If the CW's "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover left you a little confused, don't worry.
You're not alone.
The good news is that we're here to sort out a few of its more convoluted aspects and explain
just what was going on, and why.
Who exactly is the guy who shows up in Purgatory and bestows seemingly unfathomable cosmic
powers on Oliver Queen?
He identifies himself as Jim Corrigan, the Spectre, but if you haven't had your nose
buried in DC Comics for the better part of your life, that probably didn't answer any
questions.
Despite being a relatively obscure character, the Spectre is a favorite for this kind of
world-shattering event, because he's the literal embodiment of the Wrath of God.
He's less of a person and more of a force of nature, a vessel for divine fury with cosmic
power even Superman could only imagine.
Unfortunately, it turned out that turning God's vengeance into a person without any
mitigating force could lead to some abuses of power.
To temper his vengeance and create a new superhero in 1940 the Presence bound the Spectre to
Jim Corrigan, a cop who had been killed by criminals, returning him to life as a ghostly
superhero.
Eventually, Corrigan worked off enough of his sins that he was allowed to move on to
his final reward, and the "Spectre Force" was passed down to others.
After his death, Green Lantern Hal Jordan was the Spectre for a while, and then Gotham
City detective Cris Allen was drafted into the job.
It's never been handed off to Oliver Queen in the comics, but the fact that both characters
wear costumes built around green hoods makes the shift in wardrobe an easy one.
Most heroes only get one chance to sacrifice their lives to save the world.
Oliver Queen got two: once as Green Arrow, fighting to the death against the Anti-Monitor's
army of shadows, and then again as the Spectre, seemingly sacrificing his life to end the
threat to the multiverse.
The Anti-Monitor's death didn't really stick, though, so is Oliver really dead?
"You remember what I told you?"
"Dying is the easy part."
The answer, most likely, is a frustrating one: yes and no.
Oliver's definitely dead he's the Spectre, and as the name implies, the Spectre is quite
literally a ghost.
That said, as far as superheroes are concerned, death is not a permanent state.
The real question is whether Oliver Queen will stick around in his new phantasmal form,
and the answer to that is "probably."
If he's the Spectre, that means he's beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death,
meaning that he has a pretty good chance of coming back as the driving force of a future
CW crossover, if Stephen Amell ever gets bored with whatever he's going to do after eight
seasons of Arrow, with a distinct possibility he'll jump to professional wrestling.
One of the major selling points for the CW "Crisis" was that it included nods to the
entire history of DC Comics films and TV shows.
Some, like the Smallville scene or the visit to Earth-99, were pretty relevant to the plot,
while others were basically just cameos, and they might've gone by too fast for viewers
who don't have vast portions of Who's Who in the DC Universe memorized to keep up with.
This is another reference to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths comic, which also
opens with the destruction of a handful of DC's long-standing parallel worlds, complete
with the red skies and fade to white.
While the comic starts off by obliterating Earth-3, the show opens up with two incarnations
of the Dark Knight being wiped out of existence: Earth-89 and Earth-66, setting the trend of
Earths mostly being numbered the years that they debuted.
Neither of the Earths the event opens with actually show that world's version of its
main character, Batman.
On Earth-89, we catch up with intrepid reporter Alex Knox and Danny Elfman's classic score,
letting us know we're in the world of the 1989 Batman film.
After that, we skip over to the decidedly retro Earth-66, where Burt Ward appears with
a color scheme that lets us know we're seeing the Robin of the classic Batman TV series.
"Holy crimson skies of death!"
We also see the Huntress running around on rooftops on Earth-203, a reference to the
Birds of Prey series which aired its single season back in 2003.
There are a few notable exceptions to the year rule, though.
For instance, we see a Superman killed by Lex Luthor on Earth-75.
It's actually a reference to a single comic.
The shot of Superman and Lois that we see on the news is lifted from 1994's Superman
#75, the climax of the famous "Death of Superman" story in which the Man of Steel was killed
by Doomsday.
When the Superman of Earth-96 joins up with the crew, there are a few jokes made about
how weird it is that he looks exactly like Ray Palmer, although no one ever bothers to
give a reason why.
The obvious real-world reason is that both characters are played by Brandon Routh, who
starred as the Man of Steel in 2006's Superman Returns.
Superman-96 is pretty clearly meant to be the same Superman played by Christopher Reeve
in the 1978 Superman film and its three sequels.
And Routh has played that character before: Superman Returns was meant to pick up after
Superman II, ignoring the last two movies.
When he sees Lois, we get a brief excerpt of "Can You Read My Mind," the love theme
from Superman: The Movie.
And then there's this line:
"Actually, this is the second time I've gone nuts and fought myself."
That's a callback to Superman III, where Superman splits into Clark Kent and Superman to fight
himself in a junkyard.
But why is he on Earth-96 and not Earth-206 or Earth-78?
Routh's Man of Steel isn't just from the movies.
It's also a clear reference to Mark Waid and Alex Ross's landmark 1996 comics miniseries
Kingdom Come.
The deaths of Lois Lane and the rest of the Daily Planet staff at the hands of the Joker
are lifted from that story, as is the black-and-red emblem that Superman wears in mourning.
One of the grimmest moments of "Crisis On Infinite Earths" comes when Supergirl and
Batwoman take a visit to Earth-99.
Kevin Conroy, best known for his starring voice role in Batman: The Animated Series
starting in 1992, plays a version of Batman who has given into his darkest impulses.
Bruce-99 appears to be in an incredible amount of pain, both mental and physical, but we
don't get a lot of details as to what happened to make him this way.
He does mention that his world's version of Kate Kane had been killed in action as Batwoman,
helping push him over the edge.
Luke Fox tells Supergirl that many of his injuries are the result of his fight with
Superman, though that doesn't seem to be the entire truth of the matter.
Like Superman-96, Bruce-99 takes his look from Kingdom Come, where he's depicted wearing
a similar exoskeleton.
In their annotations to that story, Waid and Ross told readers that there was no single
event that caused this level of injury, and that it was just the toll of years and years
of getting in multiple fistfights with Gotham's weirdest villains.
The 99, by the way, is probably a reference to Batman Beyond, which premiered in 1999
and where Conroy voiced an older Bruce who was a bit worn down, but not villainous.
In recent memory, Tom Welling has played Clark Kent longer than anyone else, starring in
ten seasons of Smallville.
But he only once donned Superman's red-and-blues throughout the show's run.
So it makes sense that when the heroes of the Arrowverse catch up with Smallville's
Clark on Earth-167, he still isn't Superman.
Much to Lex Luthor's disgust, Clark actually gave up his powers to focus on starting a
family with Lois.
"You gave up your powers?"
"Can't say I miss these chats."
"You were basically a god.
You could fly!"
This particular plot point seems to be loosely inspired by Alan Moore and Curt Swan's "Whatever
Happened to the Man of Tomorrow," the final Superman story before the end of the original
Crisis on Infinite Earths comics.
In that story, it's revealed that Superman gave up his powers by exposing himself to
Gold Kryptonite, which permanently strips Kryptonians of their metahuman abilities.
It's pretty safe to assume that Smallville's Clark did the same, especially since Gold
Kryptonite was introduced in Smallville's last season.
The comic book Crisis on Infinite Earths streamlined DC's comic book multiverse which had spread
out over worlds including Earth-2, Earth-3, Earth-X, Earth-C, Earth-C-Minus, and so on
into one single universe.
The TV version has done the same, putting the main CW shows into one cohesive Earth-Prime.
One of the reasons that DC had such a convoluted multiverse is that unlike their competition
at Marvel, where the universe and many of its core characters had been created by a
relatively small group of people and focused mainly on New York, the DC universe was much
more of a patchwork.
The characters had mostly been created in isolation, sometimes by different publishers
who were acquired by DC after the fact.
The same goes for the shows.
Arrow came first and spun off directly into Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Batwoman,
but Supergirl originally aired on CBS, and was completely separate from the CW shows
until a crossover established it as a parallel world.
Black Lightning started off on the CW, but it was set in a different universe in hopes
of establishing its lesser-known hero outside of the shadow of the other characters.
With Supergirl, Flash, Batwoman, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning and Arrow now combined
into the newly christened Earth-Prime, there's a shared history, creating a world where all
the characters exist alongside each other.
So after eight years of Arrow, we finally have a world where Superman and Batman coexist
with the other heroes, finally making the DC TV universe feel whole.
Characters can interact without the need for another world-shattering interdimensional
crossover...
"I mean, how often does the world almost come to an end?"
"Oh, it's like that."
...so it's likely that we could see more instances of the shows crossing over in the future.
It's a lot easier to have the Flash hang out with Supergirl when he doesn't have to vibrate
to a parallel world.
The DC TV Multiverse has been at the center of several crossovers that have become an
annual tradition.
A major character on The Flash, Harrison Wells, is built entirely around swapping out with
his own interdimensional counterparts every now and then, forcing poor Tom Cavanagh to
do a new accent every couple of months while ostensibly playing the same guy.
With that in mind, it seems like the shows would be giving up a lot of potential stories
with everything combined into the new Earth-Prime.
But unlike the comic, the shows didn't actually ditch the idea of the Multiverse.
The main CW shows have all been added to a single Earth, with the in-story reason being
that they're the homeworlds of the seven "Paragon" characters who saved the entirety of existence,
but there are plenty of other worlds out there.
In addition to confirming that the DC films are a part of this multiverse through a surprise
cameo from movie Flash Ezra Miller, it also preserves some of the other shows.
The shows streaming on DC Universe make it through, with Earths 9, 19, and 21 being established
as the settings for Titans, Swamp Thing, and Doom Patrol, respectively.
Earth-96 is shown to survive with Brandon Routh's older Superman, and we also see Earth-12,
hinted at being the setting for HBO Max's upcoming Green Lantern show.
For longtime comic book readers, the most interesting reveal might be the all-new Earth-2,
which will be the home of the upcoming Stargirl show.
In the comics, Earth-2 was the home of the original Golden Age heroes of the Justice
Society of America, who debuted in the '40s, and, as time went on, their descendants.
Stargirl herself was a reimagining of one of those Earth-2 characters, the Star-Spangled
Kid, and with the show drawing on the histories of JSA characters such as Wildcat and Doctor
Mid-Nite, setting it there makes a lot of sense.
It allows her world to have a different history, playing into the idea of legacy that's so
core to her character, without interfering with the new "history" of Earth-Prime.
While the original comics Crisis is largely known as the crossover that got rid of Earth-2,
the TV version is the one that has introduced it to a whole new generation.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite superhero shows are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.