Recap / Arrow S 8 E 8 Crisis On Infinite Earths Hour Four

With only the Paragons left to save the Multiverse, the unlikely group of heroes must stop the Anti-Monitor from achieving his ultimate victory.

Tropes used in this episode:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Oliver's stint as the Spectre also happens to be his swansong.
• Adapted Out: Given the Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians of the Universe are absent from the Arrowverse, the adaptation removes Krona from the narrative while reworking Mar Novu's origin to take his place and set this whole mess in motion.
• All for Nothing: Ryan Choi is able to convince Mar Novu not to open the gate into the antimatter universe, despite Luthor's cajoling. However, the heroes still arrive there and are told by the Anti-Monitor himself that while their efforts may have been successful in their universe, there's always one version of Novu who will ignore that warning and open the gate regardless.
• All Your Powers Combined: All the paragons lend Oliver their collective strength to finish off the Anti-Monitor.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • The nature of the memories that Kate, J'onn, Oliver, and Sara find themselves in; people in the original memories react to the new people appearing there, and J'onn taking the time to tell Invasion-era Oliver and Kara about the future implies that the situation may be something like time travel (something else the Speed Force is capable of). Furthermore, the "memory" Sara appears in took place when she was dead and none of the others was present, lending credence to the notion that the whole thing is more than a Speed Force illusion.
  • What was the DCEU Flash doing in the Speed Force? Was his Earth affected by the Crisis? For now, these questions are left up in the air.
• And This Is for...: While fighting the shadow demons, Sara dedicates one of her kills to Oliver.
• Anti-Climax: Barry begs Spectre/Oliver to help him by enhancing his Speed Force. Oliver moves close to him and simply touches Barry's forehead with a single finger.
  Spectre/Oiver: There, I have unlocked your potential.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Invasion-era Oliver and Kara are completely bemused by J'onn's story about the Crisis.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: To be fair to Lex, he was literally asking for it.
  Lex: Let me make it easy for you. Ask me what I'm up to. Go 'head.
  Kara: [sighs] What are you up to, Lex?
  Lex: Universal domination, of course.
• Badass Boast: Oliver and the Anti-Monitor trade them just before their final showdown.
  Anti-Monitor: You believe Corrigan prepared you for this fight.
  Oliver: I believe my entire life prepared me for this fight.
  Anti-Monitor: All life ends. Only death is eternal. Only I am eternal.
  Oliver: We'll see about that.
• Beam-O-War:
  • Between Supergirl and Lex, when the latter tries to manipulate Mar Novu into helping him rule the universe.
  • Between Oliver and the Anti-Monitor.
• Brutal Honesty: Lex is quick to reveal his plan of universal domination and attack Kara and Ryan.
• Buffy Speak: When he sees Oliver wearing a suit in the Speed Force, Barry notes that he doesn't look "Spectre-y" anymore.
• Call-Back:
  • As he becomes the Spectre, Oliver sees flashes of his past battles with Merlyn, Nyssa, Slade, Ra's Al-Ghul, Damien Darhk, and Prometheus, driving home that every fight in his life has been leading up to his final confrontation with the Anti-Monitor.
  • Several of them, as the Speed Force brings the heroes to important points of time in their lives.
    • Oliver and Barry meet again back where they first met.
    • Kate stumbles upon Oliver and Ray arguing.
    • J'onn meets Kara and Oliver shortly before the final battle against the Dominators.
    • Barry first meets Clark, Lois and Oliver shortly after defeating Deegan and then Diggle and Laurel shortly after Sara's death. Also noticeable is the stab wound on Laurel's stomach.
• The Cameo: Barry's first stop in his journey through the Speed Force brings him to STAR Labs. He is stunned to find his counterpart from the DC Extended Universe, who appears to be lost in the Speed Force and unaware of the Crisis.
  DCEU Flash: What the hell is this?
  Earth-1 Flash: I'm asking myself the same question...literally. This can't be happening. What are you doing here?
  DCEU Flash: Well, I'll tell you that when you tell me where "here" is.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Ryan attempts it during the fight against the Shadow Demons, with J'onn and Lex joining in, only for Barry to note they should focus, considering they are in the fight of their lives.
• Character Catchphrase: In truly epic fashion, Oliver utters his for the last time as he finishes off the Anti-Monitor, putting an appropriate spin on it in the process.
  Oliver: You have failed this universe!
• Continuity Nod: In the memory of Sara's death, neither Diggle nor Laurel recognise the Flash; while John had met Barry before that, the crossover where he got to know Barry as the Flash hasn't happened yet.
• Cutting the Knot: After catching up to Lex, Kara declares she'll figure out what his plan is. Lex tells her she could just ask him to tell her.
• Deader than Dead: Killing the Anti-Monitor obliterates Oliver's very soul, making resurrection impossible by any known means.
• Despair Event Horizon: After the Time Skip from the last episode, Kara and Sara are noted by Ryan to have lost all hope. They later regain it after Barry's return and Oliver appearing before them.
• Determinator: Despite the seemingly hopeless situation, Kate, Ryan, and Lex refuse to abandon hope; Kate continues training for an impending fight, while Ryan and Lex work on a means of escaping the Vanishing Point.
• Dissonant Serenity: Throughout the episode, Oliver's demeanor can be best described as "unconcerned." As a ghost with access to the cosmic knowledge of the universe, he really has no reason to be worried about anything.
  Oliver: Dying is easy. The dead are at peace. It's living that's the hard part.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Lex not only used the Book of Destiny to survive the antimatter wave, he also gave himself the power to fire white blasts of energy from his hands.
• Enemy Mine: Finally played straight when Luthor helps Ryan Choi build an improvised time machine, and later when he joins the other Paragons in fighting the Shadow Demons. However, it's no secret that he's doing it only for himself.
  Lex Luthor: If anyone's gonna take over the universe, it's gonna be me!
• Enemy to All Living Things: Jim Corrigan describes the Anti-Monitor as such, for good reason.
  Oliver: Who am I fighting?
  Corrigan: Not who. What. The Anti-Monitor.
  Oliver: The Monitor's adversary.
  Corrigan: Not just adversary. A being that stands against all there ever was or will be. The apocalypse itself given life and form and terrible purpose.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: A variation when the heroes arrive at the Dawn of Time — and find the Anti-Monitor still there despite Kara's team changing Mar Novu's history. As Mobius points out, yes, they stopped their Mar Novu from opening the gate...but he was only one man across countless universes. The very nature of the Multiverse means there are countless other versions of the once and future Monitor spread out all across the infinitude. All it takes is one of those alternate Mar Novus — one with the same towering ambition as his Prime counterpart — to recreate the fateful experiment, open the gate to the Dawn of Time, and set this whole mess in motion all over again. As the Anti-Monitor succinctly puts it, his existence is an inevitability.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Lex represents the evil, while the Anti-Monitor represents oblivion. Despite this, it's still very hard to get Lex Luthor to commit to being a team player.
• Face Death with Dignity: Having defeated the Anti-Monitor, Oliver is at peace in his final moments, perishing as a new universe - and in turn, a new multiverse - is brought into existence.
• Fade to White: The episode ends with this.
• Flashback: The episode opens with one: 10,000 years ago on the Planet Maltus, Mar Novu and his wife unwillingly brought the Anti-Monitor to this universe during a time travel experiment gone awry. Kara, Ryan and Lex later time travel to this point.
• Friendship Moment: The whole episode is basically one big friendship moment, with flashbacks to their hardships and struggles, showcasing how far the heroes have come since then, now regarding each other as True Companions.
• Genre Savvy: Lex muses about the possible dangers on an alien world like Chest Bursters, then asks if Kara has ever seen a movie.
• Good Feels Good: Luthor actually likes the feeling of doing something heroic.
  Lex: So this is what being a hero feels like. Interesting.
• Got Volunteered: Still seething from Lex's act in the previous episode, Kara nominates him as the first to try out the improvised time machine he and Ryan built. Lex goes along with it, although fortunately for him, it doesn't work.
  Ryan: Hey, team. We're repurposing leftover Time Masters tech. Mr. Luthor and I think we've retrofitted it into a teleportation device.
  Kate: To teleport us to where, exactly?
  J'onn: Kate makes a good point; there is no...there out there anymore.
  Sara: So we send somebody to test it.
  J'onn: I'll go.
  Kara: No, we've lost too many good people already. Thanks for volunteering, Lex.
• Hand Blast: Lex gave himself the ability to fire these, strong enough to rival Kara's heat vision.
• The Hero Dies: Oliver Queen, the man who started the Arrowverse and the protagonist of this show (this is an Arrow episode), is Killed Off for Real after sacrificing his soul.
• Hero of Another Story: Barry Allen meets his DC Extended Universe counterpart, who is stuck in the Speed Force for some reason.
• Heroic Sacrifice: During their confrontation, the Spectre obliterates the Anti-Monitor in a final show of force, sacrificing Oliver's soul to do so.
• Hold the Line: The Paragons have to hold off the Anti-Monitor's shadow demons long enough for Oliver to destroy the Anti-Monitor and reboot the multiverse.
• Hope Bringer: The Spectre arrives just as the Paragons' hopes are circling the drain, giving them a fighting chance at defeating the Anti-Monitor.
• Hypocritical Humor: Novu refers to Lex as "the hairless one"; Novu himself only has a few strips of hair on his head, barely more than Lex.
• I Am the Noun: The Anti-Monitor seemingly equates himself with death.
  Mobius: All life ends. Only death is eternal. Only I am eternal.
• Insufferable Genius: Ryan finds it very hard to work with Luthor. Lex, for his part, complains that Ryan's IQ isn't higher than 200.
  Ryan: "Narcissist", "sociopath", "evil genius"...there are a lot of ways to describe Lex Luthor. But I find "douchebag" to be the most descriptive.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While he's only saying it as a taunt (and naturally, omits the detail that he only did so to spite Lena after she'd shot him in the chest), Lex isn't wrong when he says that he did what Kara failed to do by telling Lena the truth about Kara's identity.
• Killed Off for Real: Farewell, Oliver Queen. You have saved the multiverse, to say the least.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Unlike the other Paragons, Ryan Choi is just a normal person who has zero combat experience. As such, while the other Paragons can hold their own in the big fight, he just runs around flailing his arms and hoping he hits something. However, since the Shadow Demons are not really strong individually, he manages to strike down a few of them.
• Lampshade Hanging: On Malthus, Ryan wonders aloud why a forest on an alien planet doesn't look more alien. The way Kara tells him to focus, it sounds almost like the writers going 'Don't over-examine that.'
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Barry meeting his DCEU counterpart, especially the part where he couldn't believe it was actually happening. For a long time, fans had the same sentiment in regards to the TV and film 'verses crossing over.
  • This is still an Arrow episode, so it is only appropriate that the show that introduced us to Oliver Queen, and ultimately the Arrowverse at large, marks his final farewell.
  • The fact that the Spectre, formerly the Green Arrow, kickstarted the rebirth of the Multiverse, gives a whole new meaning to the term "Arrowverse".
• Magical Defibrillator: Played with. Barry awakens the supposed corpse of Sara in a scene about her death by jolting her with Speed Force energy, but it's because she's not actually dead, and it is an illusion of a past event.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The scale of Novu's mistake in traveling to the dawn of time becomes clear to him the instant he lays eyes on the Anti-Monitor.
• Mythology Gag:
  • DCEU Barry mistakes Earth-1 Barry for a cosplaying fan and offers to do a selfie. By the time this episode aired, superheroes in the DC Extended Universe had grown accustomed to doing selfies with fans, as seen in Aquaman and SHAZAM!
  • Kara holding the remnants of Superman's outfit in a Heroic BSoD is a reversal of the iconic Crisis cover of Superman holding Supergirl's dead body.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Mar Novu trying to travel to the dawn of time opened the breach to the Antimatter Universe and brought the Anti-Monitor to this universe.
• Not Named in Opening Credits: Unsurprisingly, Ezra Miller is not named in the opening credits, to keep the scene where he appears a complete surprise.
• Origins Episode: The crossover's penultimate installment reveals the origins of the Arrowverse incarnations of Mar Novu and Mobius — and with it the genesis of the Crisis.
• Peaceful in Death: As a result of his Character Development over Season Eight, Oliver is completely at peace with his death, and even feels that he's getting the easy part of the deal, and that the real heroes are the ones who survive and have to keep going on being heroes.
  Barry: It cost you your family, Oliver. It cost you your life.
  Oliver: Dying's the easy part. The dead are at peace. But the real heroes are the ones who have to keep going.
• The Power of Trust: The Spectre/Oliver asks if Barry trusts him more than once. Barry doesn't even hesitate in affirmation once he is sure he is talking to Oliver, noting he does "with every cell in [his] body."
• Retcon: As discussed in All for Nothing, the Monitor is apparently not as singular as all previous appearances would have viewers believe (or at least, he wasn't before becoming the Monitor), with no prior indication that this is the case.
• Rule of Symbolism: Sara and Barry being the ones by Oliver's side when he finally passes — and not just as the lead protagonists of the first two Arrow spinoffs. Sara represents the past and who Oliver used to be before Lian Yu. Barry by contrast represents the Present and is the living face of the legacy Oliver built (both in-universe and on a Meta level). Together, Oliver knows the future is safe in their hands.
• Satanic Archetype: Oliver and Jim Corrigan both describe the Anti-Monitor as the Monitor's "adversary" (the literal meaning of "Satan"). Corrigan goes a step further, describing him as an enemy of everything that is or ever has been and a living embodiment of the apocalypse.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: This is Oliver's Plan B if the heroes fail to stop the Anti-Monitor at the Dawn of Time: Send a team back to ancient Maltus to prevent Mar Novu from opening the gate to the Dawn of Time (thereby preventing the chain of events that unleash the Anti-Monitor and the Crisis). While the mission technically succeeds, it ultimately fails as another variant of Mar Novu elsewhere in the ancient Multiverse also pursued the same experiment and set this whole mess in motion all over again.
• Shout-Out: Ryan finds Oliver's new outfit to be "very Sith".
• Spirit Advisor: Oliver acts as a literal one to Barry throughout the episode.
• Time-Passage Beard: Ryan has grown a beard during the weeks he and the other Paragons have been stranded at the Vanishing Point.
• Time Skip: For most of the survivors, weeks have passed since they were stranded in the Vanishing Point. Averted for Barry, who tried to enter the Speed Force as an escape, only to be deposited two seconds later from his perspective after time has passed for the others.
• Time to Unlock More True Potential: To help the Paragons escape Vanishing Point, Oliver-as-Spectre unlocks Barry's full potential with the Speed Force.
• V-Formation Team Shot: The Paragons stand together in this formation as they confront the Anti-Monitor in his own universe.
• Voice of the Legion: How Oliver tends to sound as The Spectre. He can still utilize his normal speaking voice, however, as shown when he first greets Barry within the Speed Force.
• Wham Shot: The aforementioned cameo from Ezra Miller, made that much more impactful for being kept secret until the episode's broadcast. (Since unlike Tom Ellis, Ezra managed to completely avoid being spotted at the filming location.)
• What the Hell, Hero?: Played for Laughs. When Ryan notes that he got through to Novu, who wouldn't end up opening his portal, Lex notes the following in annoyance.
  Lex: You just ruined a perfectly good bad guy plan, you know that, new guy?
• Xanatos Gambit: When reuniting with the survivors at the Vanishing Point, Oliver knows the odds of the Paragons beating the Anti-Monitor at the Dawn of Time aren't in their favor. They need a backup plan just in case, which is why he proposes sending a team back to Maltus 10,000 years ago. Either the Paragons will prevail at the Dawn of Time, or the Maltus Team will successfully persuade the younger Mar Novu to abandon his experiment (thus preventing the chain of events that unleash Mobius and trigger the Crisis). Unfortunately, everybody learns too late that Plan B was doomed from the start. The heroes didn't take into account Mar Novu's countless variants across the Multiverse and how one of them would inevitably still pursue his experiment and start this whole mess all over again. Only Plan A ultimately works (though not without casualties, as Oliver gives his life to stop Mobius and reboot the Multiverse).
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: While the Paragons are stuck in the Vanishing Point, Barry is shown being flung out of the Speed Force and he learns that he's been gone for weeks. From his perspective, however, mere seconds have passed.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Kara encourages a self-doubting Ryan to live up to his title of Paragon of Humanity, prompting him to joke that she might as well be the Paragon of Pep Talk.
• You Can't Fight Fate: The Anti-Monitor's existence is an inevitability; even after Ryan convinced one universe's Mar Novu not to travel to the dawn of time, at least one of Novu's alternate selves would follow through with the experiment.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Kara's only reaction to Lex disappearing in the short time she looked away from him while talking to Ryan is to ask "Where's Lex?" in an annoyed tone before sighing, giving this impression in spades.

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