• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers DC TV Arrow/Flash Universe Crossover Discussion

-Gaith reminded me of another dislike. Didn't like the Diggle bit. I did find it gross, but also an attempt at a cheap laugh at Diggle's expense.

I don't think it was meant to be a laugh at Diggle's exspense - more a referrence to how quickly he was grabbed by Barry. the way it looked to me was he'd just had a needle and might have been feeling less than stellar and the sudden movement added to the nausea and the rest we know.
 
I don't think it was meant to be a laugh at Diggle's exspense - more a referrence to how quickly he was grabbed by Barry. the way it looked to me was he'd just had a needle and might have been feeling less than stellar and the sudden movement added to the nausea and the rest we know.

Diggle has a history of vomiting after Barry uses his superspeed unexpectedly, on him. It happened in last year's crossover, IIRC, when Barry went to recruit Team Arrow and ended up saving them from Prometheus. :crazy:

Barry should know better. ;)
 
What exactly does Diggle even experience when moved (from one city to another) at super-speed by Barry? Shouldn't his clothes catch fire (without the special suit)? Could he even beathe?
 
What exactly does Diggle even experience when moved (from one city to another) at super-speed by Barry? Shouldn't his clothes catch fire (without the special suit)? Could he even beathe?

Motion.

He gets accelerated then decelerated when Barry comes to a stop plus all the turns Barry would have made.

Most people just get a very short trip with the flash. John's would have been long which would have messed with the inner ear and hey presto up-chucko.
 
Is that why he didn't come to the wedding? It seems weird that they chose him to perform the ceremony if he didn't previously merit an invite.
That's kind of the crossover event in a nutshell: apart from Stein's death (which, beyond his absence going forward, meant pretty much nothing to the world beyond the maintenance of the status quo), pretty much everything was done in search of a gag. (Nor could I take the scene of Stein getting shot at all seriously when, in a hail of machine-gun fire, he's hit exactly once, and has time for a graceful, slow-motion Jesus fall complete with moaning choristers, even though there was no reason whatsoever for the Nazis to not keep shooting him until he was mush.)

Some say Kirk Prime went out like a chump, but hey, at least he died saving an entire planet. Stein, OTOH, was one of those who gave zero f*cks about the citizens of Earth-X despite being Jewish himself. If the writers had to give him his mortal wound in that scene, the least they could have done was written him doing something heroic on the part of the local Resistance, rather than an ordinary, dull effort to preserve the team of regulars we knew would make it out alive.
 
Sorry, folks: though there were some good moments, I found the overall event to be bad.

Same here.

and the final battle under the freeway wasn't even as cool as the rooftop Dominator battle.

It was anticlimactic, as it was clear there's no emotional investment in the characters' fight, none of the non-super powered characters ever face any real danger (and seem to have the ability to dodge gunfire), and as with all Berlanti series, the stuntwork was questionable, especially the tiresome Supergirl vs evil opposite fight.

Worse yet was the trite script and heavy focus on relationship melodrama, with each damn conversation a near-replay of the last. And if our heroes' melodrama wasn't bad enough, we had to get X-Ollie and X-Kara's endless melodrama, besides! Ugh.

Agreed. The only worthy relationship was the one which brought the characters together--Barry & Iris. After that, no one cares about the neverending moaning from Alex, or the sniping between Felicity and Oliver. At least Kara's Mon-El whine-a-thon was limited to a couple of lines.

The lack of a single, dominating (no pun intended) villain was a big problem. Thawne, X-Kara or X-Quentin Lance would have made great baddies, but diffusing their power and having all the villains endlessly bicker like Klingons on in a lesser TNG ep severely drained the tension.

Apt comparison. Aside from the cartoonish misuse of the Nazi planet framework, the central threat was never front and center; the main focus was SG-X and her need for Kara's heart, which kicked the Nazi goals (thin as they were) to the background dumpster of Late Night Twirling Moustache Theatre.

Which reminds me, the X-team's refusal to kill the Team Arrow members or the rest of the gang was pointless and stupid. Why lock them away, and then send the others to Earth-X instead of summarily executing them, especially when that's to be their Earth-X fate anyway? It made the X-Nazis look both incompetent and not entirely vicious, both of which sucked.

...and if the showrunners knew anything about the real world Nazi's treatment of soldiers / dangerous prisoners, then Team Arrow would have been given the Fritz Knochlein (SS commander) treatment not long after their arrival. Ahh, but the Twirling Moustache Gang had to be stupid enough to make speeches and allow enough time for a badly written, utterly improbable escape.

Our "heroes" gave outrageously zero fucks about Earth-X and its civilians in general, and, when the Resistance sheltered them (in a shameless re-use of the Arrowcave set, which would have been fine if somebody didn't uselessly speculate aloud that they were therefore in X-Star City), they were nothing but total assholes to their hosts. Barely a word of empathy, encouragement, and zero promises to help later

Yep--it was all self-centered BS, with Alex and her Kara obsession illustrating just how unethical she is in not showing an ounce of concern for the suffering resistance and the abused citizens. But hey, the running "sisterhood" theme was more important that the fate of a world. ;

Then the team tried to make us think that Nazis' breaching device was their only opportunity to ever get home, which is completely absurd, given that interdimensional hopping is routinely portrayed as a cinch across the shows. In short: "What a bunch of a-holes."

Well observed, but the non-"only chance to get home" part will continue to be ignored.

Large battles in which speedsters are zipping around, and yet not making everyone else redundant, strains my credulity. Add multiple Kryptonians to the mix, and things just get absurd.

Oh, yes. This is why Nick Fury was not directly involved in the New York battle of The Avengers; why would he need to be involved when you have the most powerful people on earth involved? Well, in Berlanti-land, there's a reason.


Also, the visual trope of Kryptonians perfectly evenly eye-beaming each other for seconds on end, with zero result, starts out dumb and gets dumber each time they do it.

Its overused, in cartoons, live action, comics...everywhere. When a visual once served a story is abused in this manner, it eventually loses all impact and becomes a gimmick.


But, alas, it must always be noted: Barry/Iris is still gross

Well, we can disagree there, because their relationship is the most natural, non-Teen Nick union of all Berlanti shows.

Also gross: letting your marriage be officiated with a guy who just vomited.

That's true.


And, finally... I found the Earth-X Nazi thing problematic. Part of the villainy of Nazis, both WW2 and contemporary, is that, with only a few exceptions (say, the youngest of the Third Reich citizens), they grew up in a world with democracy and freedom and no Nazism. Ergo, they should have, and did, know better. The Earth-X Nazis, however, are third- or fourth-generation Nazis, making their culpability all kinds of murky; they're more like contemporary North Koreans than Nazis as we know them. (Iron Sky runs into the same problem, but The Man in the High Castle has the time and depth to really explore such issues, and give us strange but credible things like second/third generation Nazi hippies.) This event ran much closer to exploitation and cheapening of the issues at hand, IMO.

As I pointed out in the Supergirl thread, fantasy Nazi stories rarely work, and in this case, it was borderline offensive to victims of the Nazis, in that this fantasy trivialized the top priorities of the party to make commentary of greatest concern to the showrunners--and it was not the Nazi's obsession with racial hatred. But this would not be the first time a Berlanti show either kicked the historic horror of racism to the curb, or tried to make a false equivalency with other matters.

Overall Grade: C-. After the first part, I'm afraid I really didn't enjoy it - way too much loud and meaningless automatic weapons fire - and I certainly won't be rewatching.

Agree with the grade, and the takeaway was that the showrunners are not capable of producing a large, layered superhero team-up story.
 
Gaith had mentioned something else that bothered me, but I had forgotten about. The Earth-1 team was pretty selfish when it came to getting back home. The whole Alex speech to Winn and General Winn actually going along with it, even for a little while, makes little sense. It was a tone deaf moment for the heroes, who didn't promise to come back. Heck, Kara alone could've went to Earth-X and just taken out the whole Nazi army, or did major damage to it at least, giving the Freedom Fighters more of a chance. Perhaps Winn would have been more open to a promise to come back with Supergirl or other heroes once the Earth-1 people were home. And the idea that the portal was the only way home wasn't true either. I forgot about Cisco. Granted, Cisco was unconscious during most of the action and perhaps the team was taking that into consideration, but there was also Gypsy out there somewhere. And the Legends. They can manipulate time, but I don't know if they do dimension hopping. Would it be that much of a stretch if they did?

A couple other things that didn't make sense or needed more explanation. The Ray being from Earth-1. I wish they had explained how he got to Earth-X (I'm guessing that this will be explained in his cartoon series, but if weren't aware of that or had no intention of watching it, or maybe can't access CWSeed, then you're out of luck. They needed to explain it within the crossover). And why is Citizen Cold staying on Earth-1? Cold and Ray either are in a relationship or have deep feelings for each other and the fight against the Nazis to free Earth-X is not over, so why would Cold (more honorable than the Earth-1 Cold) decide to stay on Earth-1? Perhaps that will be explained on a future Legends or Flash episode, but I wish they had just brought him on a few episodes later to either one of those shows instead of having him stay behind at the end of this crossover. It didn't feel right for the character they had just established.
 
Is that why he didn't come to the wedding?

Diggle was recovering from his injuries in the previous episode. I assume that's why he couldn't make it, although he seemed okay at the end. Maybe he had a physical therapy appointment he couldn't get out of that day.
 
Diggle was recovering from his injuries in the previous episode. I assume that's why he couldn't make it, although he seemed okay at the end. Maybe he had a physical therapy appointment he couldn't get out of that day.
That certainly is a lot for a reason in a crossover that attracts a casual viewer like me.
Hard to invite a guy who's child the groom killed.
Well that makes sense, but he seemed to offer forgiveness
 
Diggle was recovering from his injuries in the previous episode. I assume that's why he couldn't make it, although he seemed okay at the end. Maybe he had a physical therapy appointment he couldn't get out of that day.

In fact one of Team Arrow claimed Diggle was home recovering to explain his absence from the fighting.

I think it's strange that posters are castigating our guys from Earth 1 for wanting to go home NOW and not wanting to stick around longer to help Earth X'ers battle their Nazi overlords. Strange because the weapon General Schott was so keen on destroying wasn't a weapon in the classic sense, used to enslave their people. It was a gateway to other worlds, one Schott planned to use to strand Overgirl, The Reverse Flash and Dark Arrow ON Earth 1!

General Wynn didn't seem too concerned that the three people who could themselves alone recreate Earth X on Earth 1 would have free reign on a new Earth, just as long as they were off his Earth.

As for Alex whining about Kara through the 4 night event, one story I will always remember about the battle on Iwo Jima was about a young man who evaded his sick bay bed to rejoin his platoon for the assault upon the beach. He did it not for Glory or God or Country, he did it for those men he considered his brothers. Their safety was personal to him and he refused to stay behind when they were in peril.

Say what you want about Alex, but since season 1 of Supergirl, Kara has always been Alex's top priority.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Always.
 
This week's Flash can put to rest the argument about just how happy Iris was about the double wedding ;)
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top