Spoilers DC TV Arrow/Flash Universe Crossover Discussion

2 minute clip from Invasion!


Come on Barry, be a leader!!!

 

In Barry's defense, it really should be Batm*cough*Oliver*cough* leading the team in tactical and strategic maneuvers. Superm*cough*Barry*cough* is more of a public face and inspiration.

 

I agree, Oliver should be the team leader. I find that scene slightly cringe worthy because it is clear that Barry does not have the confidence to be a strong team leader. If I was any of the other characters, there is no way I would feel confident following Barry into battle.

 

That's been my impression as well.

 

I've only seen a few stills of each (We're only up to episode 6 of Arrow here tonight) and I'd have to agree with you and Christopher.

 

Wow, get a load of this shot of the proto-Hall of Justice from last night's episode. I hadn't realized it before, but it looks like that's actually a digitally modified photo of Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, the building that originally inspired the Hall of Justice. The side extensions and the driveway out front are identical:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Cincinnati-union-terminal.jpg

Union Terminal is my favorite building (I even briefly worked at the Museum Center there some years back), and I’ve long wanted to see it actually get used as the Hall of Justice. I was hoping for actual location filming here in Cincinnati, but this is the next best thing. It’s wild to see a place I’ve actually been showing up onscreen in the Arrowverse. (Although that must be an everyday experience for Vancouver residents.)

Although I can’t quite see how to reconcile this establishing shot with the hangar used in the location scenes. I guess maybe the hangar is supposed to be the back end?

 

Pretty much, Barry's barely a leader on Team Flash

 

Well - the scene itself covered that when one of gthe other characters stated something to the effect of:

"Should we just pretend we can't hear Oliver talking?"

 

I think it was Sara who said it and it's a great line.

 

And yet . . . Barry did a pretty good job in plotting Supergirl and the others from the aliens' control.

 

He also did a good job getting everyone together. That's got to amount to something.

 

Interesting clip from tonight's crossover finale:

 

To be honest.. i am disappointed in the big event so far, especially after the Arrow episode.

They built and hyped this up so well, even included Supergirl from another Earth, and all they can come up with are some bog standard, bad CGI Aliens intent on destroying Earth. The Supergirl episode devoted the last 2 minutes by simply having Barry and Cisco fetch her, the Flash episode had the team assemble, train and do some fighting and some side switching due to alien mind control and the Arrow vehicle just used it mostly as a plot device for a Flashback episode.

What is the point of the whole thing if the episodes don't really revolve around the Aliens and their plan?

So far the only decent episode was Flash but mainly due to him blowing the lid on Flashpoint to everyone.. that was a bummer and it showed how big of a mistake it really was and it rips at Barry. Supergirl and Arrow didn't really need the event to tell their story so their episodes are wasted which is a double shame for Arrow's 100th episode which deserved a better plot.

I don't see how Legends is going to get this event out of the ditch.. it'll probably be some Deus Ex Machina deal, blow the mothership up and everybody goes home.

It's a shame really.. the plan was ambitious but the execution is extremely lacking.

 

Actually we don't know what their goal is yet -- although we can get some ideas from the original comic:

http://www.cbr.com/who-are-the-dominators-arrowverses-crossover-villains-explained/

The significant part is that

Spoiler: the significant part

they were concerned about the abundance of metahumans on Earth, fearing they would make the human race unbeatable, and so they wanted to wipe out the metahuman population. I think their goal is not just to destroy the world, but to destroy the metahumans. This is borne out by a line from the preview for tonight's episode, where Donnelly Rhodes's mysterious government character advises Barry to surrender himself -- in a scene where Barry is the only metahuman in the group. And the Doms made a point of abducting only non-metas in last night's episode, because those were the only ones whose minds their machine could read, or whatever (though they had no trouble mind-controlling metas -- and a Kryptonian -- in part 1).

It's a Macguffin -- something that motivates the characters' actions but isn't really that important beyond being a catalyst. The point of the whole thing was to cross over all four casts and have the characters and actors interact in novel and interesting ways. As the catalyst for that, the producers wanted an external threat, something outside the ongoing narratives and villains in each particular show. Greg Berlanti proposed using the Dominators as that external threat, but it could've been something else. It just had to be something big enough to provide an excuse for having all three hero teams work together and bring Supergirl across universes.

 

Well then they did a poor job in my opinion.

Supergirl didn't touch on that at all and for all intents and purposes Barry and Cisco appearing could have been a post credits scene.

Flash did a good job getting the team together and dropping the Flashpoint bomb, that was the best crossover episode out of the 3 aired. That's what i expected and wanted to see.. the teams being together, playing off each other instead of being confined to their own shows with a few cameos.

Arrow wasted it's landmark episode by not fully committing to it and making a good standalone episode but instead having to also deal with the crossover event. If they wanted a flashback style episode they could have invented one of their own and there were hardly any crossover aspects worthy of mentioning.

That leaves Legends but i don't have any hope that it can save this mess of an event in 42 minutes.

 

I think it did a pretty good job on all fronts it had to hit, it honored the shows past, it included the bigger universe that spawned from it, and it also fit into the show's current arc by reaffirming Oliver's intent to fight for what's right.

 

I think they're doing fine, but maybe it's because it's unfolding exactly as I expected. It always seemed clear to me that Supergirl would just be a prologue and Arrow would be a sidebar emphasizing the 100th-episode retrospective over the crossover, so the meat of the event would be in Flash and LoT. Both because it's what the advance reports indicated and because it just makes sense -- Supergirl is in a different reality and so it wouldn't be an integral part of the story, and Arrow is more grounded and serious and less well-suited to a big sci-fi epic, so it stood to reason that the other two shows would carry the brunt. I don't think I ever would've expected it to be all one homogeneous mass where every part had the same style and emphasis. That just wouldn't be true to the character of the individual shows.

And that's the way comics crossovers often work -- some parts are central, others are secondary, and others are peripheral. In The Death of Superman, for instance, there were teaser pages of Doomsday's fist pounding its way out of his prison in several prior issues that were about other things entirely (analogous to the Supergirl episode), and there was a Green Lantern issue during the later Reign of the Supermen portion of the saga that focused on Hal Jordan's reaction to the event's impact on his hometown, which was integral to the narrative but more heavily focused on GL stuff than Superman stuff (analogous to the Arrow episode).

 

One of the things I'm worried about tonight is it feels like this crossover story has a lot more to tell and it's going to be rushed. We haven't even come to the Aliens vs. Heroes part and that's pretty much the advertising for this thing. Then how are we going to get Supergirl back to National City, or is something like that going to happen off screen. I hope it doesn't happen off screen and there might be reprucussions leading into when Supergirl comes back. Then you have Legends having to advance their arcs, and something tells me this episode tonight should be like 2 hours long.

 

As long as Cisco is still alive at the end, I don't see any mystery there. Cross-dimensional commuting is becoming a fairly regular thing now.

If so, we won't see it until the next Supergirl episode, which won't be until January. However...

Spoiler: Supergirl speculation

The next episode is directed by Kevin Smith and is called "Supergirl Lives," which is an homage to Smith's unproduced Superman Lives movie... but maybe the title has another meaning, if time between universes is wonky again and maybe she's been missing for some weeks or months.

By the way, I'm wondering... Has there ever before been a crossover between two or more TV series where each series's respective installment of the crossover used the same episode title? Oh, wait, even as I finished asking the question, I thought of an example: The 3-part Bionic Woman/Six Million Dollar Man crossover "Kill Oscar," which had Parts 1 & 3 on TBW and Part 2 on 6M$M. Also "The Return of Bigfoot," Part 1 of which was on 6M$M and Part 2 of which was on TBW.

Any other examples?

 

OK...I got distracted at home, but did Felicity just say ""Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"?