Spoilers The Flash - Season 2
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Or maybe Krypton hasn't exploded yet in the Arrowverse. Or maybe either Jor-El or Astra managed to prevent it somehow, and Kal-El and Kara are both living out their lives on Krypton.
Awesome episode! When Flash talked about visiting a world of evil superheroes, I didn't think we were actually going to see Ultraman and Owlman!!! I just assumed they didn't have the rights to them or there was a character embargo or something. I just wish they were in more than one episode, but it was pretty damn cool to get an Anti-Monitor cameo. Is this our Season 3 villain???
Why do you assume any of that? Barry just never apparently heard of Supergirl. If your world had a Superman, you'd probably be taken back to hear that one you're visiting had a Supergirl instead.
In Barry's world, he was the first public meta, and there are no aliens. Definitely no Superman yet.
Whenever Superman does go public, he's already been raised in Kansas by the Kents for almost 30 years.
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I assumed Flash was talking about Earth-2, which in this version has a lot of evil counterparts to people who are good on Earth-1.
Any post now, Christopher's gonna come in and school this guy on how depictions of parallel universes have always been varied and inconsistent and completely dependent upon the needs of the plot at hand, citing everything from Sliders to TNG's "Parallels", so it's silly to expect rigid rule-following in such an inherently absurd field of speculative fiction. Yup, Christopher's really gonna unload on this guy!
... Wait, what?!
A parallel universe without shrimp.
You forgot the Obligatory Superman Radio Show Example.Any post now, Christopher's gonna come in and school this guy on how depictions of parallel universes have always been varied and inconsistent and completely dependent upon the needs of the plot at hand, citing everything from Sliders to TNG's "Parallels", so it's silly to expect rigid rule-following in such an inherently absurd field of speculative fiction. Yup, Christopher's really gonna unload on this guy!
... Wait, what?!
Actually, what I tend to argue in cases like that is that good storytelling requires being consistent with your universe's own internal logic, no matter what other universes have done or whether it makes real-world sense. That, in fact, was my problem with a number of episodes in season 2 and after of Sliders, episodes that violated the alternate-history premise and actually had different laws of physics, like the world where magic was real.
I would never, ever claim that it's okay to see speculative fiction as an excuse to abandon the rules of good writing. That's an insult to the entire genre in which I happen to work. If anything, the more inherently absurd the premise, the more incumbent it is upon the writer to be disciplined and consistent in its presentation, the better to facilitate the audience's suspension of disbelief.
So the Christopher you're talking about must be my evil twin from another universe...
That said, Earths 1 and 2 make for a very small sample from which to infer the rules of the multiverse. Just because they're so similar in some ways doesn't mean that the next Earth is going to be.
Sure, but that's why I ask the question. Not to say "This is wrong," but to say "I wonder what the explanation for the difference might be." Like, maybe Earth-1 and Earth-2 are closer to each other in the bell curve of probabilities than Supergirl's Earth, and thus they have more commonalities. Maybe it's because they're adjacent that Earth-2 was the first alternate world that a breach was opened to.
Here's a thought: The arrival of Superman on Earth-SG would've had quite an impact on the scientific community. It brought proof that alien life existed, it introduced the world to superhuman powers more than a decade before Earth-1 learned of them (maybe more like two decades, if Clark was Superboy there), and it brought elements of advanced Kryptonian technology to Earth. So many people interested in science might've ended up pursuing different fields of study. Maybe Harrison Wells was recruited by the DEO instead of founding STAR Labs, and thus there was no accelerator explosion. Maybe Caitlin Snow became a xenobiologist and moved to Metropolis instead of Central City. And so on.
And who knows? Maybe Superman saved the Queen's Gambit from sinking. Oliver Queen may still be a dissolute rich boy to this day. And maybe Superman already dismantled the League of Assassins and HIVE.
IMHO it is debateable, that Earth-1 and Earth-2 are closer than Earth-1 and Earth-SG. Earth-1 and Earth-SG both look very similar to Earth-RL (a.k.a. the real world) while Earth-2 has this retro "transistor punk" thing going on.
Yeah, that's the problem with parallel universes in fiction. So many of them have the same people but wildly different histories (like Star Trek's Mirror Universe or Fringe's Other Side or most of the Sliders worlds), which is rather hard to believe. If their histories went that differently, then the same individuals wouldn't have met, or at least would not have procreated at the same time, and so different children would be born, and within a few generations the worlds should have mostly different inhabitants. The thing is, the fun of alternate-reality stories is letting the actors play alternate versions of their characters, so it's always going to be a popular trope even though it doesn't make logical sense.
But maybe there are different parameters for "closeness" between parallel realities, and similarity of sentient inhabitants carries more cosmological weight than similarity of material objects and events. Maybe there's even some sort of probabilistic bleed-through between universes that influences the same people to be born even when events go differently.
Kismet. Some things are meant to be even in different circumstances.
Yeah, we can over-think the situation. For me, if it works for the story & characters, I can forgive things that aren't logical.
Like "Darmok" in TNG... the whole inability to talk to each other is silly...but the acting and the general story of a real "seeking out new life & new civilizations" and living up to Star Trek ideals makes me forget the "unrealisticness"
Actually I had a lot of fun working out the logic behind Tamarian language for my "Darmok" sequel story "Friends With the Sparrows." I posted my research notes on my site: https://christopherlbennett.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/tamarian-grammar.pdf
There is an Astra in the Superman universe? Seriously? Why don't I know about this?