Well, I mostly liked the first two parts of the annual Arrowverse crossover, as I said in my review of said episodes from back in December. But now, roughly a month later, the CW finally got around to airing the last two parts. Arrowverse crossovers, but their nature, are often somewhat disjointed as each series gets its own episode and they don’t always match up very well. Plus, this is the Crisis on Infinite Earths, one of the few comic book mega-crossovers that actually felt as big as it was promised to be. It was doubtful the CW’s somewhat lower budget superhero series could hope to match the original story, but it could still do something special and fun for the fans.
On that front, it seems to have mostly succeeded, but didn’t quite get all the way there.
If I were to pinpoint the weaknesses to the crossover, it was one of tone and one weak episode in the batch. Part 4, from the Arrow team, just felt a bit off, even with that one cameo no one saw coming. If you’ve seen the episode or nosed around the wrong part of the Internet, you know who I’m talking about, but I’ll decline to say who here. But this is Arrow‘s final season, and with only two episodes left–one a backdoor pilot for a future-set series involving the children of Oliver Queen–it would have been nice if this episode of Arrow had actually been more about Oliver. If anything, it’s about Barry Allen trying to get the various Paragons to face off with the Anti-Monitor’s forces while Oliver, now the Spectre, can face off with the Anti-Monitor directly. And the nature of how the multiverse is reborn is, even by the standards of a somewhat low budget superhero show, a little silly. I’m a big fan of DC Comics’ Spectre character since his 90s solo comic book series, and while TV’s version of Oliver Queen is probably an excellent choice to be that character, it still felt underwhelming in execution.
Fortunately, the fifth and final episode of the crossover came from the DC’s Legends of Tomorrow team, and those guys long ago embraced the silly and weird and made it work. There’s a reason Legends is my favorite of the various Arrowverse shows. The characters aren’t mopey, and everyone involved in front of and behind the camera recognizes how inherently goofy the show’s very concept is and runs with it. This is a show that will take a moment for the heroes to fight a giant Tickle-Me-Elmo stand-in, or where the team’s gruff pyromaniac will take on a second career as a popular romance novelist. Having that show set up the new status quo for the various series was a smart move, and then even giving Marv Wolfman (who got a co-writing credit on the Arrow episode) pop up as more or less himself was a nice touch, the likes of which DC Comics has long engaged in both in and out of print.
So, how did this story do as a whole? Overall, the individual episodes were fine. True, they were largely fan service, but they were fine. The original Crisis was, in part, an anniversary celebration, hence why so many characters appeared in it. The characters were true to themselves, the cameos were often nice moments, and overall, it did what it had to do. It wasn’t the best of the Arrowverse crossovers (for my money, the best was Crisis on Earth-X with the heroes facing off against Nazi versions of themselves from another Earth), but it was fun. I never doubted for a moment the Earth was doomed. It certainly didn’t help knowing not only that there were more episodes to come but also that the CW had already renewed all the shows that weren’t Arrow, including Legends which hasn’t officially started for the season yet. Plus, it looks like Supergirl and Black Lightning will, at least theoretically, be hanging around the other series more. True, Black Lightning films in Atlanta unlike the rest in Vancouver, but the possibility is there.
So, yeah, this was fun, and sometimes fun is all you need.
Grade:
Parts 4 and 5: B
Crossover as a whole: B+
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