Reviews Series / Crisis On Infinite Earths 2019

Crisis of Infinite Disappointment

If there is one thing that Crisis knows how to do, it’s get your hopes up.

The crossover got off to a pretty strong start, having the fall run of Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl to set it up. The first three episodes work more than well enough to establish the Anti-Monitor as a multiversal threat and establish the stakes by killing off Oliver (and then setting him up to come back in a big way as the Spectre) and eventually destroying Earth-1, the last remnant of the multiverse, in the climax of the crossover. Unfortunately, this is where the quality starts to drop. The last two episodes are full of pointless plots and fridge logic that makes you question why virtually anything is happening, since there is absolutely no payoff - Oliver becomes the Spectre, only to die again in the exact same way he did the first time. Barry meets his Ezra Miller counterpart, which has no bearing on the story and simply wastes viewers’ time. Not-quite-Atom talks to the Mar Novu for all of two seconds, and somehow talks him out of becoming the Monitor, though some other Mar Novu becomes the Monitor anyway and the Anti-Monitor still exists. We see several more battles against the Shadow Demons, which really just kind of look flashy and never actually make you worry about the heroes. Then the Anti-Monitor gets blown up with some sort of shrink-bomb, which was developed as a plan roughly ten minutes beforehand. The first half of the final hour is devoted almost entirely to either fighting Beebo (yeah, they took time out of Crisis for fucking BEEBO) or establishing that the heroes are all on a new Earth-Prime which serves as Earth-1 and Earth-38 combined, when they could’ve been building up the not-quite-done conflict with the Anti-Monitor or be doing more than reminding us that Oliver is dead (again!) despite never concretely proving the fact.

And this doesn’t even cover everything that they didn’t do. By the end, we have no idea how the Anti-Monitor came to be (after his creation at the hands of the Monitor was alluded to in the climax) or what happened to Mia, Constantine, most of Team Flash, William, and Connor. Most of the Legends sit the Crossover out for reasons unclear. The list goes on.

In short, the Crisis is good at building up to the grandiose conflict. The stakes are palpable by the start of the third hour, and even more so by the end of that same hour. But everything that comes after is pretty much just letdown after letdown, two hours of which leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and one burning thought - “That’s it? Really?”

The silver lining is that the remainder of the 2019-20 seasons have time to explore the fallout of Crisis. There is an opportunity for Barry and Nash to have immense survivor’s guilt for the rest of the Flash a Season 6 over the events of Crisis - the former now that he knows the full extent of Oliver’s sacrifice, the latter knowing he unleashed the Anti-Monitor. Lex being in a seat of power will be interesting for the rest of this season of Supergirl. It’s unclear how exactly Arrow is planning on closing, and Legends and Batwoman probably won’t be too affected, given that the former hates crossovers for some reason and the nature of Crisis will be out-of-place for the latter, especially as it tries to come into its own on the network. But given the magnitude and quantity of letdowns we’ve previously seen from the Arrowverse, no more apparent than in Crisis itself or any Season 4 (literally any Season 4 from the four shows in Crisis that have made it that far), it’s not hard to imagine that the writers can and may very well screw this up too.