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CW Superhero Crossover Review: A New Tradition

We have been teased for months. The big CW Superhero Crossover. Supergirl, Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow; all on the same screen at the same time. In the past we have had crossovers with Flash and Arrow and Flash and […]

We have been teased for months. The big CW Superhero Crossover. Supergirl, Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow; all on the same screen at the same time. In the past we have had crossovers with Flash and Arrow and Flash and Supergirl, but we have never seen anything on this scale before.

The crossover was pitched to us as a four night crossover. Unfortunately this was a bit of a misdirect. Due to logistics of Supergirl and where she is physically in compared to the characters of the other three shows, the crossover potential of Supergirl is very limited. On top of the crossover difficulties, this week’s episode of Supergirl was scheduled as the mid-season finale, and as any TV watcher will know, the mid-season finale is more times than not the second biggest episode of the season. With that in mind, it is easy to ignore this episode, despite being a fantastic episode in itself, as it failed to have any impact of the overall crossover story. However, apart from the misdirect, there isn’t much more negative.

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Moving onto Part 2 of the crossover (really Part 1) in The Flash, this episode served as the introduction you would expect in a crossover like this. This episode introduced us to the alien villains of the crossover, The Dominators. Considering this is a typical TV budget and not a Game of Thrones budget, the quality of The Dominators looked amazing. They didn’t look like they were out of place within the show despite being aliens.

This part of the crossover produced the biggest highlight of the crossover, and that was the Heroes vs Heroes fight. Taking a note out of the Captain America: Civil War and the sequence simply known as the “Airport Scene”, this episode pitted two groups of heroes against each other. For anyone who watches all four of these shows weekly, getting to see all of them in action against each other was as good as the pinnacle moment when we got to see the Avengers team up for the first time. The moment they are all on one screen despite trying to kill each other, is an exciting ome for anyone who is heavily invested in these four shows.

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Like Supergirl, this week’s Arrow episode had a big task to face as well as serving it’s part in the crossover. This was Arrow‘s 100th episode, a massive milestone in the world of TV. It did an amazing job in terms of balance to make it a stand out episode, celebrating the 100 milestone while still playing its part in the crossover. Using the dream/flashback concept for current and old Arrow cast members was a brilliant way to bring back highlighting characters over the past four seasons while giving fan service to faithful fans of the show and the comic material.

From a crossover standpoint, the team up with the Arrow recruits and Flash and

Supergirl was fantastic. From an Arrow fan point of view, it was great to see these new team members having to work along side these seasoned veterans.

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Legends of Tomorrow capped off the ending to our crossover in style. There was a question mark over the Legends going into this crossover on whether it would just be the crew present, or the concept of the show. Thankfully, the concept of time travel carried over into the crossover. The idea of bring in time travel in an event that already has aliens is a sci-fi fans bread and butter. It was really great to see the non-Legends members travel through time and see what it is like to be apart of the Legends of Tomorrow crew.

The ending of the episode is what you want in a finale, an all-in-fight between Heroes and Aliens. Before the crossover episodes started, the CW were really pushing Heroes vs Aliens in their promotional material, and this episode brought the fight we wanted.

Overall, this crossover event is going to stand as a highlight in Superhero TV. If you are already a fan of the CW Superhero shows, you will embrace this crossover because you get to see all different story lines that have formed across four different shows get braided together into one event. For those who aren’t fans of these shows but like seeing superheroes in action, this episode could server as a great entry point and a fantastic couple of hours of TV.