Naomi bursts onto The CW with invigorating energy and a double-knotted mystery
Kaci Walfall’s Naomi unearths a conspiracy that involves her past, her future, and Superman.
TV Reviews Naomi
2022 is already proving to be a challenge for the Arrowverse. The CW’s superhero franchise kicks off the new year minus two of its DC series (Black Lightning and Supergirl), Legends Of Tomorrow has entered the last stretch of its seventh season without being renewed for an eighth, and two weeks ago saw the news that parent companies ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia had put the network up for sale. Its future DC superhero ambitions would look rather grim were it not for the positive energy absolutely radiating off of The CW’s latest Arrowverse debut: Set in a northwestern town rife with mystery and starring Kaci Walfall as the blithesome, eponymous heroine-to-be, Naomi is so far a winning adaptation of the 2019 DC/Wonder Comics miniseries that represents a promising new day for the beleaguered network.
Naomi McDuffie may share the trappings of the typical superhero—her glasses obscure the truth of her origins, her adoptive parents may know more about her past than they’re letting on, and she has a bestie who’s one crisis away from going full “guy in a chair”—but Naomi wants you to know that this isn’t going to be your typical superhero tv show. One thing that certainly helps it stand apart from what’s come before: The presence of Ava DuVernay, the Academy Award-nominated director and producer who developed the series and co-wrote this premiere episode, and whose body of work (13th, Selma, A Wrinkle In Time) indicates that this particular CW/DC series will have more on its mind than the standard-fare stuff you’ll find in other Arrowverse shows. More Black Lightning, less The Flash.
That’s not to say Naomi doesn’t look and feel like recent Arrowverse offerings. Its central locale of Port Oswego has the same picture-postcard veneer as Blue Valley in Stargirl and it has the same military presence that Smallville has in Superman & Lois. Plus, like Blue Valley and Smallville, Port Oswego has its share of shifty-eyed locals and buried secrets, and it has a tendency to attract superpowered dust-ups that both mess up traffic and kick off season-long story arcs. In the case of Naomi, the superpowered fight that ignites the intrigue of these first two episodes involves Superman, here a fictional comic book character who is adored by Naomi (you see, they’re both adopted) but is also, apparently, real? It’s a whole thing.
That brings us to the question of where Naomi lies in the Arrowverse, which by the end of “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” and “Unidentified Flying Object” is still very much left up in the sky. Is this yet another alternate reality in the DC multiverse? (Probably!) Is the Superman who appears in this episode the same Superman who appears in Superman & Lois? (Probably not!) Why do people keep saying that Superman isn’t real? And why are there actual DC comics in the hands of Lourdes (Camila Moreno), the purple-haired comic maven who has a crush on Naomi and is also handy with a lockpick? If you’re looking for answers to these pedantically nerdy questions, Naomi doesn’t have them for you—at least not yet.
The function of Naomi may feel familiar, but those aforementioned superhero origin tropes are as close to comic book archetype as Naomi McDuffie gets: her life is going quite well when we enter her story, a far cry from the browbeaten underdog sagas of Peter Parker or even Clark Kent. Naomi is incredibly well-liked in her high school (she has at least two entrances in this episode that elicit cheers from her classmates); her adoptive parents (Barry Watson and Mouzam Makkar) are professionals in their fields and trust their daughter to make good life choices on her own; and, my goodness, does she like to date. (These first two episodes find Naomi flitting between three potential romantic interests. “I feel… a lot of things!” she tells her folks. Eat your heart out, Archie.)
Kaci Walfall is terrific. As the nucleus of this Gen-Z drama she is the source of its spritely energy, and Walfall explores the emotion of any given moment with a degree of grace and measured patience that makes her compelling to watch. When she explains to a crush why the combination of Superman’s spandex and cape make him cool, you believe it. (This Superman fan believed it.) Later, she makes it clear how important the “Superman incident” is for her; she doesn’t pursue the mystery just to generate clicks to her Super-fansite (hers is #3 in the world), she does it to better understand why the hero has always appealed to her so dang much. The Superman myth is built around the concept of a found family; The Kents were strangers to the House of El and yet they raised baby Kal as their own, and the McDuffies adopted Naomi and raised her with the same absence of caution. Just love.
But Naomi’s pursuit of truth triggers change, abrupt and radical and frightening. There’s far more to her past than she knows: Her biological parents died in a car crash, she’s told, and the reason for those conspicuous glasses is that she has a degenerative disease in her eyes and the glasses… slow… the damage? Sure. Also there’s the matter of Dee (Alexander Wraith), a smoldering tattoo artist with a dark past who somehow has a connection to the Superman incident and also just happens to know the exact date when Naomi was adopted by her folks. “Don’t believe everything you think” isn’t just the tagline for this season of Naomi, it’s literally said to her by the mysterious (and almost comically glowering) Zumbado (Cranston Johnson), at the precise moment when Naomi’s investigations begin to show signs of dramatic peril. The deeper she goes, the less she understands.
The mystery of Naomi’s past is hefty enough (UFOs! Thanagar! Destiny!) but the Superman wrinkle—is he real or not?—feels strangely off, almost like some kind of network concession. The events of “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” and “Unidentified Flying Object” are largely pulled from the first three issues of the Naomi miniseries published by DC back in 2019, but these episodes’ curious story changes have a ways to go before they can be considered improvements from the source material. (Naomi McDuffie was created by Brian Michael Bendis, David F. Walker, and Jamal Campbell.) In the comics, Naomi’s a Superman super-fan. In the show, she runs a popular Superman fansite. Fine. Here is where things get a bit screwy.
The opening sequence of the comic has Superman battling an alien and they happen to ding up a bit of Port Oswego’s downtown drag along the way, one of those day-to-day inconveniences that comes with living among titans. Here, Superman is a fictional character and even though Port Oswego gets smashed up but good at the beginning of the episode by someone who flies in dressed as Superman, most everyone treats it as though it were an elaborate hoax (“best stunt ever!” they all say). It’s a big deal for Naomi—she passes out just as she approaches the skirmish and later she begins to develop… abilities—but so far the series approaches this presumably monumental event like it were a Nancy Drew-meets-X-Files mystery. (Naomi even rallies all her crushes to investigate the brooding Zumbado’s used car lot for clues, replete with My Little Pony walkie-talkies.)
That change, making Superman (and all superheroes in general) a work of fiction in the story of Naomi, makes its world feel paradoxically untethered by sense. At one point, Dee confesses to Naomi that he orchestrated this elaborate hoax (“I hired a guy with a jetpack”), but there are no consequences that follow this confession. (Her father’s military superiors conduct their investigations on the q.t. without bringing in the only person of interest in what should be a national security emergency?) Nor does the populace of Port Oswego shift into some sort of crisis mode now that something traumatic has just occurred in their treasured small town. Her classmates are all abuzz, but as for the rest of the town? Its citizens often come across more like the possessed avatars of WandaVision than a living, breathing community.
Naomi knows what it is, which is the latest CW teen superhero drama in a long line of teen superhero dramas, but it also knows that it has a unique opportunity to change the paradigm. What sets this series apart from the rest of the pack is how it bolsters the growing black representation that has been atypical of the majority of CW DC dramas since Arrow launched back in 2012. Naomi has a chance to lead the Arrowverse towards an exciting (and fun!) new future, just as soon as its lead gets a few things sorted about her own crazy past. “My whole life has been about being different, and now I have to accept the fact that I’m literally an alien,” Naomi tells her friend Annabelle (Mary-Charles Jones). The future is uncertain, she knows this, but that doesn’t change her resolve. Her words—“we have to decide who it is we want to be”—become even more impactful when you realize that the Arrowverse is entering an uncertain future of its own, only this time its new guiding light is someone as indefatigably good as Naomi. With a whole new generation ready to look up to her.
Stray Observations
- “Hi-fives are out?” “Yeah, like 10 years ago.” I have yet to receive any such memo, one decade hence.
- The song towards the beginning of the episode (Jaden Smith’s “Icon”) repeats the lyrics “I am just an icon living.” I don’t know if this was an intentional musical choice, but there is a DC/Milestone character named Icon, which was co-created by M.D. Bright and the late Dwayne McDuffie, Naomi’s namesake.
- Naomi’s adoptive mother is a linguist and her adoptive father works for the military. These are jobs their comic book counterparts did not have; presumably they’ve been changed for dramatic reasons that will bear fruit in the weeks to come.
- On that tack, Naomi’s folks needs to show a little more awareness about what’s going on with their daughter. Concerning the conspiracy chart that was once their living room: “What’s all this?” “Oh, Naomi’s working on a project!”
- I haven’t been to school in forever, but “I need this for my site!” sure doesn’t feel like an acceptable excuse to ditch class. Maybe I’m just getting old.
- Alexander Wraith is really good on this show. He comes off as unnecessarily cryptic in the first episode, but once those wings go wide he shifts quite naturally into a potential mentor role for Naomi. Kaci Walfall has great chemistry with everybody on this show, but there’s something very special about her interactions with Wraith. More of this, please!
- Superman didn’t fight “a blue guy” in the first issue of Naomi, but a purple/yellow alien named Mongul. Maybe Superman & Lois gets first crack at the megalomaniacal despot? He’s sort of a big deal in the Superman mythos, so that tracks.
- Dee hails from Thanagar, the homeplanet of Hawkman and Hawkgirl, for those of you who aren’t DC- or Legends-heads going “aw, yeah!” As to whether or not that’s also where Naomi’s from… let’s leave spoilers out of the comments for now.
- Mrs. McDuffie is famous for her smoothies. I have to know: What is she putting in those smoothies, they do look great.
- So what did you think of the premiere of Naomi, group? Is that a part of Superman’s cape in that little plastic box? Do Naomi’s parents know more about her biological folks than they’re letting on? Who is Naomi gonna smooch first? (My money’s on Lourdes.) Let’s speculate wildly in the comments below.
38 Comments
Flat out, one of the worst episodes of a television show I have ever seen. Not even campy bad (like a 70s Paul Lynde variety special), just total garbage. I do not understand how a company puts something like this on television. The show runner sees the final cut and approves is to be broadcast? I’m not even sure how this works. I was cringingly embarrassed for the show while I was watching it. Now I am just angry someone gets a job where they must get paid hundreds of thousands a year to make a piece of garbage like this and still keep their job.
It was just boring. Calm down. Pilots usually are trash
Jesus, sit down and have a cookie. It’s okay to not like something, but unless it’s Nazi propaganda or something, getting angry that a TV show exists is not a healthy response.
I liked it overall, but it is indeed strange, and not entirely in a good way. The choice to make Superman a weirdly Batman-like “Is he real?” figure is, honestly, a baffling choice. Like, Crisis showed that there were tons of Supermen out there, it wouldn’t be shocking if this were in an alternate universe with its own Superman.
I also have to wonder how Dee manages to spread his wings without destroying his jacket and shirt constantly.
But I like the main cast, and the lead actress is really likeable. I’m intrigued about what happens next.It won’t happen, but I would love if, whenever Superman appears, he’s played by Brandon Routh.“That’s not to say Naomi doesn’t look and feel like recent Arrowverse offerings. Its central locale of Port Oswego has the same picture-postcard veneer as Blue Valley in Stargirl and it has the same military presence that Smallville has in Superman & Lois.”Just to get technical, Stargirl isn’t in the Arrowverse and the military presence in Smallville was only for when Morgan Edge was fully active. The military base Superman visits isn’t in Smallville and the only military person who ever visited Smallville outside of a crisis was Sam Lane.
I think the issue here is that this takes place on an Earth where Superman is fictional. In the pilot I could have sworn that one guy mentioned that Superman isn’t even real. Same deal when Black Lightening was on a different Earth. When he first saw Superman he was surprised he was real.
Episode 2 had Dee say that Superman is, indeed, real, and tells Naomi that he’ll introduce them one day.
I think he is real but the general public does not know that. They believe he is a fictional comic book character. Possibly because the “real” superman is from another dimension.
Early in Black Lightning, his youngest daughter had some comics, one which I think was Supergirl.
No. Superman is absolutely real in this universe.
Just to get technical, Stargirl isn’t in the ArrowversePresumably, Stargirl is an alternate universe that the main Arrowverse characters are unaware of (since not all universes merged in Crisis). Note: They had Jay Garrick in a flashback scene this season.
Stargirl IS in the Arrowverse. It’s on Earth-2, which is shown during Crisis on Infinite Earths.
So were Superman Returns, Titans, and Doom Patrol, and nobody considers them a part of the Arrowverse.
Yes, yes we do. They’re a little more distant because they’re not on the CW, but they’re still part of the Arrowverse.
That’s your headcanon, not the official word. Officially, the Arrowverse only includes the Earth Prime shows.
No, That’s YOUR headcanon. Supergirl existed as part of the Arrowverse before it’s universe and Arrow’s universe were combined. The Arrowverse is the multiverse that was destroyed, and the one created, by the Crisis.
A) That isn’t according to any of the higher-ups, including DC, WB, and CW. Just because it’s in some fan wiki doesn’t mean it is true.B) By your definition, that would include literally everything DC has ever done, which is fucking asinine. The Fleischer Superman cartoons, the main comic line, and the 60’s Batman show are NOT part of the Arrowverse, you fucking idiot.
Personally, I would consider any DC show produced by Greg Berlanti to be part of the Arrowverse (which I think is in line with most people’s definitions). This is why I am confused why this show (Naomi) is being described as being a part of the Arrowverse.
Stargirl was firmly established as being part of the Arrowverse during the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event. And you might be right about the location of the military base in “Superman & Lois” but it has to be pretty close to Smallville for General Lane to just drive over as often as he does I feel.
Having read her 6-issue introseries very recently, I’m reserving most of my judgement until more backstory is revealed. There are a lot of changes that might make more sense later on than they do right now. I have two major hopes for the rest of the season: (1) That they give her friends a little more depth besides “they all care about Naomi a lot.” Love to see them being supportive, but right now they all feel like they’re there to be “people for Naomi to talk to who aren’t her parents or Dee.” A little more clarity on who (if anyone) Naomi currently feels romantically interested in (besides Lourdes?) would also be nice, since the crushes the guys have on her feel one-sided. (2) That they save any heroics for after all of the identity reveals (surrounding Naomi specifically – I’m fine if the writers want to keep a few surprises for her to discover). I just think it’d be nice for Naomi to be confident in knowing exactly who she is while she’s helping people.
I’m mixed on this show so far. On one hand it’s a lot closer to Superman & Lois & Stargirl than it is to the other Arrowverse show (Which is great because I can’t stand any of those shows anymore). But on the other hand this show has a level of clunkiness that’s not the most entertaining to watch. Hopefully that gets ironed out but if not than I don’t think I’ll be sticking with this show for that long.Also the guy who plays Dee comes across as really stiff and monotone. It really stands out because the rest of the cast is pretty good.
So no Superman and Lois talkback this year?
Seems not sadly.
I liked the first couple of episodes, mainly because it is fun to get in on the ground floor, the lead actress is quite compelling and all of the other kid characters feel real. Of course if the moody tattoo guy stays more like Legends’ “Hawkman” and less like the tailor in Black Lightning, I may change my mind. It will really depend on how much the rest of the show stays like a Party of Five/Parenthood/Stranger Things.The “Superman” thing does make for an unnecessary distraction, especially considering that the show Naomi is paired with Superman & Lois and there’s even a whole promotional video of the S&L cast welcoming her to the night.It’s made even worse by the soldier person saying they believe Superman to be real, even though on both S&L and Supergirl he worked with the DOD and not to get all political or anything, but if Superman were real, it would be likely that his adventures would be chronicled by Lois Lane in the Daily Planet and if there were any question about him being real, it would mean that either they distrust mainstream news or in this universe Lois Lane does not exist.It all just seems like an unnecessary distraction. If Superman exists in the show’s universe, it should be known and he should be a familiar Superman.
I’m guessing that this world’s Superman has been around for a long time (Dee says, “we fought in a war a long time ago”), and works with a very secret government agency. They put out the comic books for “plausible deniability” or to let anyone who claims to have actually seen Superman get branded as a hopeless geek. And it isn’t working as well as it used to.At the beginning I was afraid that the lead character was going the way of a typical Mary Sue who excels effortlessly at everything. Maybe not being able to master powers at the start will convince me otherwise.
If this world’s Superman is part of a super-secret project and the comic books were cover, then it is a different Superman than the one which comes on the show before — the cast of which “welcomed” this show in a promo — and it’s a different Superman than every other show in the Arrowverse because the one on Superman & Lois been in at least two “Crossover” events.I guess that’s fine, but it is kind of jarring because there are two different Supermans on the same station back-to-back and/or the same streaming service with new episodes available at the same time which will often be watched as a pair. In another thread, @Are You My Dad mentions how Black Lightning learned Superman was real on a different Earth when he was sucked into a crossover, but in Naomi’s world Superman is real and a different Superman.As I said, the whole thing seems unnecessarily distracting. They could have either made Superman an unobtainable hero character for which Naomi runs a fan site or they could have left him off of the show.Of course, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of superpowered aliens living among the characters on Superman & Lois, while on Supergirl there was an alien bar, alien rights activists and an alien President, so I guess there is precedent for the Arrowverse shows to exist in different universes, even ones where the two leads are cousins and presumably live on the same earth.
I would not read too much into Legends of Tomorrow not being renewed for a new season yet. I don’t think the CW has renewed anything yet. Of course, that could be bad news for all of their shows & they might all get axed and need to find a new home on a streaming service or end. But who knows. And even if so Legends seem like one of the more likely of their shows to find a streaming suitor.
I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’d expect any survivors of a CW sale to end up on HBO Max.
Some of them already are; Superman & Lois, and Batwoman stream on HBO Max after the season is done on CW. And Stargirl started out on HBO Max didn’t it?
Stargirl was (at that point) a DC Universe show, but by the time it came out the writing was on the wall for DCU and Max hadn’t started yet, so it ended up on the CW the day after the DCU premiere. (I’m inferring cause and effect, but it seems pretty clear.)
Ah, I had forgotten about DCU.
After two episodes, this show, thankfully not from Greg Berlanti, is somewhat amateurish, and I wonder if that’s because of COVID measures or is it because the producers are spending more money on song rights than in gee whiz visual effects. How many episodes until we know what Naomi is truly capable of? Season finale?
Yeah, I had high hopes for this show, but it’s pretty cheesy… and I don’t understand how someone could be such a huge Superman fan and have Naomi’s reactions to, well, anything that’s happened so far? “S&L” has had a really higher-grade look than the rest of the Arrowverse shows, and then Stargirl really upped the bar in my opinion on family dynamics and a more… hell, just ‘well-written’ interpersonal drama and character depth in a show centered on teen characters (who are often flatter than Wally and the Beav, by way of Poochie). This… feels like daytime TV. And not the good “Gargoyles” kind, yet? Maybe a cheap Disney Channel kids show. It suffers a lot by comparison to the other new kids, so far.
“At one point, Dee confesses to Naomi that he orchestrated this elaborate hoax (“I hired a guy with a jetpack”), but there are no consequences that follow this confession.”I thought this was a lie to throw off a Naomi who still had no idea she was an alien. Getting the info she and Dee were both aliens presumably was so overwhelming she hasn’t thought about it since.
Well apparently other people heard about this because the Army knew.
Hmmmm…..
I thought Naomi made an update to her Superman fansite explaining that Dee told her it was a hoax?
Overall I’m enjoying it. The characters are solid, the mystery is interesting enough, but the pacing feels off right now. At first I thought it was because I hadn’t watched the two episodes together in the context of a two-parter but even revisiting them like that it still seemed a little wonky. Nothing that can’t be improved as it goes though, it’s a common enough early issue for shows, and the rest is holding it up enough to make it worth giving the chance.
How is this an “Arrowverse” series? It is not produced by Greg Berlanti and the common locations in this show do not in any manner shape or form track with the same locations within the Arrowverse (I know of no version of STAR Labs within the Arrowverse that comes anywhere close to resembling the STAR Labs in this series for instance). I mean, yes it could be a parallel universe (and certain plot points for the story align with that assumption) but nothing really tracks for it connecting to anything anywhere within the other CW superhero shows.