Welcome to The Pop Break’s weekly round up of all the DCTV that the CW could squeeze into its schedule. Currently, Legends of Tomorrow and Black Lightning are not in season, but check back to this space in January when they are expected to premiere. In the meantime, stick around as we track Supergirl, Batwoman, The Flash, and Arrow as this super-powered quartet embark on a collision course to the epic multi-night crossover event: Crisis on Infinite Earths!Â
Supergirl (Season 5, Episode 2: “Stranger Beside Me”)
Last week, I discussed at length the grab bag quality of Supergirl’s fifth season premiere. Setting the table for a cast this deep is always going to be a challenge, but I am pleased to report a bit of an uptick this week as we check back in with our National City favorites.
The less we say about James Olsen, potential Senate candidate, the better (news broke a few weeks ago that Mehcad Brooks would be leaving the show as a regular cast members, and my guess is that this out of the blue plot point is as likely an excuse to ship James out of town for awhile as any). Instead, let’s focus on the fact that TECHNOLOGY seems like it will be filling in as the socially conscious ominous presence hanging over the series this season, much like xenophobia was last time around. Despite Kara complaining about a woman texting while walking (which is actually very dangerous, kids!) and being put off by these new VR lenses that have people distracted and disconnected, it does seem like the show is at least trying to consider a nuanced position on technology and the dangers it poses to our modern lives.
Those same lenses that Kara was bemoaning last week serve a therapeutic function this week, as Kelly uses them to help cure J’onn of the crippling psychic pain he is feeling after last week’s confrontation with a brother he can’t remember. Given the role The Monitor played in brining J’onn’s brother Malefic to Earth, I thought it was possible he was actually J’onn’s brother from another Earth. Thanks to a pair of magic contact lenses, we learn that Malefic is actually the brother of this version of J’onn, and J’onn didn’t recognize Malefic because J’onn’s memory of a key period of the Martian civil war, during which Malefic betrays the Green Martian, was erased. Given the tender way Malefic cared for his white Martian companion in this episode and a mysterious statement from VR Malefic, it is safe to say we’ve only scratched the surface of the real story here.
Created writers Dana Horgan & Katie Rose Rogers chose to take this central conflict between J’onn and Malefic and their inability to truly know each other and use it as an uniting theme for all our characters this week. Nia and Brainy, freshly coupled, are figuring out how to establish boundaries, open up lines of communication, and not run wild with every new personal detail they learn about each other (in this case Nia’s love of certain foods). These two have such sweet chemistry that I don’t even care how dumb this story makes our genius alien friend seem. Meanwhile, Alex and Kelly are still leaning things about each other too, but, by episode’s end, they realize they already know the most important thing there is to know about each other, which is how much love they share for one another.
Again, these two lovebirds make a sweet couple (even if this time the chemistry isn’t quite there), but honestly any excuse to see the usually unflappable Alex, played excellently by Chyler Leigh, be flustered and relatability insecure is fine by me. Nothing will beat her dealing with the fallout of her one night stand with the irresistible Sara Lance (Caity Lotz, Legends) during the Earth-X crossover two years ago, but I’ll take it whenever I can get it. Kara & professional rival William and Lena and her former assistant Eve are also trying to sort out how well they can know and trust each other, but it’s mostly just set up for future story. Ultimately, we can never truly know and trust another completely, that is unless Lena successfully creates technology that can ensure human beings “do no harm” to each other, even if that means obliterating their consciousness in the process, as this new, morally grey Lena does to poor Eve in this week’s final moments. What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVNpaDRSZEI
Batwoman (Season 1, Episode 2: “The Rabbit Hole”)
Speaking of not really knowing a person, this week’s Batwoman was all about getting to know one person in particular: Alice. Everyone wants to know who Alice (Rachel Skarsten, Reign) really is now that she has emerged as a dangerous terrorist with a personal vendetta against Jacob Cane (Dougary Scott, Mission Impossible: 2) the head of Gotham City’s powerful private security firm known as the Crows. That’s what you would expect, anyway, given her grand, public debut in last week’s episode. However, it seems that actually everyone just wants to kill her without asking any questions…everyone, that is, except Kate Cane (Ruby Rose, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage) aka Batwoman!
I have to say, the bones of this show are strong. Alice as a Joker-esque nemesis to Kate’s Batwoman is a nice twist on an old concept. Is she really Kate’s long-lost sister, Beth, or just a crazy woman playing on Jacob and Kate’s false hope and deep guilt over never finding Beth’s body after the car crash that killed Kate’s mother and almost killed Kate herself? Can Kate use the mantle of the Bat to finally break free of her overprotective and under-approving father and the paramilitary organization he runs which she could never earn her way into?
Is there still anything left between her and her military school sweetheart, Sophie (Meagan Tandy, Unreal), who had to swear Kate off years ago so she could remain in the military during the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and who is now married…to a man!?! And can Kate help raise the spirits and fortunes of the citizens of Gotham, who have grown hopeless in the four years since Batman has been missing? These are all great pieces with which one could make the first season of a Batwoman series. And yet…
This episode centers mostly around Kate, out of costume, trying to find proof that Alice is Kate’s twin sister Beth in order to convince her father before he has his goons..erh..I mean private paramilitary organization employees kill her. It’s a race against the clock scenario where she needs to quickly amass allies to help her and she must confront Alice herself, before it’s too late. However, this episode significantly struggles to generate any kind of tension. The pacing feels off, the resolution to nearly every scene appears predestined from the start, and nothing is earned or emotionally engaging in practice, even if they seem like they might on paper.
Part of the problem is definitely the performances. Meagan Tandy has never been as good as she was in the first season of Lifetime’s Unreal, and that hasn’t changed after her first two episodes here, but she does her best to capture a complex layer of emotions for her Sophia to be grappling with now that Kate is back in her life. The problem is that Ruby Rose, as Kate, is giving her nothing as a scene partner. I know many people questioned Rose’s casting when it was first announced, but as a fan of some of her work, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. She has attitude. She has swagger. She has a steely eyed, brooding gaze.
What she doesn’t have, at least so far, is the ability to ever seem emotionally present in a scene, and that can be devastating to the effectiveness of the episode, such as when she flatly says “My dad is going to kill my sister, Sophie.” It’s just brutal. Almost as bad is her other half, Alice, who seems like she should be a level more manic and dangerous than Skarsten seems capable of playing. Their confrontation towards the end of the episode did show some spark, so hopefully the best is yet to come for Kate and the gang. Berlanti, the executive producer on all these Arrowverse series, and co. have found was to retool and revitalize sagging series with so so leads in the past by transforming the shows around the strengths of their performers. Hopefully, as the season progresses, we will see some of that at work. Until then…yikes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL8YTnUIwjk
The Flash (Season 6, Episode 2): “A Flash of the Lightning”
While this week’s Sunday shows took their time establishing character dynamics and setting up season long arcs, the Tuesday shows wasted no time setting up the event everyone who follows the Arrowverse has been waiting for ever since we caught a glimpse of that future newspaper promising us “The Flash Vanishes in Crisis” all those years ago. Well the future is now people, and Barry is desperate to get to it after his pep talk with The Monitor last week.
We pick up just after that discussion, still in the time vault, with Barry and Iris shaken and emotional. They quickly resolve to do what they’ve always done, create a plan to rewrite the timeline to prevent the unpreventable and save everyone in the process. They never explicitly mention it, but the way they prevented Iris’s looming death in season three weighs heavily over these opening scenes. It’s effective from an audience perspective as well. We have seen them overcome the impossible and rewrite the timeline so many times before. Why can’t Barry beat this threat too. He decides to travel to the future to the day after this “crisis” to see what’s happened and how he might prevent it. He ends up being hit by dark matter, blocking him from seeing the future, so he visits Jay Garrick, The Flash of Earth-3, who is an expert in dark matter and is newly married to a woman who looks as much like Barry’s mom as Jay looks like his dad.
This effectively allows Barry to be surrounded by the people who brought him into the world as he discovers the news he truly must make “the ultimate sacrifice” to save his world and every other world from total annihilation. Barry is understandably devastated by the news and Grant Gustin does a great job making you feel like he’s genuinely experienced the end of existence a billion times over. He’s so changed by his visions of the future, which Jay helps him access via some techno whatnot while he’s on Earth-3, that he even convinces Iris it’s time the start prepping the team for life after The Flash. It’s the stand out portion of the episode and makes me excited for what’s to come. Most of the time, these crossover events receive very little lead up and have a mostly self contained quality to them. This time, things feel very different.
Meanwhile, the rest of Team Flash is not making a strong case they can function in a world without The Flash. Killer Frost has Caitlin’s body for the episode, and she works with Cisco to discover the importance of art in a well-rounded life, now that she’s trying to actually have one. This is mostly here for comedic effect, but that effect is marginal at best. Elsewhere, Cecile uses her empathy powers to realize a young woman she was about to send to prison is not guilty, so she ropes Ralph and Joe into her efforts to clear the woman, Allegra Garcia, of all charges. Along the way, she finally realized she should be a defense attorney for Metas instead of a prosecutor. Daniel Nicolet, who plays Cecile, does a wonderful job walking the tight rope between righteous indignation and pure comedy. I’m happy to see her filling up a true b-plot after all these years of mostly playing second fiddle. However, none of these two stories work great, and, when Allegra’s presumed-dead cousin comes into the picture as the evil assassin Ultraviolet, I mostly felt board. All this Crisis stuff is so compelling that so far it’s a challenge to care about the monster of the week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylb0FYYeU6s
Arrow (Season 8, Episode 1) “Starling City”
We wrap up our Crisis Watch this week with the season premiere of Arrow. Last season’s finale felt like a series finale, with the present day storyline concluding the arcs of all our major characters and Oliver & Felicity settling into retirement before The Monitor took Oliver away to make good on his promise from last year’s Elseworlds crossover. Meanwhile, in 2040, Team Arrow: The New Class took down the wall separating Star City from The Glades and took on the mantle of their parents as they said good by to Felicity and began their quest to protect their city. Everything wrapped up so neatly that I genuinely wondered what the point of an eighth and final season would be when it was first announced.
Cut to Lian Yu…but with a Batman mask where a Deathstroke mask should be? That’s right, it turns out the series is honoring that pitch perfect finale last season by leaving it in place and instead having Oliver hop scotch across the Multiverse, helping out the Monitor as he prepares for the upcoming Crisis. Our first stop is on Earth-2, where their version of Oliver and his dad actually did die the night the Queen’s Gambit sunk. Arrow creator Mark Guggenheim and showrunner Beth Shwartz receive writing credit this week, and they make the bold choice to drop the audience directly into the action, with little initial context provided outside a vague monologue delivered by The Monitor as we see that Batman mask where Deathstroke’s should be and our Oliver is discovered on the island in the same fashion as he had been way back in episode 1.
Soon, Oliver is walking back into his old mansion being greeted by his very not-dead mother Moira, and…Malcolm and Tommy Merlin? If you weren’t sure what was going on before this welcome home moment, it’s beginning to come together now. We are on an alternate Earth, our Oliver is here to help The Monitor in some unknown way. Which Earth is left as a mystery awhile longer, at least until he runs into not-Laurel, the reformed Black Siren turned Canary who ended last season leaving the team to do some good on her home Earth of Earth-2. A standout moment of the night comes when Oliver learns she’s working with The Hood of this Earth, Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra, The Other Two). On Oliver’s Earth, Chase was Star City’s DA turned mysterious archer Prometheus, who had a homoerotically charged obsession with Oliver. Now, he’s doing his best deadpan impression of Oliver, which is genuinely hilarious. Segarra captures all the campy cynicism and brooding we’ve come to expect from Oliver, dialed up to 11 for our pleasure.
Eventually, we come to learn that Oliver needs the dwarf star particle that Earth-2’s Dark Archer, who in a fun alt-reality twist turns out to be Tommy Merlyn seeking vengeance for the drug-induced death of his sister Thea instead of Malcolm Merlyn seeking vengeance for the mugging-gone-wrong death of his wife, plans on using to power his version of the undertaking from season one. This sideways walk down memory lane through many of the big moments from season one is a lot of fun.
We also get to revisit the classic Arrow trope of Oliver claiming he must carrying his burden alone before eventually accepting the help of his team. In this case, his team is mostly comprised of Earth-1’s John Diggle, who borrowed a dimension jumper from The Flash‘s Cisco to help his buddy Oliver out. It’s completely unclear how John knew Earth-2 was first on Oliver’s to-do list, but he finds him and ultimately convinces Oliver to allow him to be his sidekick for awhile. By episode’s end, Oliver has the dwarf star and makes peace with Earth-2 Tommy and Moira just as the Crisis red skies we saw previewed in Barry’s vision on this week’s The Flash begin swallowing this universe whole. John, Oliver, and not-Laurel hop into a portal back to Earth-1 as the universe dissolves in front of their eyes.
What a fun hour of TV! This is exactly what I want out of my comic book TV series. It bent sci-fi premises to tell a story that is self-reflective, humorous, and heartwarming, all with a wink to the audience and just the right amount of fun fan service for long time viewers to enjoy. And when the episode ends, it truly feels like anything could happen next week. Arrow has, in the past, been the Arrowverse series I most struggled with. It could be repetitive and needlessly drag out stories all while being saddled by performances of varying degrees of quality. I can’t say I’m sad to see the series enter its final season, but, if we must do 10 more episodes, including the crossover and it’s fallout, this is an excellent way to make it feel worthwhile.
PS: In 2040, Team Arrow: The New Class is working out the kinks of being a crime fighting family who loves and listens as much as the punch and kick, as they fight JJ, aka John’s future son, who is leading a city-conquering gang inspired by Deathstroke. This cast of young actors are a lot of fun and a great twist on their parents personas, but their piece of the episode is mostly setup for what’s to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reAuYvej_7M
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