WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” the latest Arrowverse crossover.

DC loves its multiverse, but when The CW launched Arrow in 2012, not long after Smallville ended its run, such a concept hardly seemed necessary. Even when the DC television landscape expanded in 2014, everything was relatively straightforward: The CW's The Flash existed in the same universe as Arrow, while Fox's Gotham and NBC's Constantine each inhabited its own universe. However, it got complicated rather quickly.

Supergirl premiered the next year, on a different network and a different Earth, but Barry Allen made a crossover cameo appearance. Titans debuted later, then Doom Patrol spun off of that show, taking some actors but as different versions of the characters. There was also the dubious state of Black Lightning, airing on The CW but seemingly unconnected to the Arrowverse. All of that happened as The Flash continued to explore the multiverse. Things were set to come to a head with Stargirl, which would premiere on the DC Universe streaming service but also airing on The CW. Fans began to wonder just how all of these shows relate to one another.

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In the beginning, The CW's big crossover event, "Crisis on Infinite Earths," confused things further. It added several more DC universes (such as the Tim Burton Batman, the 1966 Batman series, Christopher Reeve/Brandon Routh Superman, and Smallville, to name a few). And then there was the Titans cameo. Formerly completely separate, now the DC Universe shows were connected to the Arrowverse? They were only cameos, but now that you’ve acknowledged them directly, you can’t then ignore them. And that’s not even counting the complications of Ezra Miller appearing as Barry Allen, establishing a connection with the so-called DC Expanded Universe.

But by the end, "Crisis" came to the rescue. Unlike the original comic series, it doesn’t go as far as to collapse each reality into a single Earth. This is as much about the story as about production difficulties -- just trying to do a normal crossover with these shows, most of them shooting practically on top of each other in Vancouver at the same time, is a logistical nightmare. Add in other filming locations (Black Lightning is in Atlanta, meaning Cress Williams had to take time off to shoot his relatively small appearances up in Vancouver), different production schedules and writing teams that aren’t used to working together, and putting them all on the same Earth could be too difficult.

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Instead, "Crisis on Infinite Earths" establishes and spells out a new multiverse. Earth–1, Earth–38, and the Black Lightning Earth have all merged into Earth-Prime. Stargirl takes place on Earth–2, Titans on Earth–9, Doom Patrol on Earth–21 and the upcoming HBO Max Green Lantern series will seemingly take place on Earth–12. And though it’s not shown, the DCEU surely has its own Earth now as well.

With this new status quo, the shared DC TV universe makes more sense now. It’s not that different from what we expected, but having it laid out explicitly helps make a lot more sense of things. There are still several different Earths, but now we know exactly which ones are out there. Crossovers are still possible, but even as easy as breaching has been in the Arrowverse, it’s still a good enough excuse to save some crossovers for special occasions.

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Crisis Justice League Table

With a reset button pressed on a large part of it, "Crisis on Infinite Earths" has streamlined the DC TV multiverse. Discovering what exactly the new status quo looks like will take a bit as the shows move forward, but this at least gives us the right frame of reference for understanding the shows moving forward.

"Crisis on Infinite Earths," the latest five-show crossover between all the Arrowverse series, will soon be available on The CW's streaming service in its entirety.

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