Crisis on Infinite Earths (parts four and five)

I had originally planned to watch the final two parts of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” – presented as Arrow 8.8 and Legends of Tomorrow 5.0 – over two nights, but part four was so lousy and uninspired that I decided to stampede to the end, and I’m really glad that I did, because part five was downright fun.

So the big changes to the Arrowverse are that the Superpeoples’ Earth was merged with the Arrow/Flash/Batwoman/Legends Earth and Black Lightning’s Earth, and now Supergirl’s National City is on the other side of the river from Flash’s Central City. Atop that, Diggle’s daughter is alive again, Superman and Lois have two kids, Lex Luthor has been a good guy who’s just won the Nobel Prize, and Lynda Carter’s no longer the president. A bunch of other DC shows now have their own Earths, and at the end of the story, seven of the heroes (Barry, Kara, Sara, Kate, Clark, J’onn, and Jefferson) get together to hang out in the Hall of Justice (the building was introduced in the 2016 crossover), where there’s a monkey named Gleek running around and the old Super Friends theme plays. Best ending possible, I’d say.

Otherwise, part four was a last roundup for Stephen Amell to have yet another death scene and to marvel at how months apparently passed at the Vanishing Point but Kate kept her hair perfect. Part five was what I understand is the usual Legends of Tomorrow mayhem, with enough violence and superhero action to keep our son completely riveted and enough romance novels and fifty-foot teddy bears to keep the grownups baffled. Lots of the usual Arrowverse talk about how tough it is being a hero as well, but balanced with the show’s playful and silly spirit.

So I reckon they’ve left the big impacts on the Batwoman storyline for us to learn about in a few days, so stay tuned for that. Hopefully the next time we see the Hall of Justice, Barry will have cleaned the place up. And if any of you readers happen to see any fan art with our new seven Super Friends drawn in the classic style of the Alex Toth originals, won’t you please drop me a line? I’d love to see this cover below done with the TV gang. (Bonus points if they have somebody redraw Tyler Hoechlin’s face in a Curt Swan style.)

But fun aside, did it work? Well, I honestly don’t know that they did everything that they could or should have done. The spit-n-cough cameos from Ashley Scott, Burt Ward, and Robert Wuhl were cute, but the actors could have been given more substantial roles to play somewhere in the narrative, couldn’t they? There’s a brief bit in part four where “our” Flash meets the Flash played by Ezra Miller in the current movies, which was nice. I suppose Zachary Levi or Gal Gadot or Margot Robbie are outside the TV shows’ budget, so it was nice to see somebody from the big screen show up on TV, where I think DC’s superhero stories are told better.

But speaking of Levi and Gadot, this really was a fine opportunity to introduce DC’s other big hero names into the Arrowverse, and I think I’m disappointed that they didn’t give us the chance to meet Shazam, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern. Some footage which may have been from the Ryan Reynolds GL film is in the “new worlds” montage at least, but there should be a Green Lantern on the new combined Earth, not on his own world, because that’s precisely the problem that this story solved. And TV is long overdue a Wonder Woman. I hope some of the big names start appearing as guests on the Arrowverse shows in the future.

Anyway, wonder what they’re going to do for the November 2020 crossover? Hopefully something a shade smaller…?

Super Friends cover credit: Pencil Ink Blog

The Flash 6.9 – Crisis on Infinite Earths (part three)

First things first: our son was furious about the month-long wait before the next episode. A whole month! I’d make a crack about the age of instant gratification, but then again, when Disney+ launched, at least three people I follow on Twitter whined about having to wait a week between episodes of The Mandalorian.

Anyway, much like episode two, this part was agonizing talk-talk-talk while all two hundred actors with speaking parts got their names onscreen, and then it got entertaining. We got a far shorter cameo from one member of the cast of Birds of Prey than I expected, and an incredibly surprising appearance by Tom Ellis from the Fox/Netflix series Lucifer. He and John Constantine share some dialogue that’s certain to please anybody familiar with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic.

John Wesley Shipp also shows up as the Flash from his 1990-91 series, and not only gets that great theme song, but an actual clip from his series. Cress Williams gets to cross over from Black Lightning, because it was about time he met the rest of these characters. The most dramatic moment in the story comes when Supergirl is about to do something very dangerous and stupid with the Book of Destiny and Batwoman stares her down.

So it cruises to a cliffhanger that was pretty much in line with what I was expecting, but there’s a downright brilliant twist right before we were set to go to the credits. Jon Cryer may have just overtaken John Shea as my favorite Lex Luthor, put it that way.

So since we’re pausing this story for a month, I guess my only real complaint is that they missed a serious trick in identifying the seven essential “paragon” characters. Five of them are from the regular casts of these shows. We see these characters every week. Instead of just giving playful winks with cameo appearances from Burt Ward and Ashley Scott and Tom Welling, it would have been smashing to have them play substantial parts as the paragons (maybe adding Teri Hatcher and Lynda Carter?) and let the regular cast members be tasked with protecting them. It just seems like a missed opportunity, but it’s pretty fun anyway.

Lois & Clark 3.12 – Never on Sunday

So season two of both Lois & Clark and its rival, seaQuest DSV saw both shows tumble in the ratings. That’s in part because Fox smelled blood and sicced The Simpsons on them, and in part because the first half of L&C‘s second year emphasized wacky villains of the week played by goofball celebrities instead of the heroes, the world of the Daily Planet, and the slow, satisfying burn of Lois Lane and Clark Kent falling in love.

By the end of the year, things had course-corrected somewhat, the show got renewed, and in the short term, things worked in the ratings. Season three was when Lois accepted Clark’s way, way, way too premature proposal, but only after telling him that she had deduced that he was Superman. The frisson of having the two on an equal footing and planning for a wedding did grow audiences, and the show was regularly in the top thirty. NBC had blinked and moved seaBore to another night, Murder She Wrote was finally showing signs of age, and things should have been good, except the show was just plain lousy.

If you want to do a show where Lois and Clark are the focus and Superman’s an incidental character, then the threat-of-the-week doesn’t have to be major or massive, which explains why the first season, as designed by Deborah Joy LeVine, was so satisfying. But with Superman given greater prominence in seasons two and three, then they needed to come up with interesting, unique challenges and take them seriously and they didn’t. In season three, they were still doing comical baddies of the week, played by the likes of Mac Davis, Dave Coulier, and the Joe Isuzu guy.

Worse, Lois Lane devolved. The tough, resourceful Lois from season one with a million connections, drive, and determination was certainly seen as vunerable when her defenses cracked, and her impulses sometimes got the better of her. But season three’s Lois was weak and stupid and bumbling. She whined, she broke down. She wasn’t in control of anything anymore.

The first fourteen episodes of season three were mostly terrible, but there were two that didn’t have me rage-posting to the newsgroup. “Ultra Woman” was another red kryptonite episode. It had another dopey sitcom villain, played by Shelley Long, but it did open Lois’s eyes to Clark’s responsibilities as Superman. Plus I like red kryptonite, and it had Teri Hatcher in a tight spandex costume and I’m only human.

But Grant Rosenberg’s “Never on Sunday” was the best story of the year by about ten thousand miles. It guest-starred Cress Williams, who is currently playing the other side of the superpowered law and order equation as Black Lightning on the CW, as a minor villain from the comics called Baron Sunday. For one shining moment, Superman had a serious, believable, and interesting threat, played by an actor who wasn’t doing this for laughs.

And all these years later, “Never on Sunday” is still an extremely good hour of adventure television, with a couple of familiar faces in the cast. Beverly Garland had a recurring role at this time as Lois’s mother, and there’s a cute subplot about her slowly steamrolling Lois and Clark’s wedding plans with her own, and Les Lannom has a small part as one of Baron Sunday’s victims. It must have been around the time this first aired (January 1996) that I finally landed eight or ten episodes of Harry O in a tape trade, but none of them had Lannom’s recurring role as Lester Hodges in them, so I probably didn’t connect the two back then!

And our son was pleasantly creeped out by bits of it. Baron Sunday is a sorcerer who uses voodoo to frighten people to death, and he’s having trouble killing Clark Kent for an old incident that our hero doesn’t really know all about. He’s able to give Clark a nightmare of being sealed in a steel coffin, and the combination of Dean Cain’s scared-to-death acting and the freaky images of the coffin with a horrible grinding noise gave our son the heebie-jeebies.

One final note: I’m not sure what he’s like in the funnybooks, but the TV Baron Sunday is a massively successful stage magician who quietly uses voodoo on the side, and his latest tour has brought him to Metropolis. His PR team announces him to the Daily Planet by way of an old-fashioned folder press kit, with some 8×10 color glossies in one pocket and typed copy in the other, along with a pair of comped tickets. When this aired, I collected press kits and I wanted that prop press kit so badly it hurt. (I still have two: for Jurassic Park and the godawful 1990s Land of the Lost remake.) Maybe I shouldn’t have been such a know-it-all jerk on the newsgroup and let all the producers know how many pillows I was throwing at the screen every Sunday. If I’d have been sweet and polite, maybe one of them would have let me have it!