The Superhero TV Shows

Superhero TV Shows

Last year my review of the Arrowverse shows was based on the question, which is the most bonkers? Well there’s no point in doing that because the Crisis On Infinite Earths crossover event overwhelmed everything on that front. The multiverse destroyed, minor characters becoming cosmic beings, bringing in cameos from different TV and films (Tom Welling and Erica Durance, the Smallville Clark and Lois, Burt Ward from 60s Batman, Tom Ellis from Lucifer, Ezra Miller the movie Flash etc), Lex Luthor back from the dead messing with the Book Of Destiny, the headline stars of five shows and a couple of others becoming the seven paragons to save existence itself from the Anti-Monitor. It had it all, and it had too much, and that was before Batwoman got picked up by a different TV channel to the other shows in the UK so I saw four out of five parts out of order.

It also had the death of Oliver Queen, bringing to an end the show Arrow (though there were still two episodes to go after the Crisis) so I shall start there.

Arrow

This was sort of a Greatest Hits of Arrow, with Oliver being pulled into different universes at the behest of the Monitor in the run up to the Crisis. So we got re-mixes of old Arrow characters and themes and inevitably Arrow – The Next Generation made an appearance.

There was a re-iteration of what the creators thought the show was about – ridiculous stunts, using a bow as a melee weapon, and of course, seeking redemption through violence, but not as much violence as you’re capable of. Ollie dies in Crisis on Infinite Earths saving billions. He’s then resurrected two episodes later, at the same time as everyone in the multiverse, presumably including those billions, is wiped out. He dies again at the end so the one remaining universe can be created (bringing all the scattered shows together neatly, or as it turns out, awkwardly).

In the process he creates his ideal Star City, all our dead favourites come back to life so they can gather for his funeral (they even get my personal favourite, Rag Man, back for literally two scenes and three lines of dialogue, for some reason giving him the moral authority to make Wild Dog the successor of the Green Arrow). And then he gets to meet his wife in the afterlife, and it’s an idealised Queen Enterprises in an even more idealised Star City, though admittedly he says that’s just because that’s the first place he saw Felicity and there’s a bunch more to see.

Anyway Arrow is over, it was often cool, the second season was the best, we can draw a line under it now, or maybe an arrow pointing to all the other shows it span off!

You don’t like the segue? Sorry about that.

The Flash

The season splits into two; in the first half Barry Allen tries to change his fate, which is to die in the Crisis, and so missing that Ramsey Rosso is becoming Bloodwork, a villain whose blood controls people and makes him immortal. This gets out of control, with Barry being tempted by this immortality as a way to save something from the Crisis before, at the very last moment, stopping him and becoming caught up in the Crisis.

In the second half, the speed force is dying because they put the power of the undead Oliver Queen (Spectre) into it to break out of the Zeropoint, outside of space and time, and go back to the beginning of time to stop the Anti-Monitor. Don’t ask.

Having had his future daughter vanish due to time travel shenanigans at the end of last season, he now proceeds to lose his speed force, and also lose his wife into a mirror dimension, and it ends in a pretty dark place, though they do try to offer a small bit of hope or at least determination; Team Flash may be scattered but they have friends and intend to get everyone back somehow. Of course part of this is that filming was cut short by Coronavirus so this was not the ending they’d planned.

Supergirl 

Another season split in two by the Crisis. In the first half Leviathan, alien earth gods who keep humanity under control, plot to destroy the world; Lena Luthor, distraught at being lied to by Kara about being Supergirl plans to end violence by mind controlling everyone with Q-waves. This gets stopped just in time for Crisis after which...

Everything is different! Lex Luthor is alive, the most popular man on Earth, and also in charge of the DEO. Most of the team quit and join Martian Manhunter in his new detective agency and watchtower superlair, but Brainiac-5, at the urging of three other Brainiac-5s who were smart enough to survive the destruction of the multiverse, stays on as this is the only way to defeat Leviathan (who have been reset in this new world). So there’s a three-sided struggle between Lex Luthor, Leviathan and the Super Friends with Lex allying with one or the other. Meanwhile Lena Luthor starts off resetting her relationship with Lex, but this goes wrong and she and Kara come to a tentative agreement. Then there is the confrontation with Leviathan and it ends on an inadequate note (thanks Coronavirus) – Lex having out-plotted everyone but Team Supergirl not out for the count. One thing I hoped for was that now Supergirl is officially in the same world as the other shows the ending could have used characters – Kara is mates with Barry and she and Kate Kane had some moments of mutual respect in Crisis. But no (thanks Coronavius).

Anyway, I was talking about Kate Kane.

Batwoman

Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl all began with their titular characters facing a threat of the week that then builds to an all-consuming threat. Batwoman doesn’t do that; Kate puts on the batsuit in order to face down Alice, her sister, and the Wonderland gang. Then she puts on the wig and paints the bat symbol red so no one thinks she’s taking on the mantle of the Batman. The choice to make the central conflict a family one from the start is fine, especially as both Alice and her actor are some of the best bits of the show. Unfortunately some of the supporting cast aren’t quite there, and so when a non-Alice villain of the week dominates an episode and one of the weaker characters has some of the major plotlines I find myself wondering why I’m watching.

The stunts are pretty good.

There was a good fake-out after the Crisis, the first episode after was back to normal in Gotham City with nothing changed until the very end when an alternate version of Alice, who hasn’t been driven mad and become a supervillain, turns up. And then Kate has to choose between sisters. Absolutely stone cold plotting and character work for those two episodes.

The ending actually gets somewhere, though it’s not quite what they planned (thanks Coronavirus. In retrospect, this is clearly the set up to the big finale, with the Crows declaring war on Batwoman and Alice, driven to extremity, has killed the last person she loves, on a track for self-destruction. Maybe Batwoman will finally ask for help from her super-friends?)

So what is to be done? The show occasionally gestures at the fact Gotham City is corrupt from top to bottom, but it’s not really interested in that, it wants two sisters to be torn apart, and to do some cool stunts in between. Maybe it could learn something from another show with a city corrupt from top to bottom, a masked vigilante, and cool stunts, it finished recently, I’m sure they’d let you have a look at the scripts.

Or you could recast and reboot it, that’s good too.

Legends Of Tomorrow

Legends insists on having a reason to keep John Constantine about so they start off with Astra, the possessed girl he failed to save in his backstory in the failed Newcastle exorcism, releasing history’s greatest villains from hell as revenge. There are several episodes of this, during which they also take the opportunity to slightly prune the cast giving Brandon Routh a fine send-off after he played both his Arrowverse character Ray Palmer, the Atom, and also his Superman Returns character, a loss-ridden Clark Kent and Superman. They even threaten to remove Sara Lance, the team’s captain, who has defaulted to being the leader of this TV universe’s Justice League. Wild Dog kept trying to recruit her to lead Star(ling) City’s vigilantes, but bad news Rene, Arrow’s cancelled, you can’t revive it with the White Canary.

Constantine makes a deal to bring Astra’s mother back to life, but to do that he needs the loom of fate. Charlie, the shape-shifting punk of the team, is revealed to be one of the three fates. She rebelled and destroyed the loom to give free will to humanity. Previously she had scattered the pieces across the multiverse but some idiot has remade it so there’s only one universe and the two other fates can now find them.

When I write it like this it almost seems to make sense but there are bonkers episodes such as the one in which the fates win, remove free will and they are all trapped on television programs, which includes a second return to a knock-off of Mr Roger’s Neighbourhood (the first one being when Nora Darke, having acquired the powers of a fairy godmother, is babysitting a young girl for some reason; this has the triumphant return of the Puppets of Tomorrow). Sara Lance, having been blinded by one of the fates, wins the chalice from the Greek god Dionysus at a game of college beer pong; having been granted immortality for one day they find themselves trapped in an England being overrun by zombies.

Being a shorter season than the other shows (other than Arrow) they had completed filming before the Coronavirus. Not that I thought that had effected the general weirdness. I’m assuming Sara Lance and Ray Palmer’s heavy presence in the Crisis crossover accounts for them not appearing a lot in some episodes.

A Failure To Conclude

If we were to ask which is the most bonkers, it’s Legends of Tomorrow. But the weirdness of Crisis on Infinite Earths, though not the highwater mark of crossovers (probably Crisis on Earth X) manages to infect all the shows to one extent or another. And then Batwoman, Supergirl and The Flash fail to finish properly, so that loses the opportunity for this to pay off. (I always felt the season finales of Flash Season 1/ Arrow Season 3 in which Barry Allen sprints halfway round the world to rescue members of Team Arrow in the Arrow episode before running back to deal with his own problems, following which Oliver Queen joins Flash and Firestorm just in time for the final battle on the Flash was the best use. Also occasionally members of Team Arrow/Flash would turn up in each other’s city to help out or consult was pretty good. More super team exchange programs please).

What is to be done with Batwoman I asked, and what is to be done with all these supershows? Have they passed their peak? Maybe, though Legends of Tomorrow proves they are not out of imagination and Batwoman shows they have new twists, even if most of the ones they use were not to my taste.

And the answer to what is to be done is I will almost certainly be back to watch these ridiculous stunt-filled soap operas next year. And maybe I will write up a post-season analysis and have a gimmicky hook to hang it on.

The shows finished in an unsatisfying way thanks to coronavirus. I don’t have that excuse, but here’s my unsatisfying ending anyway