitlin, so it’s not just Iris who’s suffering from Girl Flu on this show.)

This approach rarely works because it’s trying to breathe life into a cardboard cut-out. “I was sweet and good and now I’m sweet and good with a career and tougher clothes” is not a fix. Make her evil with agency, make her an equal partner to the protagonist with agency, but do not spackle her empty shell and try to sell her as a fully realized character. She’s still gonna be The Girl.

I may be impatient about the whole Girl thing because romance writers solved this a long time ago. Mid-century romance heroines got rescued a lot by macho heroes, nurses fell in love with doctors, secretaries married their bosses, and agency was in short supply because it was so unwomanly. Thirty years ago we turned that around and gave our protagonists power over their own lives, so to see those passive, boring romance heroines from the fifties still showing up as love interests on the screen is maddening. We’re better than this.

And now, thank god, so are some of the female romantic interests on film, which is important because the love interest is still the primary role for women on the screen (more female protagonists, please). But lately there’s a new Girl in town and the best thing about her is that she’s not a girl at all, she’s a woman who lives her own life and might let the hero share it if he can keep up with her.

I really, really like her.

*It should be noted that Amy Kane in that first photo morphs from The Girl into a Working Woman at the end of High Noon, so it’s not really fair to use her image at the beginning of this essay. The picture is just such a classic I couldn’t resist.

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