TV Review: Crisis on Earth X

TV Review: Crisis on Earth X

There is no more understandable or predictable sin than going back to the well once too often.  If something succeeds, then you do it again, only bigger.  And if THAT succeeds, then wash, rinse, repeat.  If the first Star Wars trilogy was innovative, then another one will be better; if the second trilogy makes a lot of money, then do some more until the people stop buying tickets.

 It’s amazing when someone dodges this bullet and does a sequel or follow up that is better than the original.  The third Mad Max film, Beyond Thunderdome, was better than the second one, which itself was better than the low-budget original (and most critics think the fourth installment, Fury Road, was the best of them all).  But it is hard to come up with other examples where someone tried to do “the same, but better” and actually succeeded.

As of this week there is another example—CW’s second “crossover event,” Crisis on Earth X, is head and shoulders above last year’s Heroes vs. Aliens event.  It’s almost like they learned what mistakes to avoid last year, and then . . . avoided them.  It is a great four hours of television that is greater than the sum of its parts, which are estimable.

There were a couple of obvious problems with Heroes vs. Aliens.  First, the threat was some new species of alien called Dominators that had not been introduced into the CWverse beforehand, meaning that the stakes were not immediately understood as cataclysmic.  Second, the episode of Supergirl dedicated to the event was completely irrelevant, until the crossover aspect was introduced in the last two minutes.  Third, the plan the good guys had seemed sort of lame; if I remember correctly, The Flash wanted Supergirl to do mock attacks, so they could test battle strategies on her because she, like the Dominators, was an alien.

The biggest problem was that each show—Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow—held true to their own casts and production style, which made the overall arc inconsistent and difficult to follow for those who didn’t watch all of them (I follow three of them but gave up on Arrow very quickly).  The plot jerked all over the place as each show tended to their own story arcs and characters and only provisionally attended to the quality of the event.

That is NOT the case with Crisis on Earth X.  It is essentially a 4-part mini-series, with every scene directed to serving the overarching plot and not the characters of whatever series bears the title of the episode.  The episode of Supergirl that started it off was about Barry Allen and Iris West’s wedding; Supergirl (and her sister Alex) were attending, but the opening scene is all about The Flash.  Some of the Legends don’t show up until the Legends’ episode, but the cast is so full that frankly it’s a relief.  The character of Win Schott is not in the Supergirl segment, but does an impressive bit during The Flash episode.

There was truly a lot of “crossover” interaction among the cast, most notably Alex Danvers getting drunk at the rehearsal dinner and hooking up with Legends’ Sara Lance.  The friendship between Barry Allen and Kara Danvers aka Supergirl had already been established, but Grant Gustin and Melissa Benoit have a wonderful chemistry.  Likewise, Barry’s friendship with Oliver Queen had been establish, but their scenes are true interactions and not just Steven Amell “guest starring” on The Flash (well, technically they were on Supergirl, but as I said, it is best to forget the individual show titles and just think of the shows as episodes 1-4 of a mini-series). 

The choice of antagonist was well-considered, as Nazis from another planet are new to the CWverse (I think I should refer to it as the “Arrowverse” but like I said, I don’t watch Arrow) yet familiar.  Any fan of sci-fi (which I am assuming takes up most of the audience for these shows) would have no trouble believing in an alternate universe where Nazis rule Earth, and Nazis as an enemy is a known quantity (just ask Indiana Jones).  It also works as a meta-concept, given that a certain highly placed public figure has said that he thinks Nazis are nice people too, so they can attack Nazis but can claim not to be making any political statement even when the sub-text has become text.

You can quibble with some of the plotting, but on a tale of this magnitude some slack is deserved.  Gaining access to the Nazi facility by having this universe’s Arrow impersonate Earth-X’s Arrow, when they know there is a doppelganger, is just lazy writing.  The sheer number of superheroes demanded crowd control at some point, and the Nazi guards were as accurate with machine guns as Imperial Stormtroopers are with blasters (that is to say, they can’t hit the side of a barn if they were inside the barn).

But the result was a four-hour mini-series that was easily the equal of the Netflix series Jessica Jones or Daredevil season one.  It is also nice to have a science fiction show that has epic CGI battles, but also takes time to develop characters and invests in emotional payoffs (spoiler: someone dies).  The series featured not one but two same sex couples kissing, and definitively staked out a position that Nazis are not good at a time when that message, sadly, needs to be refreshed with a lot of people.

Crisis on Earth X is a sprawling, epic, masterful use of the mini-series format to tell a story that no individual series could tell episodically. The writing, acting and directing were all of the highest order, which is impressive given the logistics of having to produce the mini-series while the four series were simultaneously in production (Supergirl did the most obvious cheat by featuring an episode that was entirely a flashback with teen actors standing in for the regulars).  Crisis on Earth X is as much a sign that we live in the Platinum Age of Television as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Mad Men; just a lot more fun.