"Elseworlds, Part 1" – The Flash S05E09 Review

And now for something completely different than what previously has been completely different...

For starters, The CW did a little swapping of its own, temporarily moving Supergirl to Tuesdays and The Flash to Sundays. I guess it worked out better to have The Flash start off the three-part event. So while normally I do Supergirl on Sundays, I;ll be doing The Flash in its place since The CW aired The Flash tonight. I suppose I'll do Supergirl. Maybe I'll even do Arrow on Monday since it's part 2 of "Elseworlds". And still do DC's Legends because the puppet/cat/altered-timeline story looks too good not to review. It's a busy schedule, but The Gifted isn't airing until 1/1/19 so I've got a little spare time on Tuesdays.

Or not. We'll see. I'm a writer of mercurial tastes.

Anyhoo, on with the motley. We get a brief opener where psychiatrist John Deegan (Jeremy Davies) is at a symposium and advancing a eugenic solution to giving people superpowers. Yep, because "eugenics" always goes over well. Deegan's colleagues walk out on him. As Deegan leaves, a guy with a bald head and muttonchops (LaMonica Garrett) shows up, gives Deegan a book, tells him that he can rewrite reality with it, and advises him to think big.

On with the comedy. Oliver (Stephen Amell) wakes up in Barry's bed and soon discovers that everyone thinks that he's Barry... and that he has superspeed. Iris is all over Oliver like white on rice, and meanwhile Barry (Grant Gustin) is at ARGUS sparring with Diggle (David Ramsey) and equally confused. Barry doesn't have his superspeed, but he does have Oliver's fighting abilities.

There's some comedy hijinks as Oliver dons the Flash costume and battles some tech thieves. Barry goes out with Diggle as Green Arrow and fights some Bratva dudes. Since this is The Flash, the focus is on Flash's support team. Oliver eventually tells them what's going on, and they don't believe him. He brings in Barry for support, but Team Flash still doesn't believe them, knocks them out, and locks them up in a pipeline power-dampening cell.

There's a few jokes about things like the lack of toilet--a regular Internet thing—and eventually Barry dislocates his thumb Oliver-style to escape his power-dampening cuffs after Oliver gets him angry. Oliver phases them through the cell wall after he laughs at Barry's goofy-looking dislocated thumb. They decide to go to Earth-38, where Kara (Melissa Benoist) lives, figuring she wasn't part of the whole reality-changing thing. They have to get an extrapolator from Iris (Candice Patton), and Barry soon convinces her he's the real Barry by describing things only he would know and appealing to their true wuv.

Cut to Earth-38, and the theme from Smallville booms out. It's the Kent farm, and Kara, Clark Kent (Tyler Hoechlin), and Lois Lane (Elizabeth "Don't call me Bitsie" Tulloch) are hanging out there. They have a conversation about Kara's recent exploits, and then Barry and Oliver arrive. Kara can see them for who they are, and they have a brief bit where they train and Barry pulls the same stunt on Oliver with hidden crossbows that Oliver pulled on him a few years back. They realize Barry has to be angry to access Oliver's powers, and Oliver has to be cheerful to access Barry's.

Meanwhile, back on the "main" Earth, Earth-1, an android named AMAZO (CGI effect) has escaped. It can duplicate the powers of Killer Frost and Elongated Man, and knocks them on their asses. Cisco gets a "vibe vision" of the bald dude, aka The Monitor, and figures that something is going on. There are also red skies, but nobody mentions these seem to be the same red skies mentioned in the future newspaper article where Barry disappears. Cisco (Carlos Valdes) brings Barry and Oliver from Earth-38, and Clark and Kara tag along. They're Superman and Supergirl, by the way, and all four of them take on AMAZO. It duplicates their powers and an increasingly angry and ominous Barry comes up with a plan: Oliver will negate its superspeed phasing ability, the Supers will hold it, and Barry will shoot an arrow with a virus into the robot's eye. The plan works and AMAZO blows up real good.

Cisco shares his vibe vision with Barry and Oliver, and they realize the encounter between Deegan and the Monitor took place in Gotham City. So it's off to part 2 of "Elseworlds" on the 12/10 Arrow

Part of the fun of the now-yearly crossover events is how much fun the actors have with them. Or alternately, the audience has as much fun as the actors do. Arrow has been a bit of a drag this year: it's never been the most humorous of the CWverse shows, and Oliver being locked up in prison for the first few episodes hasn't helped. So "Elseworlds, Part 1" gives Amell a chance to strut his comedy chops a bit.

Grant Gustin has always done well at comedy, and The Flash is the most comedic of the two shows. Not as funny as DC's Legends, but then it presumably isn't supposed to be. So watching Gustin's Barry get excited when he discovers he is a great fighter, and getting some payback for Oliver shooting him in the back a few years ago (complete with photo-taking), are probably the comedy highlights of the episode.

All of the little in-jokes which the Flash creative team tosses in helps. There's some sharing of talent between all of the CWVerse shows. But we get stuff that I suspect we won't get on Arrow and Supergirl: the Smallville theme, Ralph (Hartley Sawyer) commenting that it isn't Tuesday yet, Diggle throwing up when he gets superspeeded, the "You have failed this city" line recited twice (is that still a thing for Oliver?), Cisco's picking up on AMAZO's "bad guy name", and the aforementioned callbacks to Oliver's first training session with Barry. And AMAZO, a character who I've always liked (particularly Grant Morrison's "conceptual" version: look it up) and who I never thought I'd see on CWVerse show because there's no Justice League (yet) for him to fight against.

Tyler Hoechlin's Superman was... okay. He looks fine as Superman, but has always struck me as a bit too geeky as Clark Kent. Tulloch's Lois Lane was... very Lois Lane-ish. Hyper, in other words. I didn't see enough to come to a definite conclusion, and I wonder if she'll be appearing in the next two parts of the crossover. There doesn't seem to be any reason to have her there. However, judging from tonight, that isn't going to stop them, either.

As for the actual plot, we find out next to nothing. What's going on with Earth-90 and the wiped-out heroes of that world? Who knows? All we find out is they use the same sequence of the Earth-90 Flash (John Wesley Shipp) when he faces off against the Monitor and then runs off. Presumably the Monitor gave some schmuck the Book Supreme just like he gave to Deegan, and the heroes of Earth-90 "did it to themselves". Why this Monitor is going around giving schmucks reality-writing powers, and what Deegan's plan is that involves swapping Barry and Oliver's lives, who knows. Presumably the "new" Batwoman will be part of this reality swap as well.

With the red skies, maybe the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" is upon us. In the preview for the 12/10 Arrow, there's someone who is apparently donning Psycho Pirate's mask, and PP was a big part of the Crisis. For that matter, the name :"John Deegan" is a bit like "John Dee", who is Doctor Destiny in the comics and has some reality/dream-rewriting abilities of his own.

But those are some of my suspicions. Stay tuned to see how it plays out in the Arrow and Supergirl crossover events. Meanwhile, what do you think?