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Spoilers Crisis on Infinite Earths Discussion (CW Event Spoiler Thread)

If the multiverse was destroyed, there was a nothingness present and then, a new multiverse was created, how the ###k did rando Refugees from a different multiverse show up in earth prime national city, when there's never been antimatter waves in this multiverse?
 
I am hoping that at some point it becomes necessary for them to remember the events of Earth Prime--and their personal histories on that world. But we'll see I guess.
 
Man, these shows are going to be really weird for future viewers who follow them individually or out of order. That's why I'm so relieved the site problem cleared up. If I hadn't been able to watch on The CW's site anymore, I would've had to trust that all six shows' current seasons would get to Netflix in a timely fashion after they ended, and even if they did, I'd have to be careful to make sure I saw all the episodes in the right order.
Interesting how all of this is following the same pattern of what it happened in DC Comics after every big Crisis: confused fans and unclear new continuities. Their solution was to do every time a New Crisis to clean up the mess of the previous one. I'm curios what the tv shows will do...
 
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If the multiverse was destroyed, there was a nothingness present and then, a new multiverse was created, how the ###k did rando Refugees from a different multiverse show up in earth prime national city, when there's never been antimatter waves in this multiverse?
Simple: Wibbly wobbly, timey whimey multiversey.
 
^ I get the joke/reference, but CW-COIE was convoluted enough. If it even smells like the nonsensical way Doctor Who tries to explain things, then they're in real trouble.
 
^Have you even watched a single episode of 'Legends of Tomorrow'? That ship sailed looooooong ago.
That plus all the ludicrous nonsense passed off for "science" in both 'Flash' & 'Supergirl' means that the bar for logical explanations is reaaaally low.

This isn't 'The Expanse', they're comic book inspired adventure shows. Best to just go with it.
 
^Have you even watched a single episode of 'Legends of Tomorrow'? That ship sailed looooooong ago.
That plus all the ludicrous nonsense passed off for "science" in both 'Flash' & 'Supergirl' means that the bar for logical explanations is reaaaally low.

This isn't 'The Expanse', they're comic book inspired adventure shows. Best to just go with it.
Honestly, I think the biggest problem you will have will be the same as there was after the first Crisis in the comics: to understand what is in continuity, what is not, what stories have remained unchanged, etc. And I mean for the writers. I don't even know, for example, how much of Supergirl's history will be changed with the new status quo.
 
Honestly, I think the biggest problem you will have will be the same as there was after the first Crisis in the comics: to understand what is in continuity, what is not, what stories have remained unchanged, etc. And I mean for the writers. I don't even know, for example, how much of Supergirl's history will be changed with the new status quo.

But they have the advantage that the characters still remember the old timeline, at least. And it's not a complete reboot of the continuity like it was in the comics; they can keep any past story continuity they need and only change the pieces they want to.

Although I think there's bound to be a lot of inconsistencies glossed over -- like, why are people in Batwoman so skeptical of the idea of a guy wearing a mask to impersonate someone when Lena introduced image inducers just a couple of years ago? And shouldn't all the global events in Supergirl like the Myriad incident and the Daxamite invasion have had an effect on the near-simultaneous huge season finales on The Flash and Arrow?
 
Although I think there's bound to be a lot of inconsistencies glossed over -- like, why are people in Batwoman so skeptical of the idea of a guy wearing a mask to impersonate someone when Lena introduced image inducers just a couple of years ago? And shouldn't all the global events in Supergirl like the Myriad incident and the Daxamite invasion have had an effect on the near-simultaneous huge season finales on The Flash and Arrow?

We would have to assume that many of those events did not happen or happened differently on Earth Prime. Maybe Flash and Supergirl were fighting the Daxamites side by side in this continuity. There likely have been many more pairings and crossovers in the new reality.
 
Honestly, I think the biggest problem you will have will be the same as there was after the first Crisis in the comics: to understand what is in continuity, what is not, what stories have remained unchanged, etc. And I mean for the writers. I don't even know, for example, how much of Supergirl's history will be changed with the new status quo.
Pretty much, hence my "don't overthink it, just go with it" approach. ;)
 
We would have to assume that many of those events did not happen or happened differently on Earth Prime. Maybe Flash and Supergirl were fighting the Daxamites side by side in this continuity. There likely have been many more pairings and crossovers in the new reality.
I had wondered how Agents of Liberty would have reacted to the Metas....
 
I had wondered how Agents of Liberty would have reacted to the Metas....

Well, Agent Liberty was fine with giving himself Harun-El-induced superpowers. I think the Children of Liberty would be fine with metahumans because they're human, and they'd like the idea of humans being able to compete with alien powers.
 
And the Flash??? He took on King Shark several times...he’d be able to take on Lockwood.
 
And the Flash??? He took on King Shark several times...he’d be able to take on Lockwood.

Best to avoid "Why doesn't superhero A help superhero B solve their problems?" questions. That way lies madness. You just kinda have to assume that the heroes are usually too busy dealing with the villains in their own respective cities and only make time to team up for the really big problems. Or they let each other take care of "their own" villains out of professional courtesy. (In Part 5, the only reason Flash showed up in National City is because Weather Witch, one of "his" rogues, was there. Although, wait, if National City didn't exist on Earth-1, and he didn't yet know the worlds had merged, then how did he know to go there?)
 
But they have the advantage that the characters still remember the old timeline, at least. And it's not a complete reboot of the continuity like it was in the comics; they can keep any past story continuity they need and only change the pieces they want to.
This was exactly the problem of the first Crisis. The only characters to completely rebooted were Wonder Woman and Superman. Everyone else had something akin to a "soft reboot" (for example Teen Titans continued it storylines from before Crisis). So, their histories were still valid, but a little different. This is a famous example from All Star Squadron, where the full effect of Crisis hit during a photo op (the All-Star Squadron was a Earth-2 superhero group during the WW).

Before the Crisis...
splash-allstarsquadron-60a.jpg

So you can see there are the Earth-2 duplicates of Superman, WW, etc.
Then, after the Crisis...
splash-allstarsquadron-60b.jpg

After the crisis, the two Earths merged and so all the "duplicate" characters disappeared. The problem was what exactly happened during the adventures where these characters had an important role? (Spoiler: it was a mess)

This is a good article on this subject:
Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Dividing Line Part 1
Instead a single universe was created. The hope was that the streamlined approach would make DC’s comics more accessible to new readers who couldn’t understand why there were two different Supermen, Batmen, etc. It also left the way open for writers to create new stories without the baggage of 50 years of continuity. In many ways Crisis was a success in the fact that it re-energized many of DC’s titles and characters. It brought in new readers and sales. As for making the universe more streamlined and easier to understand, the last 20 years have proven that in this respect Crisis on Infinite Earths failed.

The biggest stumbling block lay in the fact that DC chose to “reboot” some characters from scratch while others were left to continue without interruption. Superman and Wonder Woman were the first to receive these reboots. These two characters were integral to DC’s long history, and it soon became apparent that the removal of their histories caused problems for other characters who didn’t have their histories rewritten.

Before Crisis, Superman had been Superboy and inspired the Legion of Super-Heroes. In the new continuity, Superman never was Superboy, so the Legion’s history was affected even though their own series was not rebooted (yet!).

Wonder Woman was also the inspiration for Wonder Girl of the Teen Titans and a founding member of the Justice League prior to Crisis. After her reboot, Wonder Woman was unknown until the Legends mini-series. The Teen Titans and the Justice League were therefore affected by Wonder Woman’s restructured continuity. Yet neither title was rebooted. This was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Prior to Crisis, most of DC’s World War II era characters had existed on Earth-2, including version of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman which were each separate from their modern day Earth-1 counterparts. In post-Crisis continuity there was left a single Earth, so the Earth-2 characters that had modern day counterparts were eliminated from history. Aside from the big three mentioned above, Green Arrow and Aquaman were notably removed. Therefore the Justice Society, 7 Soldiers of Victory, and the All-Star Squadron all had their histories affected. Many of these characters had children such as Huntress and the Fury, or relatives such as Power Girl that were active in Infinity, Inc. All these characters were affected too.

Like a house of cards when pulling out a couple key structural pieces, the universe soon became chaos. To make matters worse, reboots continued over the next few years. Hawkman and the Legion both received restarts that ignored everything that had been established, including many stories that had already happened after Crisis. Nearly every character including Batman were continually tweaked and altered over the next decade. It soon became impossible to determine which parts of a character's history were still considered canonical and relevant to new stories. Contradications were the norm.
 
This was exactly the problem of the first Crisis. The only characters to completely rebooted were Wonder Woman and Superman. Everyone else had something akin to a "soft reboot" (for example Teen Titans continued it storylines from before Crisis). So, their histories were still valid, but a little different.

Yes, but my point is that the changes needed here are more minor. None of the series has been rebooted. They're all being treated pretty much as if their established histories still happened, with the only change being that they happened on the same world. Batwoman, Black Lightning, and Legends all picked up the same story arcs they had before, with little to no change. Supergirl and Arrow have established some post-Crisis reality changes, but only to the extent that it serves their plotlines; e.g. Lex runs LuthorCorp and the DEO now, William Day's backstory is a bit different, but Leviathan, Nia/Brainy, and other major plotlines are unchanged. Although I do wonder how
Dinah Drake being erased from existence
fits into Arrow's continuity.

Also, the other two worlds that have been combined with Earth-1 were created to be narratively independent at first, so that means that for the most part there are no duplicate characters -- it's just that characters who formerly existed in separate realities are now merged into one history. They only bring in duplicates if they want to for the purposes of their stories, as with Supergirl and Batwoman.


(Anyway, I'd say Batman got a pretty significant reboot post-Crisis, being given a whole new origin story along with major changes to many characters, e.g. Jim Gordon being too young to have a grown daughter so that Barbara was retconned into his adopted niece. The "present-day" stories initially continued in much the same vein they had pre-Crisis, but Jason's backstory and personality were abruptly rewritten, and the influence of the new origin was felt more and more over time.)
 
Honestly, I think the biggest problem you will have will be the same as there was after the first Crisis in the comics: to understand what is in continuity, what is not, what stories have remained unchanged, etc. And I mean for the writers. I don't even know, for example, how much of Supergirl's history will be changed with the new status quo.
The rule of thumb is that all stories remain intact until we are told otherwise.
 
^Have you even watched a single episode of 'Legends of Tomorrow'? That ship sailed looooooong ago.
That plus all the ludicrous nonsense passed off for "science" in both 'Flash' & 'Supergirl' means that the bar for logical explanations is reaaaally low.

My point is that Doctor Who's theories/explanations of how time works are among the most laugh-inducing-to-idiotic in all of filmed fantasy, and that kind of writing should be avoided. And yes, the "science" of shows like Supergirl and The Flash are incredibly silly, sometimes on a 1980s cartoon level, but post CW-COIE, the shows are going to be forced to deal with time and alternate reality plots going forward, and they should not dive into that hyper-technobabble, motormouthed noise seen on Doctor Who as a way of explaining things / taking action.



I had wondered how Agents of Liberty would have reacted to the Metas....

Lockwood had no problem with human enhancement. In fact, even Alex understood their beliefs as explained to Supergirl in season four's "Blood Memory"--

"This world is filled with a lot of people that are bigger and stronger than her, and that kind of vulnerability...it makes you angry! When you feel powerless enough, you will do anything it takes...to feel strong."

Alex justified the positions of Lena and the Children of Liberty having any interest in eugenics/superhuman development programs. She may not agree with their end goals (obviously not), but she certainly gave a voice to the basic motives behind that kind of program.
 
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