How Did The CW's DC Superhero Crossover Affect The Flash?

Find out what's next for Wally West

By Jean Bentley Nov 30, 2016 2:05 AMTags
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There are still two hours to go in The CW's big DC TV crossover week, as the teams from The Flash, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl fight off the alien Dominators who have invaded Earth-1. But the first of the three episodes has already been quite eventful for your favorite DC superheroes. 

A quick recap, for those who missed tonight's installment: A meteor landed in Central City, but it wasn't a meteor after all—it was an alien spaceship, and it turns out that the aliens are the Dominators (and the government has known about them since the ‘50s).While they said they came in peace, it doesn't really appear that is the case—you know, since they kidnapped and killed the president and all.

After Barry (Grant Gustin) and Cisco (Carlos Valdes) recruited Kara (Melissa Benoist) to join the fight, everyone from Team Flash, Team Arrow and Team Legends gathered to train together. While there, Stein (Victor Garber) told Barry about a recording he found from Future Barry saying not to trust anyone, and Cisco forced Barry to tell everyone about Flashpoint.

As if that weren't dramatic enough, the aliens mind controlled half the heroes to fight against the others (don't worry, Barry fixed it) before, at the end of the episode, abducting Oliver (Stephen Amell), Thea (Willa Holland), Ray (Brandon Routh), Sara (Caity Lotz) and Diggle (David Ramsey). To be continued!

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While the whole alien invasion situation will take a few more hours to fight off, we learned plenty about what's to come on The Flash after the first hour of the crossover event.

For starters: Wally West (Keiynan Lonsdale) is destined to become Kid Flash, no matter how badly Iris (Candice Patton), Joe (Jesse L. Martin) and Barry (Grant Gustin) try to stop him. So he's enlisted H.R.'s (Tom Cavanagh) help instead—which will clearly only end badly.

"It will not go well, as assumed," says executive producer Andrew Kreisberg. "What I love about this version of Wells...[is that] he is a genius in his own way. He's not a mathematical genius and he's not a physics genius the way the other Wellses were. But he has the capacity to see it in other people, and he has the capacity to see other people's talent and how to mine it and how to grow it. He sees that in Wally."

The CW

He continues, "It's an interesting relationship because a version of Wells was so important to Barry in season one, and a version of Wells was so important to Cisco in season two, and then this year it's Wally who gets this version of Wells that on the face of it may not be the world's greatest teacher, and yet every episode we find that moment for him to drop this wisdom bomb on everybody else that shocks them. It's kind of why they let him stay around when he's not providing any actual true value to the team—he really does have this value in keeping the team together."

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Although Wally's storyline wasn't necessarily connected to the wider crossover story, it was important that the producers not ignore the major cliffhanger we saw at the end of last week's episode.

"I think one of the things we always try to do, especially with the crossovers, is not make it feel like all of a sudden we're in this evergreen world that's completely disconnected to everything that's been happening previously," Kreisberg says. "At the end of [The Flash] episode 307, Wally became a speedster. That's huge. That's big news. To sort of gloss over that and not have anybody react, considering the myriad of reactions Joe has had to Barry becoming a speedster and Iris finding out, it felt like we'd be doing a disservice to the people who were watching The Flash and enjoying it."

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Plus, having the rest of the superheroes there provided a great distraction from the tremendous development that just happened. "Also, this was a good opportunity to advance Wally's story in terms of — they all kind of got over their, ‘Oh God, Wally is a speedster,' within the course of this giant episode where, what was the point of making sure Wally stays out of danger if the world is going to be destroyed by aliens? Him stepping into the fray and getting a little taste of things felt like it was an opportunity rather than something that we had to service because the story was telling us to."

We'll find out what repercussions Wally's newfound power—and new training regimen—will have when The Flash returns for its fall finale on Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 8 p.m. on The CW.