Well, as promised, here's a review of Arrow. Not my usual stomping grounds since one review a night is about my limit and we've already got DC's Legends on Monday nights. But Elseworlds is a three-part crossover event, and DC's Legends is going on hiatus until April. So what the hey.
For those who didn't watch part one on Sunday's The Flash (and if you didn't, why did you watch part 2 other than to get a Bat fix?), Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) and Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) have switched minds, powers, and lives. Barry is now a grim green-wearing archer vigilante with a hot wife, and Oliver Queen is now a cheery red-wearing speedster superhero with a hot wife. Nobody else realizes the truth, but Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist), aka Supergirl on Earth-38, can tell them apart because she's on a different world.
As we've seen on the last several weeks on the various CWVerse shows, something bad went down on Earth-90, involving a big ole Book of Destiny, and Mar Novu (LaMonica Garrett), aka "The Monitor". Flash of that world (John Wesley Shipp) managed to escape the deaths of all the other supertypes and fled... somewhere.
On The Flash, Barry and Oliver realized they needed to take on each other's personalities to access each other's powers. Kara and her cousin Kal, aka Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) came back with them to their earth to fight an android that adapts superpowers.
That roughly brings us up to speed. Read my review of that episode, or TVMaze's recap, if you want more. So with this episode, Barry, Oliver, and Supergirl go to Oliver's hometown of Star City. They help the resident government supergroup ARGUS take down one of the show's minor foes, and then team up with Oliver's former teammates Diggle (David Ramsey) and Curtis (Echo Kellum). As well as Oliver's wife Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards), and since she still thinks Barry is her husband, wackiness and character development ensues.
There's also red skies and lightning storms that have followed the heroes from Central City to Star City. Also following them are Cisco (Carlos Valdes) and Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker). Cisco is Vibe, and has superpowered psychometry/clairvoyance, so he "saw" Novu give the Book of Destiny to Dr. John Deegan (Jeremy Davies) with instructions to "think big". Presumably Deegan is behind the body-swapping, and Cisco saw him in Gotham City, so they're off to Gotham City for a backdoor pilot!
We get a lot of jokes and references to Bruce Wayne and Batman. And I'm not sure it really fits well into the CWVerse. As Oliver notes a couple of times, he's the urban vigilante. And one gets the impression The CW went with Green Arrow because they couldn't get the rights to Batman when Arrow premiered. So it's an awkward fit now. Apparently Gotham City is an even worse sinkhole than Star City, and Batman is an urban legend who disappeared three years ago.
Our trio of superheroes meander around Gotham for a while and get arrested when a gang tries to mug them. Kate Kane (Ruby Rose) bails them out and takes them to an abandoned Wayne Enterprises building, offers it to them as their temporary HQ, and tells them to get out of Gotham City when they're done. Oliver steals some data from the GCPD computers, and this lets them eventually track down Deegan to... Arkham Asylum.
The heroes go there, and Oliver and Diggle confront Deegan. He opens the cell doors and escapes in the confusion. The heroes have to quell the riot, and although earlier we saw cell doors with names like "Cobblepot" and "Nigma" written on them, the inmates are generic orange-suited types. Among them is Nora Fries (Stephen Amell's wife Cassandra Jean Amell), and Roger Hayden (Bob Frazer), aka Psycho Pirate, who was a key player of sorts in the comic book "Crisis on Infinite Earths".
Since Nora is the wife of Victor Fries, aka Mr. Freeze, she grabs her husband's cold gun and gets into a cold-to-cold fight with Caitlin, who is occasionally Killer Frost. Psycho Pirate tries to escape in a van but Barry stops him until Barry gets knocked out. The van driver slams his van into Cisco with enough force to kill ten people (and Cisco currently has no superpowers, and invulnerability wasn't among them when he did), but the mysterious overly-redhaired Batwoman (Kate Kane, Ruby Rose) shows up and takes out the rest of the inmates.
Barry and Oliver go after Deegan and are exposed to a hallucinogenic gas out of a case marked "J. Crane". Look up "Scarecrow" and "Fear Toxin" if you want to know what that means. The gas causes them to hallucinate the other guy's greatest enemy, Eobard Thawne (Tom Cavanagh) and Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman). There's a mildly unbelievable fight where Barry manages to hold his own against the superspeeding Oliver (they're hallucinating each other as their enemies), until Batwoman shows up and takes them both down.
Batwoman tells the heroes to get out of her town, but then has a heart-to-heart with Supergirl. They talk about their famous cousins and reveal they've learned each other's secret identities. This would make a little more sense if they were from the same Earth. But when Kara says her cousin knows Kate's cousin, I think she means that her cousin knows the Earth-38 version of Kate's cousin.
Meanwhile, Felicity, Curtis, and Cisco as the "nerd squad" have realized that they need to create a device to pull through whoever is creating the red skies and lightning storms. It's the Earth-90 Flash, who is... somewhere. He tells them Novu gave Deegan the book and is up to something no-good.
When the others get back and since it's Oliver's show, Oliver admits he always thought Barry had things easy compared to him but has learned from his encounter with Reverse-Flash that he doesn't. Barry advises Oliver to tell Felicity that he loves her, because they've had marital issues since Oliver got out of prison on his own show.
Novu walks down a street and they see him on a news report. Yep, it's just that simple. They confront him, and Novu teleports Flash-90 away. He explains he's been traveling the Multiverse giving the Book of Destiny to schmucks like Deegan so they'll twist reality and test the heroes for the uber-threat that's coming. Novu teleports the Book to him, gives it back to Deegan, and tells him to think even bigger.
Oliver and Barry then find themselves in Central City as a low-rent duo of villains named the Trigger Twins. Diaz (Kirk Acevedo), who is Oliver's current big bad, shows up as a cop in the new reality and tries to arrest them. Barry takes them down, but a black-clad Superman flies down and says it's the end of the line for them.
Whew! Like I said, there's a lot to unpack here. And that's part of the problem with the episode: it has a lot of plotlines to hit. It's got to take advantage of the Flash crossover to get Oliver to resolve his differences. It has to have Cisco and Caitlin show up so they can apologize for coldcocking Barry on his show so that they'll be able to function together when that show starts back up in January. It has to touch base with what's going on with Flash-90 and Deegan. It has to establish Novu as a threat so that we don't get a big ole bunch of exposition in part 3 on Supergirl. And it has to set up the whole Batman/Batwoman thing.
While on the one hand I can see why they didn't include the Legends (who got their own jab in on the Elseworlds crossover, basically missing a phone call about it), on the other hand the creative team really needs that fourth part to spread out the plot a little more. Tossing in a backdoor pilot for Batwoman on top of all of the actual plot makes things awfully crowded. Granted, the Legends haven't added a lot to the previous crossovers. And last year's Earth-X was kind of a backdoor pilot for The Ray. Which didn't come to much on CWSeed as an animated series.
But a lot of stuff gets short shrift here. Like... where the heck is Flash-90 through most of this? And where does Novu send him? It's a cute excuse to give Shipp some screen time as its his third character in the CWVerse (which they duly gaslight), and the 90s Flash theme blares out every time he shows up. But he doesn't do anything.
It also makes you wonder who Batwoman is going to fight in her own series. Having references to Penguin and Riddle (and Poison Ivy, and Clayface, and Scarecrow) are cute. But while I'm sure she has a rogue's gallery in the comics, none of their names comes to mind and I follow the comic books. A hero is defined by their enemies, and this "Ooh, look at the names of the villains we can reference" approach is already a bit tiresome. I don't expect Joker or Harley Quinn to pop in. But Batwoman needs more than a demented wife of a demented male villain to make her mark.
Fortunately, the episode barely manages to hold it all together going on the talents of the actors. Gustin and Amell are still bouncing off of each other, doing the whole "We've got to be more like the other" thing while retaining their basic characteristics. Their reaction to Batman is a good example: Barry is all fanboying over Batman, while Oliver keeps insisting Batman is an urban legend and seems offended that there might be another urban non-powered vigilante out there one-upping him.
Presumably Melissa Benoist will have more to do in part 3. She's not exactly spare baggage in part 2. She does have a few good moments with Kate/Batwoman, talking about their respective cousins. As I noted, it's a bit fuzzy since Kara's cousin's relationship with Kate's cousin is with another-Earth version. But oh well. Sometimes, I wish they had just put Supergirl on the same Earth as the other CW shows. Ditto for Black Lightning. If the creative team can squeeze Batwoman in, they can squeeze in Supergirl and Black Lightning.
We also get a reference to Diggle having a ring on Earth-90. Which goes back to speculation that Diggle was supposed to become the "new" Green Lantern on Arrow. That and a couple of veiled comments by the creative team means the speculation has been set off anew. There's also lots of other injokes: Kate has a bust of Shakespeare like the one in the 60s Batman, and the police call in a crime at the corner of Nolan and Burton. Ho ho. And doing the opening Arrow sequence but substituting Gustin for Amell.
So overall, with "Elseworlds, Pt. 2", come for the humor and to figure out everything that's going down in Part 3. There's enough there to satisfy both Flash and Arrow fans. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it keeps all of the balls in the air in the end. How will it turn out? Tune in to Supergirl Tuesday, 12/11, to find out.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
Written by Gislef on Dec 11, 2018
It is silly but it is a whole lot of fun to watch it.