And yeah, did Mick just bugger off down the pub in this episode and nobody noticed?
Stein & Jax weren't here either, nor was anyone from Team Flash other than Barry & Cisco.
Well from a real-world perspective, Supergirl already did the black mercy thing and Barry had Flashpoint, so it would just be going back over old ground.
No, I meant I was wondering what the Dominators' in-story reason would be for taking only
Arrow-connected characters. The real-world reason is that they needed to set up
Arrow's 100th episode, so of course it would focus on
Arrow characters. When that happened, I wondered what the in-story excuse for that would be. And the explanation that they took only non-powered humans makes sense, aside from Mick's omission. (Was he already inside when the teleport beams started?)
Yeah I have to say so far this crossover isn't doing a whole lot for me. I understand there are budget considerations and it's probably not an easy thing to write with all the characters involved, but the story still feels awfully clunky and thrown together, with too much attention being on each show's standard angst and melodrama instead of on the actual team-up and the huge alien threat they should all be focusing on.
But that's how crossovers generally work. They're not usually some single completely homogeneous blend of everything, unless they're separate miniseries altogether like the original
Secret Wars or
Crisis on Infinite Earths. If it's the kind of crossover that's made up of issues/episodes of the various regular series involved, then it should be expected that each installment will be an episode of its own series first, a crossover second. That's normal, both for TV crossovers and comics crossovers. Heck, even back in the '90s when DC had all four Superman books telling one big connected story -- as in the Death/Rebirth of Superman saga -- each individual book's creative team still focused on its own featured characters and subplots within that larger linked narrative. (Which sometimes led to some contrived plotting where a looming problem in one issue would just get ignored for the next three chapters of the saga until the focus came back to that series's supporting cast again.) So I never expected anything different from what we're getting.
I'll agree, though, that the impact of the actual alien incursion (particularly the assassination of the POTUS) has been underplayed up to now. But then, the Dominators have been playing kind of a clandestine game up to this point. I think it'll work better once we see it as a complete whole -- these episodes are the buildup, and tonight's finale will be the grand payoff when the plans the Dominators have been laying come to fruition and the big battle happens.
Plus I find some of the other characters they added to be just plain annoying. I didn't even know DC had ever created a character that wears a Jason-esque (ala Friday the 13th) Hockey Goalie mask - ugh.
While it's true that Wild Dog was created by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty in 1987, five years after Jason Voorhees first donned his goalie mask in
Friday the 13th Part III, the character's use of a mask was not meant to be a reference to Jason in any way. After all, goalie masks existed before Jason started to wear one. The idea behind Wild Dog (who was Jack Wheeler in the comics, not Rene Ramirez) was that he was a "realistic" street-level vigilante who put together a makeshift costume out of what was available. He was created to be DC's answer to the Punisher, although it was
taken to an almost parodic extreme.
