SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for recent episodes of Arrow and The Flash, including both shows' most recent season finales.]
Season 6 of Arrow and Season 4 of The Flash each had their heroes square off against villains whose successes came from dominating the playing field. Arrow's crime boss Ricardo "Dragon" Diaz controlled Star City policemen and judges, while Flash's Thinker was prepared for everything and surprised by nothing. Naturally, both had grand ambitions: Diaz sought to rule Star City, while the Thinker wanted global domination.
However, the cumulative effects of their weekly exploits got us thinking about the Arrowverse's interconnectedness. Specifically, the details of their plans and the pace at which they unfolded suggested that if our heroes had exploited all of their own connections more fully, the end result might have been a lot better for them and for us viewers.
I'll Be There For You
The Thinker was a megalomaniacal strategist whose superhuman intellect continually kept him several steps ahead of Team Flash. Eventually his scheme, ironically dubbed "the Enlightenment," involved a network of satellites which would make the world's population dumb and malleable. Accordingly, because the Thinker could thwart a technology-based attack, Team Flash realized that they would need a specific super-person to destroy the satellites.
Since Team Flash already knew someone who could a) fly into space, b) shrug off orbital defenses, c) destroy the satellites with super-strength and d) zap the bits with heat vision, you might think they placed a quick call to Earth-38. Instead, they sought out Amunet "Blacksmith" Black and her killer shrapnel. Although that took care of one satellite, the Thinker was only delayed for a few minutes while he reprogrammed the STAR Labs satellite as a replacement.
Likewise, in the season's penultimate episode the Flash had to train Killer Frost and Vibe on the finer points of Flashtime because their latest counterattack required more than one person to move at super-speed. While this worked out well in the end, they could also have called up Jesse Quick, Kid Flash or Jay Garrick. Moreover, Jesse and Jay had already guest-starred in the earlier episode which introduced Flashtime.
Arrow also started the season with a super-smart bad guy (evil hacker Cayden James) before swerving into the shouty toxic masculinity of Ricardo Diaz. Using overwhelming force rather than intricate analysis, Diaz bullied his way to becoming Star City's very own autocrat by bribing every public servant he could find. Thus, the key to his power came from a blackmail-filled flash drive he wore as a necklace. Towards the end of the season Green Arrow and Overwatch tried to clone the drive, but they weren't fast enough.
You can see where this is going. Not only would a speedster (not to mention some STAR Labs help) have been useful to Team Arrow this season, but the Flash could at least have disarmed enough of the bad cops and other gangsters to give Team Arrow better odds. In turn, that might have stopped Ollie from throwing himself on the mercy of the FBI and getting sent to a supermax prison for the summer.
Precedent for this sort of blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo comes from the middle of Flash's first season, when Ollie helped Flash and Firestorm take on the Reverse-Flash; and from Arrow's Season 3 finale, when the Flash rescued Team Arrow from a Nanda Parbat dungeon. Even this season, with Ollie up to his eyeballs in trouble, John Diggle wasn't too busy to pop over to Central City for a couple of ARGUS-related scenes.
Admittedly, Flash nodded towards its fellow shows when Barry name-checked Supergirl, Green Arrow and Kid Flash in the Season 4 finale. While this was better than nothing, it came too late to be meaningful. Besides, the satellites ended up being just part of the buildup to the season's real endgame; namely, forcing Barry to confront the Thinker inside the villain's mind. Specifically, the Thinker wanted Barry's knowledge of the Speed Force in order to have access to all of time. That's a decent villain scheme, and it incorporates Barry's super-speed without pitting him against yet another evil speedster (not to mention a time paradox).
However, such apocalyptic threats remind us that the Arrowverse has no shortage of super-folk. Indeed, since the final stakes involved control of the Speed Force, that made destroying the satellites at least marginally less important, and therefore something which could be taken care of in a minute or two by a Kryptonian, Martian or Daxamite. Instead, the season finale got two ticking clocks: the literal countdown to total global domination, and the risk that Flash would be trapped in Thinker's mind for good.
As it turns out, the Flash Season 4 finale actually did downplay the Enlightenment somewhat, by staging the last big action sequence around the crashing STAR Labs satellite. The Flash had to stop the satellite himself (or so he thought), since there was no time to call anyone else; and the sequence helped set up next season's daughter-from-the-future arc. It was a good way for the episode to play with audience expectations, and it provided a nice bit of catharsis in a season which often felt frustrating.
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Quality Time Management
Certainly a big part of that frustration came from the constant setbacks Teams Flash and Arrow faced all season, as the Thinker and Diaz marched inevitably towards their goals. While explaining the twists and turns of a TV season as "all part of the plan" isn't bad in and of itself, watching it unfold week after week can get pretty tiring. It makes our heroes look ineffectual and/or easily manipulated, and it resigns viewers to the fact that nothing will be resolved until season's end.
Flash's sibling shows dealt better with their overall pacing. Arrow's initial focus on Cayden James gave its sixth season some variety and built some nominal mystique around Diaz. Similarly, Legends of Tomorrow spent its third season first battling totem-wielder Kuasa and then Damien Dahrk before coming together against the demon Mallus. The Legends premise also lends itself better to standalone episodes (like "Phone Home," the look at Ray's 1988 childhood) which don't necessarily feed into the season's major arcs.
Finally, while Supergirl has stuck with the same villain (Reign) all season, it seemed to be positioning the future menace of Blight as the climactic threat. Now that Blight has been defeated for good (or so it seems), Reign has come back to the spotlight. Regardless, since Supergirl has grounded Reign and her alter ego firmly in the show's interpersonal dynamics, it may care more about those dynamics than whether Reign will be defeated.
In other words, Legends and Supergirl avoided Flash and Arrow's frustrations by taking the focus off any one villain and/or said villain's omnipotence; and "Arrow" spent less time with Diaz as the main villain. That left Flash with a whole season's worth of Thinker, and therefore a season's worth of near-victories and outright defeats. This included Barry's ridiculously short McTrial (which Arrow echoed later in the year with only slightly more seriousness) and the last-minute losses of sympathetic metahumans like the Fiddler, Hazard, Melting Point and Elongated Man. The Thinker needed to "win" just about every encounter not only to justify his existence, but seemingly to mark time until the season finale.
Speaking of trials, both Barry and Ollie were cleared (at least temporarily) by masters of disguise who impersonated key figures. Elongated Man impersonated the Thinker, who had framed Barry for his murder; while the Human Target impersonated both the actually-dead Tommy Merlyn (to convince the jury that "Tommy" was Green Arrow) and then the trial judge. Nevertheless, neither marked the end of the villain's plans, since the Thinker still had a half-season to go and Ollie was apparently destined to end up in prison.
For that matter, the strategy that helped Elongated Man and Flash defeat the Thinker was Ralph's idea to "not think," and act simply on instinct. To the show's credit, this was probably not something the rest of Team Flash would have thought up; and it only came about because the team had been forced to go into the Thinker's mind.
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All In This Together
Since Elongated Man is unique to Flash and Human Target is unique to Arrow, those examples aren't really crossovers, but the products of groundwork the shows have already laid. Besides, there are valid storytelling reasons for your show's star to not be saved by another show's headliner. For one thing, it establishes that there are just some threats your star can't handle alone, and that arguably undermines confidence in your show's characters. It can also affect viewer expectations about when a guest-star might appear.
With regard to the characters themselves, both Barry and Ollie are notoriously stubborn. Ollie's Season 6 character arc involved his alienating just about all of Team Arrow, and his speeches about his lonely crusade didn't exactly suggest a willingness to call in outside help. (Using the Human Target both played on how far he's come and how ingrained his stubbornness was.) There's also the practical matter of showrunning logistics; but again, Diggle and Kid Flash were each just on Flash and Sara Lance was just on Arrow, so it can't be too hard to coordinate.
In that spirit we suggest humbly a much larger feat of coordination, but one with potentially more upside: Have the shows cross over at the end of their seasons. Remember, Diaz wanted to rule Star City with brute force, but the Thinker wanted to bring about global peace by making people too dense to be deadly. Since those are mutually exclusive schemes, we wouldn't have minded seeing Diaz settle in as Star City warlord just as the Enlightenment dumbed down him and everyone else in town. Alternatively, imagine a scenario where the two team up to take out all the heroes in both cities, leaving Supergirl and the Legends to rescue them. It could have also ended with the Thinker tapping into the Speed Force and using his command of time to take on the Legends directly.
A season-ending crossover wouldn't be easy, but it could be baked into the storytelling from the beginning, so that the producers know what to plan for even if the fans aren't expecting it. We understand that on one level these shows are about melodrama and characters, but they're also about cheering big colorful characters as they defeat hissable foes. (Trust us, Diaz and the Thinker were two of the more hissable.) Using each other's casts to resolve the shows' season-long plots both plays into conventional crossover marketing and would allow each show to end its season potentially on a clean slate.
It took a lot for Arrow to introduce superpowers, and to a certain extent it still resists using them, even though metahumans Ragman and Black Canary have been regular members of Team Arrow. However, just as Arrow can't ignore the existence of superpowers, none of the Arrowverse shows can ignore their interpersonal connections completely. As the villains grow ever more daring, the demands on our heroes become greater as well, and sometimes you just need help. In fact, the original Justice League of America writer Gardner Fox used the "switch foes" tactic frequently throughout the Silver Age, so it is practically a DC Comics tradition.
Again, we understand that these shows are about the characters dealing with (and hopefully overcoming) adversity. The writers and producers don't just pick these villains at random, but use them to take the heroes on emotional journeys. Each show deserves to stand on its own. Accordingly, brief guest-shots can help clear away the clutter and get our heroes to their final showdowns without so many fits and starts. Streamlining that storytelling would also free the shows to do more standalone episodes, something which Legends has embraced with great success. Smarter crossover usage would not only strengthen the Arrowverse as a whole, but it would bring each show's stars into sharper focus, and demonstrate why they alone are best-suited to defeat their particular foes.
How do you think the Arrowverse has handled its crossovers? Let us know in the comments!