Nic said:
Bringing back Thawne was cheap. I get that he's come back in comics before using Speed Force magic, but this was the wrong place to try and do that. Which is a shame, because I thought I just preferred Tom Cavanaugh over Matt Letscher (even though Letscher was still very good), but no, Thawne just being alive and evil despite being erased from history TWICE was just too much. Having an evil-for-the-sake-of-evil Barry (different from Savitar) would have been a ot more fun. If they had to bring in Thawne (with or without Wells' face), he could have had his speed drained by Barry X like what happened with Zoom. Also, be vague on whether this is Earth-1 Thawne or Earth X-Thawne.
Couldn't agree more.
Sorry, folks: though there were some good moments, I found the overall event to be bad.
- Biggest problem: after a promising first part, it got pretty darn dull, and never recovered. When the Legends are criss-crossing all of history and the world on a weekly basis, getting stuck for most of the event's remaining two hours in and around STAR Labs was a big letdown, and the final battle under the freeway wasn't even as cool as the rooftop Dominator battle. Worse yet was the trite script and heavy focus on relationship melodrama, with each damn conversation a near-replay of the last. And if our
heroes' melodrama wasn't bad enough, we had to get X-Ollie and X-Kara's endless melodrama, besides!
Ugh.
- The lack of a single, dominating (no pun intended) villain was a big problem. Thawne, X-Kara or X-Quentin Lance would have made great baddies, but diffusing their power and having all the villains endlessly bicker like Klingons on in a lesser
TNG ep severely drained the tension.
- Speaking of Earth 1-Thawne, after seeing him erased from existence
twice, to resurrect him with zero explanation was
incredibly lame, as was his out-of-nowhere well-established alliance withe the X-Nazis. And why
was he taking orders from X-Ollie, anway? If he was afraid of Kara, and more taking orders from
her, that might have been one thing, but in that case he should have taken the opportunity to kill her, and seize control of Earth-X and the operation for himself.
- Which reminds me, the X-team's refusal to kill the Team Arrow members or the rest of the gang was pointless and stupid. Why lock them away, and then send the others to Earth-X instead of summarily executing them, especially when that's to be their Earth-X fate anyway? It made the X-Nazis look both incompetent
and not entirely vicious, both of which sucked.
- Our "heroes" gave outrageously zero fucks about Earth-X and its civilians in general, and, when the Resistance sheltered them (in a shameless re-use of the Arrowcave set, which would have been fine if somebody didn't uselessly speculate aloud that they were therefore in X-Star City), they were nothing but total assholes to their hosts. Barely a word of empathy, encouragement, and zero promises to help later; they instead instantly demand the Resistance bend over backwards for them and
their world, and
then Alex harangued X-Winn when he didn't leap to do so. (That actor/character is
still the worst, but the way, but that's another series.) Then the team tried to make us think that Nazis' breaching device was their only opportunity to ever get home, which is completely absurd, given that interdimensional hopping is routinely portrayed as a cinch across the shows. In short: "What a bunch of a-holes."
- Large battles in which speedsters are zipping around, and yet not making everyone else redundant, strains my credulity. Add multiple Kryptonians to the mix, and things just get absurd. Also, the visual trope of Kryptonians perfectly evenly eye-beaming each other for seconds on end, with zero result, starts out dumb and gets dumber each time they do it.
- Okay, time for some positives. Despite finding him one of the worst actors I'd ever seen in
LoT S1, Franz Drameh was pretty good in Part Four, and I loved Leo Snart. And there
were some cute lines and moments here and there.
- But, alas, it must always be noted: Barry/Iris is still gross. Also gross: letting your marriage be officiated with a guy who just vomited. Never mind that Barry literally kidnapped Diggle; he couldn't have spent a few more seconds zooming off to get him a soda to wash out his mouth and throat? And couldn't they move more than five feet away from his grass-stained puke?
- And, finally... I found the Earth-X Nazi thing problematic. Part of the villainy of Nazis, both WW2 and contemporary, is that, with only a few exceptions (say, the youngest of the Third Reich citizens), they grew up in a world with democracy and freedom, and no Nazism. Ergo, they should have, and
did, know better. The Earth-X Nazis, however, are third- or fourth-generation Nazis, making their culpability all kinds of murky; they're more like contemporary North Koreans than Nazis as we know them. (
Iron Sky runs into the same problem, but
The Man in the High Castle has the time and depth to really explore such issues, and give us strange but credible things like second/third generation Nazi hippies.) This event ran much closer to exploitation and cheapening of the issues at hand, IMO.
Conclusion: the best Arrowverse crossovers so far have been the lower-key ones: "All-Star Team Up", "Flash vs. Arrow"/"The Brave and The Bold",
LoT's Grodd episode immediately prior to this... hell,
all of
LoT, if one can call an entire series a "low-key" crossover, which is bananas, but, I just did. I'm sure these huge events must be incredibly difficult to pull off, but if "Invasion!" and this are the best they can do, I'd frankly rather they not do them at all.
Overall Grade:
C-. After the first part, I'm afraid I really didn't enjoy it - way too much loud and meaningless automatic weapons fire - and I certainly won't be rewatching.