News Next Arrowverse Crossover to Include Batwoman

More to the point, we can say that the Henry Allen of Earth-1 has two speedster doppelgangers who do not share his name, Jay Garrick of Earth-3 and Barry Allen of Earth-90. Although since Barry's name in the comics is Bartholomew Henry Allen, it's conceivable that the E-1 and E-90 versions have the same given name but one of them chooses to go by his middle name.

 

^ Everything that exists in one reality of the Arrowverse's Multiverse exists in all realities of said Multiverse in some form that is similar to how it exists in other realities; the differences - and there are differences - exist in the details.

 

Nope. There is no evidence of that.

 

Why can't Amazo be both the name of a ship and a robot? I'm confused.

 

I suppose it's possible. Maybe the android is from a different reality. Maybe Professor Ivo liked the name for some reason, but in one reality he gave it to a ship he owned, while in another reality he gave it to an android he built.

 

I know, maybe that's what makes it work, is that they didn't set out to make a shared universe and that's what they ended up with. Meanwhile Universal deliberately tried to get one by using its monsters the Mummy, Dracula et al and that died a death. Meanwhile I read that Paramount and hasbro were trying to conjure up a shared universe with GI-Joe, the Transformers and others. I don't see that getting anywhere.

 

Yes, that's right. It was the success of Arrow that gave the producers the freedom -- or rather, the trust from the network and the viewers -- to branch out and bring in more comic-booky elements. It's pretty common in comic-book screen franchises. Smallville started out keeping things relatively grounded and avoiding the more garish comics elements as much as it could, but eventually phased them in more and more (though that was largely because they got renewed well beyond the 5-6 years they'd planned on and ran out of stuff to do otherwise). The MCU started out relatively grounded with Iron Man before gradually phasing in bigger and weirder things, and Agents of SHIELD started out as an ABC-friendly show about regular human government agents, then brought in more and more comics elements from year to year until now it's a show about Inhumans and magic and AIs and aliens and time travel.

Still, it's amazing how rapidly and how far the Arrowverse has grown. In some ways, it captures the flavor of the comics even better than the MCU does -- it's more unapologetic about embracing the wildness and silliness of the comics, using the characters' superhero names, and so on, and it's structured in a more comics-like way in having parallel ongoing series with occasional crossover specials. And in the DC tradition, it's even folded in properties that weren't originally part of it (Constantine and now the 1990 Flash, though they've been hinting at the latter one for years).

 

Power couple indeed!!

 

The Arrow episode of the crossover will be the 400th episode aired in the Berlanti's DC CW multiverse(that's including Black Lightning there).

 

It's premature to include BL, since as yet there's no proof that it's in the same multiverse/continuity. But are you counting Constantine and 1990 Flash, or just the actual CW and CW Seed shows?

 

Just the five shows currently airing on the CW.

 

Well, the full Arrowmultiverse at this point evidently encompasses:

Earth-1:
Arrow
The Flash (2014)
Constantine
Legends of Tomorrow
Vixen

Earth-1/Earth-X:
Freedom Fighters: The Ray (see edit below)

Earth-38:
Supergirl

Earth-90:
The Flash (1990)

By my count, that's 412 live-action episodes and 24 animated mini-episodes, although the 12 Vixen episodes were folded into the longer Vixen: The Movie while the two seasons of 6 Ray episodes have now been compiled into two 30-odd-minute installments. So let's call that 415 "episodes" in all. (And I didn't even know season 2 of The Ray had come out, which it apparently did back in July. Surprising lack of publicity there.)

EDIT: Okay, I just watched the entirety of Freedom Fighters: The Ray, and it turns out to have massive inconsistencies with Crisis on Earth-X and the Arrowverse in general (like Mr. Terrific flying????), so I think we have to discount it as non-canonical. So make it 412 episodes and one animated movie (Vixen).

 

Spoiler

According to ScreenRant, the character that people are assuming is a robot is actually John Deegan in costume as Doctor Destiny.

 

Behind the scenes fun with director James Bamford

 

Yup. Don't ask me how or why The CW did it, but straight out of the gate, despite "Crisis on Earth-X" being initially billed as a backdoor debut of The Ray in the Arrowverse, "Crisis on Earth-X" made the soon-to-debut Freedom Fighters: The Ray impossible and incompatible with the Arrowverse.

 

My suspicion is that current events in US politics provoked the Arrowverse producers to do a Nazi-themed crossover earlier than they otherwise might have (since I think the original idea was to have FF:TR come out before the Ray's live-action appearance, as with Vixen), so they had to go ahead with their version of Earth-X and the Ray before the animators had time to complete their version, but too late in the game for the animators to substantially change their version. So the changes they made to the story to fit the crossover's needs (which had to take priority, both because FF:TR wasn't out yet and because the principal work with the larger audience always takes precedence) couldn't be reflected in the webseries, and thus it ended up as a canon orphan. Although that does not explain Mr. Terrific flying.

The problem is, if the animated series had only taken place on a single Earth, we could just assume it was another parallel world that was close but not identical to Earth-One. But since it was a multiverse-crossing story that explicitly identified its settings as Earth-One and Earth-X, that makes it irreconcilable.

Of course, Vixen has a couple of continuity issues with the Arrowverse too. It shows the Anansi totem as a flexible string of beads and teeth rather than a rigid metal carving, and it shows it as binding itself to the user so it can't be removed. It also shows Cisco naming Vixen, when in LoT the name was inherited from her grandmother. The element totems also look different in the two shows, and Kuasa has an African accent in Vixen and an American one in LoT. But those are minor continuity glitches, on a par with the discrepancies that sometimes exist between the live-action shows (like Jax needing parallel Earths explained to him in Crisis even though he'd met Supergirl the year before).

Then there's Constantine: City of Demons, which we were led to believe would be a sequel of sorts to the NBC show, but turned out to be a complete reboot with more comics-faithful versions of characters seen in the show, and is apparently meant to be in continuity with the Justice League Dark animated movie instead.

 

Lol. What happens if they ignore a rule and have Amazo the robot? Someone going to flunk them? Fire them? Will the writers get a stern lecture with finger wag?

 

Not the finger wag. Surely.

 

Melissa Benoist talks about how excited she is to have Batwoman in the crossover:

 

Nice featurette for the crossover. Lois calls Clark "smallville".