Mark writes...

I had some thoughts on Miss Martian abusing her powers that I wondered if you could respond to.

My interpretation of what we saw and were told in season two was essentially that Miss Martian has various levels of "brain blasting" and psychic interrogation. We know her brain blast of Psimon in Image left him incapacitated for years; even by the time of Legacy it seemed he was only partially recovered, and seemingly needed several more months before he was able to escape his hospital room permanently, as described in Beneath. Her attack on Kaldur seemed to be of a similar scale. Everyone seemed to believe he would not recover without outside telepathic aid. I'll call this a Level 2 brain blast for the purpose of this ramble.

On the other hand, the Krolotean she interogates at the beginning of Alienated appears fully recovered by the time he appears at the end of the episode to leave with the Justice League. Granted we don't see him talk or get any idea of his mental state, but he is standing, not drooling, and generally seems okay. Shimmer clearly has fully recovered from Miss Martian's attack in Beneath by the time of Before The Dawn. I'll call these Level 1 attacks.

My interpretation had been that Kaldur and Psimon were exceptional cases, where M'gann was driven by extreme anger that pushed her to go much further than she normally would. In virtually all other cases (unless perhaps hypothetically she were to encounter Queen Bee), her attacks would be at most like the the latter Level 1 examples, incapacitating the victim for hours, days, perhaps a few weeks at most, but they recover fully fairly quickly without need for external help.

This, to me, feels like the only way to make sense of the Justice League (and the rest of the Team besides Superboy)'s seeming indifference to M'gann's "abuses" of power. I can see why Superboy might feel that what she was doing was too much even at Level 1 and that he might fear, rightly as it turned out, that it would lead to greater excesses. But how many times must Superman or Batman or even Superboy himself have given an opponent a bad concussion, put them in hospital for days or weeks, or even a coma? Heck, how often do you come across stories of someone dying from one punch in a drunken bar fight? The heroes must realistically severly injure and kill some people accidentally from time to time, and not just by using lightning powers on a girl with an unkown heart condition. I can see why others might feel it hypocritical to call her out for doing something psychically that they do physically, especially if they aren't aware of how much control over it she has. It raises an interesting moral question.

I find it much harder to see the League or other members of the Team either not noticing or not caring if she was frequently doing to enemies what she did to Psimon and Kaldur. Not without her psychically manipulating them, which you have previously ruled out.

There's also the issue of Nightwing. Beast Boy flat out tells him that M'gann psychically took Kaldur out in Before The Dawn, yet he is shocked when Conner later tells him M'gann fried Kaldur's brain in The Fix. My assumption was that Nightwing (and Beast Boy himself) assumed what M'gann did was the Level 1 version, when in fact it was Level 2. Superboy himself probably even thought that until M'gann told him the truth. It's easy to believe that if what she did to Psimon was a one-off, years ago, when she didn't have as much control of her powers. But it's hard to justify that if M'gann was doing Level 2's with any degree of frequency or recency.

However, many other fans of the show seem to believe M'gann was doing what she did to Kaldur quite regularly, and I've noticed a response or two from you that seems to suggest that the Kroloteans didn't recover and the other Kroloteans refused M'gann's help.

1) So was the Krolotean at the end of Alienated not as well as he appeared? Or was it just the Krolotean leader from Earthlings that didn't recover? Or did he recover and the Kroloteans just weren't telling?
2) Generally, was my original interpretation on the right track? Were M'gann's worst excesses limited to Psimon and Kaldur, or at least exceptionally rare?
3) If M'gann was doing the worst Level 2 brain blasts more often than I thought, were the League and the Team somehow largely unaware of it? If so, how? Would the League not keep tabs on captured villains and notice how they were in extended comas?

Thanks for indulging this long, rambling post.