Elseworlds Part 2: Arrow Takes a Turn

This crossover is one of the best things that has ever happened on TV

By Lauren Piester Dec 11, 2018 2:00 AMTags
Elseworlds, Arrow, The Flash, SupergirlThe CW

RIP, body-swapped Oliver and Barry. We'll miss you dearly. 

Tonight's second part of the three-part Arrowverse crossover did not exactly solve that problem or any problems at all, but it did make a lot of progress and tackle a lot of concepts all at the same time. 

First of all, Oliver and Barry are no longer swapped, but now they're twins. Specifically criminal twins in matching leather jackets and bandanas. It's somehow possible that the twin looks are even weirder visually than seeing Barry and Oliver in the wrong superhero suits. That's the new reality Dr. John Deegan wrote when the Monitor gave him the book once again and told him to to better, dream bigger than last time. So now, Oliver and Barry are kinda old timey criminals on the run, and Diaz is a cop chasing after them while they've apparently gotta fight Black Suit Superman. 

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That's really just how things ended tonight, and where we're at heading into tomorrow night's Supergirl. Before we even got there, and before we got to Gotham City, we had to take a little trip to Star City to address a few things. 

Olicity Troubles

The real Oliver's first instinct was to not tell his wife, Felicity, about the swap, because they had so many issues at the moment that he didn't want to complicate it. But Felicity found out anyway, because when Cisco and Caitlin showed up, they assumed Oliver wasn't an idiot and had told his wife about what had happened. 

Felicity was sort of devastated, especially after hearing how quickly Iris believed it (to be fair though, she didn't believe it that quickly), but she jumped right into helping out and building a giant magnet(?) to draw in whatever was trying to get into the universe. (More on that in a minute!) 

The whole situation actually ended up helping Oliver and Felicity, who reconciled by the end of the episode. 

"You will always be the love of my life," Oliver told her. "People change. That never will." 

"They are made up now. They're in a good place," Arrow showrunner Beth Schwartz confirmed after a screening of the first two parts of the crossover. 

Schwartz said that the crossover came up at the perfect time in that storyline, because Oliver and Felicity's problems had to do with them being different people after he got out of prison, and now Oliver's had to become literally a different person.  

"He was able to understand her journey, which made for a perfect time for him to realize that he might have been overreacting in episode eight, and it was a nice resolution." 

Schwartz teased that they discuss it a little more in future episodes, but you can all rest easy, because Oliver and Felicity are doing OK, assuming they get out of whatever's happening tomorrow. 

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Welcome to Gotham City

We'll do a little bit more of a deep dive into the introduction of Batwoman, but so far, she's an impossibly cool lady in an abandoned building in a city where you can barely exist for two seconds without getting mugged, and boy did the three super friends not fit in. It made for some incredible moments, like the argument over whether or not Batman was a myth (Oliver REFUSES to believe it) and some serious bonding between Kara and Kate Kane, who know exactly who each other is and maybe also flirted with each other a little bit.

The trip to Gotham led to breaking into Arkham Asylum to find John Deegan, and that turned into a wild adventure in a mental hospital. Killer Frost got to fight the wife of Mr. Freeze, who had gotten ahold of his guns, and Oliver and Barry both fought each other and also each other's arch-nemesises. Oliver-as-Barry faced off against the Reverse Flash, and Barry-as-Oliver fought Malcolm Merlyn, but they were actually under the influence of something and fighting each other, and Batwoman had to break it up. 

Eventually, after getting that book away from Dr. Deegan, everyone had to leave Gotham, partly because they had some serious stuff to do, and partly because that's the only thing Batwoman wanted them to do.  

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Another Barry Allen

Thanks to Felicity's giant magnet, the Barry Allen of Earth-90, who happens to be the same Barry Allen from the 90s version of The Flash and happens to be played by John Wesley Shipp (who, in this universe, still looks like Barry's dad/Jay Garrick) arrived to explain what's going on. 

The Monitor is a guy who's going around testing various universes to see if they're ready to handle an incoming crisis. For some weird reason, his method of doing this is handing a crazy doctor a book that allows him to rewrite reality. None of this quite makes sense just yet, but OK! 

Earth-90 Flash joined the rest of the gang in facing off against the Monitor but it was a really sad attempt, because the Monitor just kinda zapped him away and stole the book back to give back to Deegan to have him try again, which is what led to the whole new reality there at the end. 

This Barry also asked a very confused Diggle why he wasn't wearing his ring, but we're going to have to wait to figure out what that's about. 

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Other bits and pieces: 

That Opening Sequence

The move to have Grant Gustin star as the Green Arrow in the opening montage was inspired, but we gotta whine about the fact that we didn't get Stephen Amell doing the same for last night's episode of The Flash. Rude, honestly. 

Batman's Not Real!

We will never get over Oliver's stubborn refusal to believe in the *actual* first vigilante, which Schwartz says she loved as a way to poke fun at how Arrow introduced Oliver as the first one. 

Supergirl and Batwoman

Friendship bonding, more-than-friendship bonding, outright flirting, whatever it was going on in the scenes between Kara and Kate was pretty darn delightful. Sure, Kara's basically made of sugar and Kate seems extremely jaded in a way that makes you think they might never get along, but they shared a moment there at the end and Kara outright said she could see through Kate's clothes and had seen all her tattoos, so we don't think we're reading into a connection they clearly had that went past just having famous superhero cousins. And yeah, we're into it. 

The crossover continues tomorrow night with Supergirl at 8 p.m. on the CW. Stay tuned for more coverage of this television event!