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.