1) Are Arrow and Flash synced now? When the season started Arrow was 5 months behind Flash so does this episode take place with Oliver having been out of prison for a while?
Other way around.
Arrow picked up 5 months after last season's finale while
The Flash picked up mere seconds after its finale, so it was
The Flash that was 5 months behind and had to catch up. There have been some mentions of at least a couple of weeks or so passing between episodes, and they did have Thanksgiving around the right time, so we have to assume that after the first few episodes, we started getting big time jumps between installments.
I liked it. But it just felt like just a regular episode but at the same time not. The characters should be thinking and feeling a different way with all that's been going on this season but they all seemed to have had their reset buttons hit. Iris, Cisco and Caitlin all seemed way to happy and chipper in spots
What I noticed was how, in the STAR Labs scene of everyone examining Barry and Oliver, the characters were addressing each other by name more than usual. "That's right, Caitlin." "What do you think, Ralph?" That sort of thing. No doubt for the benefit of
Arrow and
Supergirl viewers who might not be familiar with the
Flash cast.
Also we have Barry wearing the Green Arrow mask just a week after the
Arrow episode literally called "Unmasked," because it would be too complicated to explain to non-
Arrow viewers that Ollie's identity is now public.
My memory is a little vague on the subject since I haven't actually seen 'Smallville' since it went off the air, so I can only assume that they actually shot the Kent Farm stuff at the original location.
Yes, they did.
Especially the establishing shot of the town, which come to think of it, they could have just lifted straight from the old show.
They probably did. I'm sure WBTV still has the raw footage on file somewhere.
Speaking of the red skies: am I the only one that incorrectly assumed that this would take away Clark & Kara's powers as soon as they showed up?
That's red sunlight, which isn't quite the same. If the Sun turned red, it wouldn't turn the sky red (despite how
Superman: The Animated Series portrayed it in "Solar Power"); rather, it would be more of a greenish-blue or grayish-green (like the color it appears if you wear blue-block sunglasses), because the air only scatters the light toward the shorter end of the spectrum and the red light would pass straight through. So we have to assume that normal sunlight would still be getting through; it's just that there's an extra red wavelength somehow being produced in the atmosphere.
Not to mention that the Supers came through at night anyway, so they must've been drawing on their reserve stores of solar energy that they soaked up on the Kent farm. (Hold on, wasn't it day when they left the farm, though? More evidence that time doesn't exactly sync up between Earth-1 and Earth-38.)
