There was much to find really cool and genuinely awesome about the first part of the mini-series/crossover event, and there was much to be critical of.
The DC universe is really good at crossovers, I feel more so than the Marvel universe, but then again (no disrespect to the late Stan Lee) I typically find DC characters more compelling than Marvel characters. My favorite crossover event in the comics was Kingdom Come, which dynamically explored the future of men and women in capes in an original and poignant way. Crisis does not appear at first glance to be either original or poignant, but part one was fun to watch. Not being a regular viewer of the CW shows, there was much I did not know in terms of backstory. That Superman was living off-world with Lois and their baby, for instance, I suspect the result of the last crossover storyline which I neglected to watch. I also don’t know much about the supporting characters on Supergirl, so the tension between two women building a device to help save humans was largely lost on me. But that’s not really the writer’s fault. After all, as some of the guest stars and characters slated to appear in the Crisis series were from decades ago; I suspect younger viewers won’t catch the Easter eggs featuring them either. To wit, Robert Wuhl briefly reprising his role as Knox from the Burton Batman movie was a quick, amusing callback to a film I didn’t even especially like. The plot... that there is a thing wiping out all universes... isn’t really a plot. It brings to mind the line from Dr. McCoy in the first Star Trek movie, “Why is any object we don’t understand always called A Thing?” It’s a device to gather the characters, to assemble the team, but it’s nothing we ought to bother investing too much in. After all, they are superheroes, and the actors who play them have signed contracts, so it is likely they will save the day and Earth(s) will survive. I’ve watched a couple episodes of Batwoman, and of the DC shows currently on air, it is by far my favorite, mostly because it’s covering a character that hasn’t been explored on TV before. But she didn’t do much in part one. The only hero who got to really act the part of a hero was Green Arrow. Again, I don’t know the story of his daughter or his friendship to the Flash, but it was well acted and told in an interesting way. Batwoman and the “Legends” were just sort of there. The biggest struggle in DC crossovers are always the Kyptonians, because they are virtually indestructible, so the writers have to go out of their way to give them something to focus on or the less-super heroes don’t have much to do. Frankly, they should have sent Clark to go after his son with Lois... it felt out of character for him to let his family fend for itself, even in the face of planetary armageddon. Supergirl was always a poorly conceived character to me. Superman was the last son of Krypton, and giving him a cousin made him less unique, and DC has always struggled to make Supergirl not just a female Superman. They certainly flushed out the character on the CW series over the years, but the character still feels like she’s in Superman’s shadow. The shadow demons were nothing more than a horrible, hack writing device to give allow the superheroes to kick ass without risking an adults-only TV rating by having them kill anything with a soul. It was, hands down, the worst element of the story, and it made it feel like there really was no story... at least not yet. But it is always fun to see a big group of superheroes fighting alongside each other. As for the story, it ended in a sort of Battlestar Galactica sort of way, with a rag-tag fleet of ships filled with humans fleeing the big bad enemy, destination unknown. It’s potentially a good setup, but also has the potential for a big letdown. -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKgmY4A3FHZ_JRhQ7S0xqZNpYHxhFdpVE8%3DZFRBfOraj8%3DbTvQ%40mail.gmail.com.
