WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Stargirl Season 2, Episode 8, "Summer School: Chapter Eight," which aired Tuesday, September 30th on the CW.
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is a sci-fi horror story that explores themes related to humanity, monstrosity, family, isolation, and especially the dangers of obsession and ambition. In Stargirl Season 2, Episode 8, the villain Eclipso spins his own version of Shelley's classic novel with Rick Tyler, aka Hourman, and Solomon Grundy.
Since Season 1, Rick has been struggling with feelings of abandonment and has been internalizing anger towards his family. He's upset at his parents for inexplicably abandoning him at a very young age and he's twice as angry at his uncle for abusing him. Without positive reinforcement from a loving, nurturing family, Rick doesn't feel his existence is validated. As such, Rick is unable to control his emotions and has an unstable self-concept. He also struggles to form and maintain healthy relationships with others, even after acquiring a group of friends since meeting Courtney Whitmore.
With all that Rick has gone through since childhood, he is one of the more emotionally vulnerable characters of Stargirl. It's clear from his friendships with Courtney, Beth Chapel and Yolanda Montez that he yearns for meaningful human connection. It's also clear from his decision to befriend Solomon Grundy that Rick wants to connect with someone who understands him, hinting at how he truly sees himself. This actually sets him apart from Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist of Shelley's novel.
In Shelley's novel, Dr. Frankenstein had a more privileged upbringing. It was actually his own curiosity, obsession with science and ambition to push limits that drove him to "play God" and animate a being comprised of various corpses. Upon successfully bringing his morbid creation to life, Frankenstein was immediately horrified by what he had done and rejected the creature. When the creature escaped from Frankenstein's lab, he tried to connect with other people but they all feared and rejected him. He then returned to his creator with an ultimatum: create a female companion for him or he would murder all the people Dr. Frankenstein loved.
In Stargirl, Rick actually has more in common with Dr. Frankenstein's creation than Frankenstein himself. Like the creature, Rick is similarly rejected by his uncle who posed as his father as a favor to his sister, Rick's mother. Rick is also sensitive to rejection and thinks of himself as inherently unlikeable. His inability to control his emotions leads him to react violently to triggering situations, which contributes to his self-loathing. When he nearly beat Solomon Grundy to death as payback for the death of his parents in Season 1, Rick began to question who the real monster was. This experience led Rick to try and make amends with Grundy.
Eclipso is a villain who feeds on people's deep-seated fears and uses people's emotional triggers to manipulate them into performing desired actions. This was how he was able to exploit Rick's friendship with Grundy in order to trick him into nearly killing his uncle. He exploited Rick's unstable self-concept by exposing the root cause of it: childhood abandonment. This manifested in the hallucination of the 10-year-old girl in the creek seemingly being murdered by Grundy. The girl represented the childhood Rick lost and Grundy represented the person he thinks he has become: a monster.
Because Rick is unable to reconcile his inner child with the person he is now, this triggered the violent response Eclipso was looking for to destroy him. In reality, there was no little girl and Grundy was actually his uncle. To further destabilize Rick, Eclipso had him attack the father figure who abused him as a child and shaped him into the monster he thinks he's become. This effectively made Rick's harmful views of himself become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this regard, Eclipso twisted the themes of family and isolation and especially the themes of humanity and monstrosity present in Shelley's novel to destroy Rick.
New episodes of Stargirl air Tuesdays on the CW.
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