So, apparently a three-week DC catchup was
in order.
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| It's like they traveled back in time to kidnap Chyler Leigh and Melissa Benoist's younger selves; only presumably way less illegal and space-time destroying. |
We begin with Supergirl and the bucolic flashback episode 'Midvale', apparently Smallville's
slightly larger sister community(1) and home to Kara's foster family. The plan
is to wallow in family and help Alex recover from her narratively jarring
break-up with Maggie, but the immediate result seems more to be that Alex
descends into semi-sanctioned alcohol abuse and gets pissy with Kara for being
all 'plenty more fish in the sea' after her own dark night of the soul
following the loss of Mon-el.
The bulk of the episode, however, takes us
back to when the girls were both teenagers, Kara the overachieving newbie and
Alex an aspiring bitch queen. The death of a fellow student - a close friend of
Kara's - leads the two girls into their own investigation, revealing an affair
between Alex's queen bee BFF and a teacher and the dead boy's penchant for...
Well, blackmail is an ugly word, and it's not actually made clear if he spies
on the town for fun and profit, or if his motivation was to try to make the world
a better place by pressuring teachers not to sleep with their students or
corrupt law enforcement officers to come clean(2). The loss and the
investigation bring Alex and Kara together for the first time, and the
flashback works the same magic in the present, although it's not entirely clear
how given that they don't really talk about it and there isn't a lot of
parallel plot intercutting to link then and now.
 |
| Right! The telescope. That was the link. |
'Midvale' gives us a fairly strong tale of
the young Danvers sisters, but the world they inhabit is too isolated for the
events to have much interest. Kenny Li is a sweetheart - or a blackmailing
perv, but I'm pretty sure the idea is that he just sees things and wants to
change that which he feels to be wrong - but we have little time to invest in
him before his death, and conversely it's just too obvious that the nice-guy
sheriff is the real killer because there is literally no-one else it could be.
On the other hand, the young versions of our leads are on point.
Also, J'onn talks Kara out of being too
powers-usey by pretending to be an FBI agent who happens to look like her mother,
which is a touch creepy, and still confusing because her mother doesn't look like her mother anymore.
 |
| "Well, wherever he's been, he's clearly had access to grooming accessories and a gym." |
But anyway, that leaves Kara feeling a
little more composed about the loss of Mon-el, just in time for 'Wake Up', in
which a mysterious ship is disturbed by geology. The DEO investigate and find
Mon-el and a bunch of peeps in suspended animation, including - as it turns out
- a Saturnian space babe named Imra. Has Mon-el relapsed to his pre-Kara ways?
Well, no; actually for him he's been away for seven years, living in the 31st
century, recovering from his lead vulnerability, and getting married. Oops.
Elsewhere, J'onn struggles to connect with
his father, having been kind of closed off for a while and not knowing how to
show his dad the world outside the DEO. In arc-land, Sam goes on a quest to
discover who she really is. She presses her foster mother and discovers that there
is a spaceship in her barn, which leads her to the 'Fortress of Sanctuary'. A hologram tells her she was designed to be an instrument of punitive
judgement before having a kid messed up the timeline, but now her personality
can be overwritten(3) and she can get with the tyranny.
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| This is a lot of variety for a total of 52 Earths, on all of which Barry and Iris gravitate together. |
On to The
Flash, and a two-episode mini-arc in which Team Flash try to track down DeVoe.
In an attempt to expand his working capacity and, as advised by Cisco, make
friends, Harry assembles 'the Council of Wells', a collective of his alternate
selves from various dimensions. In the meantime, Barry takes Ralph out on his
first case, where the Ductile Detective's drive to get the job done at any cost
- the same thing that got him fired when he planted evidence to get someone he
knew to be guilty sent down - clashes with Barry's focus on defending the
innocent. We also get some stock business with Barry and Iris asking their
couples' therapist to hypnotise Ralph and get some sort of lead on who was on
the bus.
 |
| As Black Bison's whole deal is getting objects to do things, there aren't many action clips of her. |
Our meta of the week is a Native American
activist with the ability to bring effigies to life, hell bent on retrieving a
tribal relic and punishing those who have sought to keep it in private hands. She goes by the self-appointed moniker 'Black Bison', to save the cringe of having Team Flash try to name a Native American themed villain. The abuse of power in the name of a worthy and even righteous cause is somewhat underused as a theme - perhaps because ultimately this ends up being a B-plot to the Council of Wells - although
part of Ralph's ongoing development(4) lies in ultimately swiping the relic from the
scene of capture and returning it to the tribe to whom it belongs on the
downlow.
 |
| "There. Sure glad I don't look stupid in this." |
The Council of Wells eventually overcome
their collective supermass of ego and provide an address for one Clifford
DeVoe, a wheelchair-bound college professor. In 'Therefore I am', we alternate
between his start of darkness story - in which he designs a 'thinking cap'
which his wife makes for him, and gets his brain lightly poached into a
hyer-brilliant but slightly megalomaniacal state while trying to steal energy
from the particle accelerator to make it work - with Barry's increasingly
lonely attempts to uncover his secret identity, while others come to believe
that he might just be an innocent professor and Captain Singh fields complaints
against Barry for his actions, because once more we see that Barry Allen is
terrible at not getting caught by obvious traps like a few home security
cameras.
In the end, DeVoe comes clean, not because
Barry catches him out, but because - so it seems - he can't bear to have no-one
but his wife understand just how overwhelming his intellect is(5), and challenges
Team Flash, who traditionally approach big bads by outthinking them, to marvel
at how completely he has them figured out.
DeVoe is a real dick.
 |
| Still awkward. |
We're still stalled on Arrow, so on to Legends of
Tomorrow. In 'Helen Hunt' the Legends detect an anachronism in the golden
age of Hollywood. Hedy Lamarr - siren of the silver screen, brilliant inventor
and Professor Stein's 'hall pass' - has been bumped from the career-making role
of Helen of Troy by, well, the actual Helen of Troy. Helen's mere presence
seems set to escalate studio rivalry to gang warfare, while the truncating of
Lamarr's career interferes with her work on spread spectrum frequency hopping,
which begins to unravel future wifi technology, including the team's comms. Oh,
and Stein and Jax get body-swapped by an experimental untangling formula,
leading to a bit of Freaky Friday business even as Stein (played here by Franz
Drameh) gushes over Hedy Lamarr.
Things take a turn for the serious when
Damien Darhk appears in the role of a Hollywood agent. He agrees to a straight
fight with Sara, but when she wins the medium steps in, and is revealed as
Darhk's daughter, all grown up and unwilling to see her Dad killed by another
vigilante. In addition, Amaya learns that water-witch Kuasa is her granddaughter,
and while the Legends ultimately win the day, Mallus' anti-Legends are an increasingly
sinister and looming presence, as well as being far less of a sausage fest than
the Legion of Doom.
Oh, and Zari decides that taking Helen back
to Troy would be cruel, so as her ongoing impact on the timeline is limited she
instead drops her of on Themiscyra.
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| Like father, like son. |
'Welcome to the Jungle' takes the team to
Vietnam, where a mysterious and charismatic figure is recruiting people on both
sides to some sort of new tribe and a monster is stalking US patrols. The two
turn out to be one and the same, when the Colonel Kurtz figure proves to be
none other than an anachronistic Gorilla Grodd. Grodd wants to assassinate a
president and take over the world, which obviously the Legends are against, but
Mick has problems of his own, most particularly his own father, a gruff non-com
with a flamethrower and a familiar attitude.
Grodd is stopped, Jax saves the President(6)
from an ambush and Mick saves his father from committing a massacre in revenge
for Grodd's crimes, and begins to open up just a little as a result. Grodd
seems to fall to his death, but instead is snatched through time and greeted by
Damien Darhk.
And all of this leads us at last to the four
part crossover event Crisis on Earth-X(7).
 |
| I've got a good feeling about this ceremony. |
Heroes from all four series assemble in
Central City for the wedding of Iris and Barry. Alex comes as Kara's plus one, despite
the fact that this is not the wedding she was planning to be at, gets drunk at
the rehearsal dinner and wakes up in bed with Sara, because of course Sara hit
that. Cue a major existential crisis for Alex, who has had precious few
relationships, and never a one-night stand. Fortunately for Alex - less so for
everyone else - the wedding is soon interrupted when a mystery Kryponian
vapourises the reverend as the opening act of a Nazi invasion from the 'fifty-third,
but it's so bleak and horrible we don't even give it a number' Earth-X.
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| In the CW-verse, doubting conservative parents ask their newly-out daughters: 'How can you be a lesbian if you haven't slept with Sara Lance?' |
The attack is led by the Kryptonian and a
brace of archers, one of whom is captured and revealed to be Tommy Merlyn. He
mocks Olvier's attempts to relate to him as weakness, before taking poison.
Meanwhile the other archer - parallel Oliver Queen, the Fuhrer of Earth-X - and
'Overgirl' - Kara's opposite number - rally their forces with the aid of transtemporal
cockroach Eobard Thawne, but are once more pressed to retreat by Oliver's
kryptonite arrows. The assembled teams are able to track the Nazis based on
radiation leaking from Overgirl as a result of absorbing too much yellow
sunlight, but are ultimately overwhelmed and everyone but Iris and Felicity gets
captured. The sidekicks are imprisoned in the pipeline, the heroes are taken to
Earth-X and thrown into Commandant Quentin Lance's concentration camp, and Kara
is exposed to red sun radiation to soften her up, so that her heart can be
transplanted into Overgirl.
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| Not sure about the masks, but the use of the SS logo in place of the S of House El is horribly inspired. |
Iris and Felicity delay things long enough
for the rest of the Legends to stop Thawne killing Kara and to break out the
other sidekicks. The heroes break out of the camp with the help of Leo Snart, Earth-X's
Captain Cold, a touchy-feely, plan-oriented, openly gay hero in a relationship
with Ray 'the Ray' Terrill, and join up with a group of freedom fighters led by
Earth-X's Winn Schott(8). Schott is committed to the destruction of the Reich,
and intends to use his world's Red Tornado to destroy the portal linking the
worlds. He offers the teams time to get through, but then sends Tornado anyway,
leaving the Flash and the Ray to hold off the android while the rest of the
team storm the portal (a plan which involves Oliver disguising himself as the
Fuhrer before blowing his cover to protect Earth-X Felicity, who is of course interned
for being Jewish.)
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| It's that man again. |
The heroes break back through and take down
the bad guys, even managing to bring down the Nazi version of the Waverider, but not without cost.
Professor Stein takes a bullet activating the portal, and although briefly stabilised
by the fusion of Firestorm, ultimately persuades Jax to take the formulae
developed to separate them, so that he will not take Jax with him. Massive
props to the series for skipping the tediousness of Stein's family blaming Jax
to create unnecessary conflict. Instead, they embrace him as a member of their
grieving family, because the loss of Stein is painful enough for Jax, who has
spent much of the mini-series coming to terms with the father-son relationship
he and Stein share.
In the end, Overgirl explodes, Oliver shoots
his Nazi doppelganger, and John Diggle - who was ordained as a minister to
marry his brother, back before he killed him - is brought in to do the honours
for Barry and Iris, and for Oliver and Felicity(9). Sara tells Alex to fly and
be free. It's all pretty uplifting and then everyone goes home for what I
expect to be a brutally painful round of mis-season finales.
Phew.
Oh, and Snart stays on Earth-1.
So, that was an exciting batch of episodes. Supergirl is doing pretty well at the
moment, and Legends of Tomorrow has
never been as much fun. Ralph Dibney is taking The Flash to some odd places. He's being played with what seems to
be a lot of Plastic Man in his characterisation, and I don't know if that plus
the wackiness of the Council of Wells(10) is doing the tone any favours when
set alongside the scheming of the Thinker. Crisis
on Earth-X was an outstanding crossover, avoiding the segmentation of Invasion while keeping its strengths,
and expanding to a full, four-episode arc. Also, punching Nazis really plays to
the crowd.
(1) In many ways it's remarkable that such
deliberately generic place names as Smallville and Metropolis have survived to
the present day.
(2) Given the lack of condemnation of his
actions, I assume the latter.
(3) I really hope this isn't as total as it
seemed, because otherwise the character's whole set up seems likely to have
been background for a pat resolution where she either recognises her daughter and
lets herself be taken down, or doesn't and kills poor Ruby for dramah.
(4) On this note, I'm glad to see that the
writers aren't playing with some of the creepier 'jokes' about stretching
powers, despite Ralph's slightly sleazy persona.
(5) Although in classic form, he is physically
crippled and needs a life-support wheelchair from House of Davros to survive.
(6) LBJ.
(7) Italicised, because it was basically
presented as a four-part miniseries, complete with its own titles.
(8) As if to cement his position as
'character the writers have least idea what to do with' James 'Guardian' Olsen
was killed in the cold open of Part 1.
(9) A character plot has Felicity refusing
to get engaged to Oliver, because that was where everything when to shit last
time.
(10) Even excluding 'Wells the
Grey', a wizard.
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