Spoilers DC TV Arrow/Flash Universe Crossover Discussion

Oh God, a pedantic lecture about what I'm supposed to think.

Son, I watched this episode on its first airing. I was thrilled to watch it. Seeing the "old Enterprise" and its original crew, a young Spock, the original story intermixed with the new one... it was all brilliant to me. Back then we didn't know anything about "unaired pilots;" unless there was an article in TV Guide, we just took the episode as it was presented.

"Compensating for falling behind schedule" is nothing but a trivial look at production history. It doesn't take away from the story they told because it is just trivia.

It was a well told story that stands on its own merits. How many dollars were saved is irrelevant. That they made it a two-parter should be a hint to you that they felt at the time it had meat.

 

I have an idea for a crossover episode of 'Arrow' with a difference: it opens with a caption "Earth-66" and then cuts to some happy, upbeat music over scene of everyday life on the streets of Vancouver with Greg Berlanti or Andrew Kreisberg in as pompous voice as possible introducing the episode. And basically the episode unfolds as an episode of the 'Batman '66' TV-show, complete with slightly richer and more colourful cinematography and Ollie sporting a Green Arrow costume more like the one from the Bronze Age. You could even have boxing-glove arrows and of course fight scenes with word captions, ridiculous death-traps and maybe a cameo by Adam West. If they can do a musical Supergirl/Flash episode, they can certainly do this as an homage to the classic show.

 

That was my inspiration .

 

Andrew Kreisberg hopes to do a true 4-way crossover next season that fully involves all four shows.

 

I dunno, I'm wary of the impulse to try to top every big event with an even bigger event the following year. That obsession with endless crossover events has been bad for comics, I think, because the plotlines of individual series keep getting warped and forcibly changed or cut off in order to accommodate the events. Now, Invasion! didn't fall prey to that, because it was crafted more as a reflection of what was already going on in the individual shows (Flashpoint and the Barry-Cisco tension, Team Arrow dealing with their history, Martin finding out about his daughter). It was actually a pretty good example of how to do a crossover. But if they get into the habit of thinking they have to do a bigger crossover every year, it risks getting to the point where the crossover becomes the end that the individual shows are building to, rather than a story that's in service to their individual arcs.

 

The last crossover got some of the highest ratings the network has ever seen. So long as that trend keeps up, I don't see them going away. Besides, the entirety of the Arrow-verse will likely culminate in a version of Crisis on Infinite Earths anyway.

 

I know that's how it works -- that's why the comics keep doing it. I just don't have a high opinion of doing something because of chasing ratings/sales rather than because it's what's right for the story. And I don't have a high opinion of trying to do the same thing over and over again like clockwork. The first big event is effective because it's special. But once the big events become a routine, expected thing, they have to keep straining to try to get bigger and bigger, and it becomes ridiculous. Look at modern Doctor Who. Once they'd done one season finale that involved saving the whole universe from being destroyed, they had to keep destroying the universe pretty much annually thereafter, and it lost its impact. I understand the business reasons why it happens, but that business logic tends to have a negative effect creatively.

We know there's theoretically a "Crisis" slated for 2024, but that's from a version of the future that won't necessarily happen, given all the changes. And I've said before, I think CoIE was a pretty bad idea in the comics and I'd rather not see it done. DC themselves realized it was a mistake to wipe out the multiverse and restored it, like, two or three different times. So why repeat that mistake? The whole advantage of adaptations is that you can get it right the second time.

There's also the fact that it seems to be pseudo-official DC Entertainment policy that the multiverse includes everything, not just the CW shows but the other networks' TV series and the DCEU movies. Geoff Johns has made comments to that effect, and so has the showrunner of Powerless. There's no way all of those would ever be conflated into a single continuity. Anything the CW shows did would only affect the CW shows, probably not the other networks' shows and definitely not the movies. So if the Crisis did happen, either it would be defined rather differently or it would end differently with the merger of universes being averted.

 

I wouldn't expect a theoretical Arrow-verse version of Crisis to match up exactly to the comics version anymore than I expected Age of Ultron to match up with its comic namesake. For that matter, Winter Soldier and Civil War both took liberties with the stories that they were named after. Perhaps this version of the Crisis would serve to save the Multi-verse rather than eliminate it. And I realize that logistical and budget issues would make any DCEU-movie character appearances unlikely, that can be resolved through using a brief snippet of, say, Justice League in the form of a Speed-Force vision similar to Kara's first appearance on Flash. Just enough to establish that the movie universe was a part of the same multi-verse and at equal risk.

ETA-- For that matter, brief snippets from Gotham and Powerless would serve a similar purpose, establishing the threat to the multi-verse without having to bring in infinite guest stars. Hell, why stop there? Why not blink-and-you-miss-them clips from Batman '66, Superman '53 and Wonder Woman '75? Of Michael Keaton, Christopher Reeve and Christian Bale?

 

And Smallville and the DCEU.

 

Shaquille O'Neil as Steel! Halle Berry as Catwoman!

 

I'd be fine with that. Although it's hard to do a version of CoIE without showing at least some parallel Earths being destroyed to establish the threat, and to have dramatic impact, they'd probably want to sacrifice at least one world we're familiar with (like maybe Earth-3 or Earth-19).

Though accepting that risk would require a considerable suspension of disbelief, since we'd know Warner Bros. would never abandon its movie universe in service to a TV plot.

Because they'd all be decades older now? If there were a time travel sequence, maybe, but that doesn't seem to fit with the CoIE premise. (Though I guess it could be fit in if Legends of Tomorrow were involved.)

 

I don't think it is really necessary for the crossover episodes to follow the arcs of the individual show, or advance them in any significant way. All the shows have episodes throughout the season when they're treading water a bit, and which are practically standalone so why not make them in a crossover?

A sort of standalone miniseries across the series could be an interesting concept where we could see characters together that don't normally interact with each other. That's where the last crossover was kind of lacking, because it had to move along individual shows' plots, it had to clump the usual combinations of characters together.

 

Sure, theoretically you could do that, but that makes it less meaningful. It seems shallow if the only importance of an event is the fact that it's an event, that it's otherwise disposable. If the story is going to deserve to be big, then it should have an impact on the characters' lives. It shouldn't just be a gimmick for its own sake.

Not entirely. We got a lot of Felicity-Cisco interaction in all three parts, which was awesome. Also a lot of Oliver-Barry interaction, which we usually don't get enough of. We got Cisco-Nate in part 3. We got to revisit past interactions that don't happen much anymore, like Stein and Caitlin in parts 1 & 3 and Sara and Ray reconnecting with their Arrow roots in part 2. The whole subplot in part 2 was about Rene having a problem dealing with Flash and Supergirl. And there was the Oliver-Kara tension in parts 1 & 3, though that was a bit contrived. I thought it was a good balance between exploring atypical character pairings and serving the individual shows' ongoing arcs.

 

But why would it have to be less meaningful?
A story can be standalone and independent of the main arcs and still have an impact on the characters. One does not preclude the other.

And nobody said that the crossover has to be a grander event either, like another bigger world ending disaster, they can just as easily go for a more personal story next season, Kreisberg only said they're in a position to organize the shooting schedules better so that they're not restricted by logistical issues.

 

I wanted them to do that during that season two Flash episode when they first went to Earth-2, I don't know why they didn't do it.

These can all be the universes sacrificed .

The solution obviously is that they are only partially successful in saving the multiverse, with none of the effects being felt on Powerless, Gotham or the DCEU, but all the CW universes get merged into one. That could be the sacrifice.
I've got to be honest I don't think COIE was a mistake. I much prefered the comics before they undid Crisis. As for having a multiverse for DC's live-action (and possibly some animated shows eg Vixen & Constantine) shows & films, I'm all for that (apart from this Earth 1 & 38 business, merge them, ditto Black Lightning if that winds up on its own Earth).

Not necessarily, if you recall, pre-Crisis present-day Earth-2 as featured in All Star Squadron was 1942, whilst Earth-1 was whatever the present day was, so they could all be there present day. I think they did this with an early Sliders episode.

 

OK, so I'm a TV producer....
I want to take some really cool story from the comics and present it in TV.
It may come into some conflict with something presented in comics at a later date.
Should I go ahead and produce this really cool story, or should I garbage it because the comics changed the story for its own reasons?

 

For one thing, it would've been costly to get all the clearances for the footage. For another, it would've been too distracting from the story. They accomplished enough by giving a glimpse of Supergirl and the '90 Flash, both of which were relevant to the show itself -- the former foreshadowed the upcoming crossover, and the latter indirectly foreshadowed the real Jay Garrick.

There are a couple of fan edits along the lines you're suggesting, like this one:

But I don't want that. I like it that there are different universes that have their own distinct characters and histories and outlooks -- e.g. Earth-38 is used to aliens while Earth-1 is stunned by their arrival. It's the differences between the worlds that make them interesting, that add diversity and texture and storytelling potential to the shows. Homogenizing them all into one reality would strip away that storytelling potential, and that would do no good.

The main argument I've heard in favor of combining the universes is that it would make crossovers easier. But surely that's been debunked now. Cisco's power lets him cross between universes as easily as he can cross the street. Gypsy is out there too, so there are presumably other vibers in the multiverse. Harry Wells can create breaches technologically, and Cisco gave Supergirl a pocket-sized device to create her own breaches at will. So crossovers are already easy without the need to combine universes. So really, what would be gained?

As I understand it, All-Star Squadron was the exception. When Barry Allen first crossed over to Earth-2 and met Jay Garrick in 1961, it was also 1961 on Earth-2, and Jay was a decade older than when we'd last seen him and had retired and gotten married to his love interest. Most Earth-2 stories were similarly updated to the present and explored the later years of the Earth-2 characters -- for instance, Earth-2 Batman married Selina Kyle and their daughter grew up to be the original Huntress. The date was in sync in both universes; it was just that people like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etc. had lived 20 years earlier on Earth-2. (An idea extrapolated from in Alan Brennert's "To Kill a Legend," where the Phantom Stranger took Batman and Robin to a world where Bruce Wayne was 20 years younger and offered him the chance to stop the murder of that world's Thomas and Martha.) All-Star broke with the usual approach to Earth-2 stories by being done as a flashback series.