Elseworlds (and CXG)
I had kind of thought I would do a few final thoughts on Elseworlds but...well I didn't want to think about it any more. I covered most of my thoughts I think.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 4x08
So this is the episode that I’m actually going to comment on. One comment on the Valencia plot, I picked up the fact that Heather was probably reading it wrong a long time before it was said. But considering how meta this episode is, I don’t think that’s a mistake on the writing’s part; I’m not even sure they were trying to hide that Valencia never used pronouns. That said, I’m not sure her saying she and Joe never see each other anymore tracks, and it makes things very different if we go back to when she and Josh were together and Josh would go to him for advice.
But the main thrust of this is that...I do kind of love what they do with Greg on meta level, but I don’t like it. It’s hysterical to me how they decide to get around the new casting and I did quite like the song, and I have to hand it to the writing/acting/directing, because half the time if I closed my eyes I could hear old Greg in the lines so they definitely were still writing him as the same character (changed and grown, but you know what I mean) but that doesn’t mean I fully accept it either. I can kind of see the problem in being so faithful to the character we knew, the new actor is just trying to do someone else’s performance and so their chemistry can’t find its own groove since it’s trying to recapture something they hadn’t established together.
Also, it’s weird, because I’ve been getting the vibe for a couple episodes now that they were planning to deal with the Greg question by the end of the season but this feels too early to be something to deal with in the endgame, and too late for them to be endgame. Especially with a new actor I can’t help thinking.
Elseworlds 1 (Flash)
Obviously I’m going to have to see more of how this plays out, but so far I’m not super feeling it. I think a lot of my problems may be tied to this being very much a Flash episode, and yet the only person I care about is Oliver. By making the contrast between Barry and Oliver such a focus it does do a better job than a lot of the crossovers of maintaining Oliver’s character than they sometimes do; but I think it’s a little telling that we only briefly see Digg and no one else from Arrow besides Oliver as Oliver has tended to mostly maintain his character in other crossovers (to contrast the world of Flash) but a lot of the others really get lost in other shows’ hands.
But before I deeply dive into that, why doesn’t Oliver have more of a reaction to the name Ivo? I don’t know if in universe there’s a reason it’s coming up again or if he’s supposed to already know the repetition. But seriously, you’ve got Ivo Labs and Amazo and Oliver doesn’t react. Hell, he brings up Anatoli in this episode, when they met on the Amazo being tortured by Ivo.
As Oliver is the only major player here that I’m interested in, I’m going to speculate wildly about what this is doing for his arc. Also, if I had to guess I’ll bet this has way more impact on Oliver going forward than Barry. When they switch back Barry is going to wake up and just be all ‘I’m so glad I’m me and no longer have to be angry asshole. Back to normal for me.’ While Oliver is the one who’s actually being given something to think about. Part of what drove me away from watching Flash is how much Barry is never challenged in his view of how to be, and I don’t get the impression this is actually doing that for him. ‘Hey, my powers work really well when I’m happy, I’ll keep being happy and untroubled by the consequences of my actions.’
On the other hand Oliver spends the episode being told he’s a total shit show and going ‘yeah, that’s pretty much me.’ Which of course feeds in to what I was talking about last week, where being Oliver is already Oliver’s punishment for the crime of being Oliver. I totally get why Barry treating the Arrow-skills lightly pissed him off; those skills have been purchased dearly and cost him more than even he wants to think about. And he doesn’t heal the way Barry does, not physically and not bounce back emotionally, he’s carrying scars of both kinds from every fight he’s ever had, and Barry has the gall to call act like it’s cool. The emotional scars don’t leave Oliver just because he’s in a different body, he’s still cursed with being Oliver Queen, and in the switch seems to have been cut off from the few things that make being Oliver a little more bearable.
I am annoyed at how long it took them to even try convincing people by saying ‘here’s some stuff that only I could know.’ There’s no way these teams compare notes often enough (especially with Oliver having been in jail) that there aren’t things the other wouldn’t know. (Admittedly, that is a terrible sentence.)
The scene where Iris talks about Oliver and Felicity and their relationship, that hurts. It’s something he needed to hear I think, but I could feel that blow and it’s a big one.
I did like that Oliver assumed Barry had fucked up the world again, it’s what I thought he should think; while Barry may not be responsible in this case he should be first assumption when things get super weird. (Also, Sara Diggle, never forget, never forgiven.)
The big fight is terrible. The character stuff in this episode sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, but I hated the fight scene.
Also, using the Smallville theme made me laugh a lot.
Also, also; last episode made a huge deal about Oliver not wearing the mask; why did Barry-Arrow even have one?
Elseworlds 2 (Arrow)
I may have hated everything about that episode. Nothing about it makes any sense and I don’t give it a pass for being part of the mini-arc; the Arrow characters get completely screwed over (even if logically it does make some sense), I have lost any desire I ever had to watch Batwoman and I now hate that it exists at all, and it was just all around bad.
The problem is that I hate the world of Batman; I had hoped that this was going to be a reinterpretation that somehow didn’t have Batman involved and barring that at least didn’t take place on Earth 1 where now they have to explain how we haven’t had all these comparisons to Batman before. Maybe if he’d been gone for like 15 years, very much become a legend more than recent memory, and when he was around was just fighting street crime rather than super villains; but this is never going to make sense. The only thing that almost works is Kate herself, for all this is very early and very minor characterization we get she doesn’t seem that bad, but I hate the world too much to watch the show for a maybe okay character.
The treatment of the Arrow characters doesn’t even feel like the Arrow writers wrote this. This was written by someone who thinks Oliver was out sleeping with women on QC business; Oliver was ship-wrecked as a 22 year old lay-about; he was not doing any QC business at the time. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have met this woman while tagging along on Robert’s business trip and hooked up with her, but that was 11-12 years ago; this was not written by someone who actually knows Oliver’s history.
I’m not even sure the person who wrote this watched the previous episode, because fuck you if Iris knew anything was wrong with ‘Barry’ in the equivalent of ten words Felicity got before sent off to the sideline. Oliver was acting completely weird for Barry and she went right on talking about big bads and breakfast; fuck you if you want to make Oliver and Felicity look worse in comparison this way. Yeah it’s true that they’re more strained and trying to find their way back to each other, but don’t pretend for a second that Iris didn’t had over the Flash ring after spending several minutes with what she thought was Barry but Oliver was barely even trying to act the part, while Felicity got ten seconds of them trying to keep her in the dark. Sure she’s going to kick herself for not seeing it, but the script sems to be saying something it has not earned at all.
Also, why didn’t the red lightning follow them to Gotham if that’s how it worked?
This episode’s attempt to analyze Barry and Oliver’ character fell completely flat for me. Why in any world would they hallucinate each other villains? Why is Oliver’s Malcolm when they were more or less getting along by the end and Malcolm in fact died saving Thea, only distantly connected to anything Oliver did? And sure, Barry does have his own difficulties, but he’s also fucking right that he doesn’t have a scratch on Oliver’s trauma. If I had a sense that Oliver’s trying to downplay his issues rather than the story trying to act like he needed to learn anything from the experience I’d roll right it; but I’m absolutely sure the story is trying to say Oliver should have equal sympathy for Barry and I don’t.
I hate that the Flash characters got to invade this episode but there was no reciprocity (unless the Arrow characters, including the rest of the team thank you very much, get to dominate the final part, and the first part was supposed to be more Supergirl or something). Yes, it makes sense, they have the experience to work with this mess, but I don’t want them here. It makes the writers write the whole ‘geek squad’ as if they’re on a Flash episode and I never really liked the way Flash handled the geek squad.
And seriously, I know filming this many connected shows all in Vancouver is a problem, but stop using that same building for every asylum story. I’ve seen that same staircase about twelve times by these shows in the last couple years.
So, if one of the goals of the crossover is to pull me back to any of the shows I’ve dropped or pick up the new one, it’s utterly failing. To be fair, it probably would have only taken me about 10 minutes into Batwoman to remember why I didn’t really want to watch it, so we just get the trouble out of the way.
Elseworlds 3 (Supergirl)
Well...I liked it better than the last part, maybe about even with part 1. So it probably evens out to...bad...yeah, bad.
Between then and part 1, I realize what might draw me back to Supergirl: Superman. Clark and Lois are so much more interesting better characters than most of the SG characters. To be fair, if they were the main characters I would probably quickly hate them too, but in this dosage I’m more interested in them than especially Kara.
Also, this is such a cheap way to make this count as a SG episode. Somehow Alex and Jimmy just show up on a rewritten Earth-1, for no reason at all. That said, I am now slightly into Caitlyn/Alex, so there’s that.
Also, still pissed that the Flash characters get more respect than anyone else. Of course Cisco and Caitlyn get to be in all the episodes, and do things in them. Digg is sort of here, but has absolutely no reason to be in this one; barely the first one, and not a ton to do in the ‘Arrow’ episode.
Plus, the CGI in this episode is terrible. I usually do not complain about that, but this was so bad that it was distracting.
But now let’s circle around to what you probably know I’m going to talk about: what the fuck Oliver? Also, what the fuck writers regarding Oliver? He clearly cut some kind of deal with the Monitor, after the story went out of its way to establish how wrong it was when he cut a deal with the feds. Why even include that part in episode 1 if this is where the plot was going? Why have him and Felicity make up in episode 2 if this was where it was going? Why not show us what this is going to cost him (because you know he let this deal screw him over) if we want to say that that was somehow setup for him making the same mistake again?
Also, I may call Oliver a shit show, and say his life is a twelve layer shit cake, but this episode’s conclusion on that front doesn’t say to me that writers understand the character. I’m not even sure it knows what point it wants to make on that front, since it’s all ‘no Oliver, you don’t have to embrace the darkness and kill this guy’ only for the solution to be that he needs to turn around and kill the guy. Plus so much of this story seemed to be about Oliver and Barry understanding each other better, and showing why even though Barry has so much more ability, they need Oliver just as much in most situations to win the day; and I mean as Oliver, the darkness and the light and everything in between in him. But then the ending moral seems to be along the line of Oliver needs to be willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of better heroes or something and I’m not down with that.
Come to think of it, this does kind of feel like a Supergirl moral. It’s elitist that the more powerful heroes have to be the ones in charge, and that good morals are somehow inherent to some people and if you’re not a perfect person you aren’t really worth being a hero. Hmm, I’d kind of forgotten how much bitterness I had about the way SG worked; I don’t tend to think of that as why I stopped watching that show the same way I do with Flash, but I did feel it there too.
Lastly, kind of a terrible place to leave us over winter break.
Super lastly: I’m almost glad the Legends weren’t in this season’s crossover; I am aware that I could easily fall back into Legends in a way I highly doubt I would with Flash and SG and if they’d been in these episodes I might have been tempted to go back. Then again, if they had sucked as badly as everything else in these episodes it might have been one more thing I was reminded why I didn’t watch anymore.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 4x08
So this is the episode that I’m actually going to comment on. One comment on the Valencia plot, I picked up the fact that Heather was probably reading it wrong a long time before it was said. But considering how meta this episode is, I don’t think that’s a mistake on the writing’s part; I’m not even sure they were trying to hide that Valencia never used pronouns. That said, I’m not sure her saying she and Joe never see each other anymore tracks, and it makes things very different if we go back to when she and Josh were together and Josh would go to him for advice.
But the main thrust of this is that...I do kind of love what they do with Greg on meta level, but I don’t like it. It’s hysterical to me how they decide to get around the new casting and I did quite like the song, and I have to hand it to the writing/acting/directing, because half the time if I closed my eyes I could hear old Greg in the lines so they definitely were still writing him as the same character (changed and grown, but you know what I mean) but that doesn’t mean I fully accept it either. I can kind of see the problem in being so faithful to the character we knew, the new actor is just trying to do someone else’s performance and so their chemistry can’t find its own groove since it’s trying to recapture something they hadn’t established together.
Also, it’s weird, because I’ve been getting the vibe for a couple episodes now that they were planning to deal with the Greg question by the end of the season but this feels too early to be something to deal with in the endgame, and too late for them to be endgame. Especially with a new actor I can’t help thinking.
Elseworlds 1 (Flash)
Obviously I’m going to have to see more of how this plays out, but so far I’m not super feeling it. I think a lot of my problems may be tied to this being very much a Flash episode, and yet the only person I care about is Oliver. By making the contrast between Barry and Oliver such a focus it does do a better job than a lot of the crossovers of maintaining Oliver’s character than they sometimes do; but I think it’s a little telling that we only briefly see Digg and no one else from Arrow besides Oliver as Oliver has tended to mostly maintain his character in other crossovers (to contrast the world of Flash) but a lot of the others really get lost in other shows’ hands.
But before I deeply dive into that, why doesn’t Oliver have more of a reaction to the name Ivo? I don’t know if in universe there’s a reason it’s coming up again or if he’s supposed to already know the repetition. But seriously, you’ve got Ivo Labs and Amazo and Oliver doesn’t react. Hell, he brings up Anatoli in this episode, when they met on the Amazo being tortured by Ivo.
As Oliver is the only major player here that I’m interested in, I’m going to speculate wildly about what this is doing for his arc. Also, if I had to guess I’ll bet this has way more impact on Oliver going forward than Barry. When they switch back Barry is going to wake up and just be all ‘I’m so glad I’m me and no longer have to be angry asshole. Back to normal for me.’ While Oliver is the one who’s actually being given something to think about. Part of what drove me away from watching Flash is how much Barry is never challenged in his view of how to be, and I don’t get the impression this is actually doing that for him. ‘Hey, my powers work really well when I’m happy, I’ll keep being happy and untroubled by the consequences of my actions.’
On the other hand Oliver spends the episode being told he’s a total shit show and going ‘yeah, that’s pretty much me.’ Which of course feeds in to what I was talking about last week, where being Oliver is already Oliver’s punishment for the crime of being Oliver. I totally get why Barry treating the Arrow-skills lightly pissed him off; those skills have been purchased dearly and cost him more than even he wants to think about. And he doesn’t heal the way Barry does, not physically and not bounce back emotionally, he’s carrying scars of both kinds from every fight he’s ever had, and Barry has the gall to call act like it’s cool. The emotional scars don’t leave Oliver just because he’s in a different body, he’s still cursed with being Oliver Queen, and in the switch seems to have been cut off from the few things that make being Oliver a little more bearable.
I am annoyed at how long it took them to even try convincing people by saying ‘here’s some stuff that only I could know.’ There’s no way these teams compare notes often enough (especially with Oliver having been in jail) that there aren’t things the other wouldn’t know. (Admittedly, that is a terrible sentence.)
The scene where Iris talks about Oliver and Felicity and their relationship, that hurts. It’s something he needed to hear I think, but I could feel that blow and it’s a big one.
I did like that Oliver assumed Barry had fucked up the world again, it’s what I thought he should think; while Barry may not be responsible in this case he should be first assumption when things get super weird. (Also, Sara Diggle, never forget, never forgiven.)
The big fight is terrible. The character stuff in this episode sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, but I hated the fight scene.
Also, using the Smallville theme made me laugh a lot.
Also, also; last episode made a huge deal about Oliver not wearing the mask; why did Barry-Arrow even have one?
Elseworlds 2 (Arrow)
I may have hated everything about that episode. Nothing about it makes any sense and I don’t give it a pass for being part of the mini-arc; the Arrow characters get completely screwed over (even if logically it does make some sense), I have lost any desire I ever had to watch Batwoman and I now hate that it exists at all, and it was just all around bad.
The problem is that I hate the world of Batman; I had hoped that this was going to be a reinterpretation that somehow didn’t have Batman involved and barring that at least didn’t take place on Earth 1 where now they have to explain how we haven’t had all these comparisons to Batman before. Maybe if he’d been gone for like 15 years, very much become a legend more than recent memory, and when he was around was just fighting street crime rather than super villains; but this is never going to make sense. The only thing that almost works is Kate herself, for all this is very early and very minor characterization we get she doesn’t seem that bad, but I hate the world too much to watch the show for a maybe okay character.
The treatment of the Arrow characters doesn’t even feel like the Arrow writers wrote this. This was written by someone who thinks Oliver was out sleeping with women on QC business; Oliver was ship-wrecked as a 22 year old lay-about; he was not doing any QC business at the time. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have met this woman while tagging along on Robert’s business trip and hooked up with her, but that was 11-12 years ago; this was not written by someone who actually knows Oliver’s history.
I’m not even sure the person who wrote this watched the previous episode, because fuck you if Iris knew anything was wrong with ‘Barry’ in the equivalent of ten words Felicity got before sent off to the sideline. Oliver was acting completely weird for Barry and she went right on talking about big bads and breakfast; fuck you if you want to make Oliver and Felicity look worse in comparison this way. Yeah it’s true that they’re more strained and trying to find their way back to each other, but don’t pretend for a second that Iris didn’t had over the Flash ring after spending several minutes with what she thought was Barry but Oliver was barely even trying to act the part, while Felicity got ten seconds of them trying to keep her in the dark. Sure she’s going to kick herself for not seeing it, but the script sems to be saying something it has not earned at all.
Also, why didn’t the red lightning follow them to Gotham if that’s how it worked?
This episode’s attempt to analyze Barry and Oliver’ character fell completely flat for me. Why in any world would they hallucinate each other villains? Why is Oliver’s Malcolm when they were more or less getting along by the end and Malcolm in fact died saving Thea, only distantly connected to anything Oliver did? And sure, Barry does have his own difficulties, but he’s also fucking right that he doesn’t have a scratch on Oliver’s trauma. If I had a sense that Oliver’s trying to downplay his issues rather than the story trying to act like he needed to learn anything from the experience I’d roll right it; but I’m absolutely sure the story is trying to say Oliver should have equal sympathy for Barry and I don’t.
I hate that the Flash characters got to invade this episode but there was no reciprocity (unless the Arrow characters, including the rest of the team thank you very much, get to dominate the final part, and the first part was supposed to be more Supergirl or something). Yes, it makes sense, they have the experience to work with this mess, but I don’t want them here. It makes the writers write the whole ‘geek squad’ as if they’re on a Flash episode and I never really liked the way Flash handled the geek squad.
And seriously, I know filming this many connected shows all in Vancouver is a problem, but stop using that same building for every asylum story. I’ve seen that same staircase about twelve times by these shows in the last couple years.
So, if one of the goals of the crossover is to pull me back to any of the shows I’ve dropped or pick up the new one, it’s utterly failing. To be fair, it probably would have only taken me about 10 minutes into Batwoman to remember why I didn’t really want to watch it, so we just get the trouble out of the way.
Elseworlds 3 (Supergirl)
Well...I liked it better than the last part, maybe about even with part 1. So it probably evens out to...bad...yeah, bad.
Between then and part 1, I realize what might draw me back to Supergirl: Superman. Clark and Lois are so much more interesting better characters than most of the SG characters. To be fair, if they were the main characters I would probably quickly hate them too, but in this dosage I’m more interested in them than especially Kara.
Also, this is such a cheap way to make this count as a SG episode. Somehow Alex and Jimmy just show up on a rewritten Earth-1, for no reason at all. That said, I am now slightly into Caitlyn/Alex, so there’s that.
Also, still pissed that the Flash characters get more respect than anyone else. Of course Cisco and Caitlyn get to be in all the episodes, and do things in them. Digg is sort of here, but has absolutely no reason to be in this one; barely the first one, and not a ton to do in the ‘Arrow’ episode.
Plus, the CGI in this episode is terrible. I usually do not complain about that, but this was so bad that it was distracting.
But now let’s circle around to what you probably know I’m going to talk about: what the fuck Oliver? Also, what the fuck writers regarding Oliver? He clearly cut some kind of deal with the Monitor, after the story went out of its way to establish how wrong it was when he cut a deal with the feds. Why even include that part in episode 1 if this is where the plot was going? Why have him and Felicity make up in episode 2 if this was where it was going? Why not show us what this is going to cost him (because you know he let this deal screw him over) if we want to say that that was somehow setup for him making the same mistake again?
Also, I may call Oliver a shit show, and say his life is a twelve layer shit cake, but this episode’s conclusion on that front doesn’t say to me that writers understand the character. I’m not even sure it knows what point it wants to make on that front, since it’s all ‘no Oliver, you don’t have to embrace the darkness and kill this guy’ only for the solution to be that he needs to turn around and kill the guy. Plus so much of this story seemed to be about Oliver and Barry understanding each other better, and showing why even though Barry has so much more ability, they need Oliver just as much in most situations to win the day; and I mean as Oliver, the darkness and the light and everything in between in him. But then the ending moral seems to be along the line of Oliver needs to be willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of better heroes or something and I’m not down with that.
Come to think of it, this does kind of feel like a Supergirl moral. It’s elitist that the more powerful heroes have to be the ones in charge, and that good morals are somehow inherent to some people and if you’re not a perfect person you aren’t really worth being a hero. Hmm, I’d kind of forgotten how much bitterness I had about the way SG worked; I don’t tend to think of that as why I stopped watching that show the same way I do with Flash, but I did feel it there too.
Lastly, kind of a terrible place to leave us over winter break.
Super lastly: I’m almost glad the Legends weren’t in this season’s crossover; I am aware that I could easily fall back into Legends in a way I highly doubt I would with Flash and SG and if they’d been in these episodes I might have been tempted to go back. Then again, if they had sucked as badly as everything else in these episodes it might have been one more thing I was reminded why I didn’t watch anymore.