“Elseworlds Part 2” was a hugely important episode for the wider Arrowverse canon as it introduced the Batman mythos into The CW’s shared DC universe for the first time. What’s more, it also featured a possible homage to Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Throughout the first two installments, red stormy skies had been plaguing Central City and Star City. In last night’s outing, the combined minds of Curtis Holt, Felicity Smoak, Caitlin Snow and, well, OK, not Diggle but he was there, worked out that they were the result of someone trying to break through into their universe from elsewhere in the multiverse.
It was revealed who when a blue portal appeared on a Star City rooftop and we saw John Wesley Shipp’s Flash from Earth-90, last seen surviving the devastation wrought on his world by The Monitor. As he was struggling to materialize on Earth-1, his message only came through in bits and pieces before the connection cut out and he was gone.
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DC movie fans may get a sense of deja vu here, as this is pretty similar to the scene from BvS in which Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen appears to Bruce Wayne in the Batcave, surrounded by blue lightning, babbling about something that’s going to happen in the future and, memorably, that Lois Lane’s the key. Of course, sadly this sequence is rendered meaningless now as Zack Snyder’s original plan to explain it and the Knightmare scene in Justice League 2 will never happen.
Still, comic book readers will see what the Arrow writers were going for here: both the BvS and “Elseworlds” sequences are references to a famous moment from Crisis on Infinite Earths in which a dying future Flash appears in front of Batman before disintegrating. Clearly, Crisis is a big influence on “Elseworlds” in many ways (see: the red skies, The Monitor…90s Flash even namedrops the word “crisis.”), and we’ll see what else lies ahead when the crossover concludes with Supergirl later tonight on The CW.
