Here Is How Batwoman Sets Up for “Crisis on Infinite Earths”

Tonight’s episode of Batwoman was came with a surprising twist in the form of a shocking death that will undoubtedly have major ramifications for the show as the season continues forward. However, tonight’s episode wasn’t just the midseason finale episode of Batwoman. It was also the series’ final episode before the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover next week and as such, the last moments did a little bit of table setting for the epic five-night event that will ultimately see all of the Arrowverse’s heroes coming together to take on the biggest threat they’ve ever faced. Here’s how the episode sets the stage.

Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Batwoman, “A Mad Tea Party,” below

In tonight’s episode the Kane family drama comes to a head with Alice (Rachel Skarsten) killing Catherine Hamilton Kane (Elizabeth Anweis) by poisoning, an act that lands Jacob Kane (Dougray Scott) in jail and fractures Kate Kane/Batwoman’s (Ruby Rose) relationship with step-sister Mary Hamilton (Nicole Kang). The episode closed on Kate telling her shackled father that when he goes to take down Alice once and for all, she will not stand in his way.

The exchange is a powerful note for Batwoman to close on for its midseason finale, but it wasn’t technically the last of the episode. A post-credits scene of sorts takes the audience to Central City on December 9th, 2019 at 11:58 p.m. and sees Nash Wells (Tom Cavanagh) standing before the door to The Monitor’s (LaMonica Garrett) Earth-1 “lair”. Nash talks about how he’s crossed the multiverse to kill him, but The Monitor “saved his life”. The Monitor’s voice tells him to “submit” and “begin his life anew”. After pressing a sequence of symbols on the lair’s door, it opens to reveal a blinding yellow light. That light engulfs Nash, taking him with it before the door slams closed.

It would appear that this scene generally confirms — or at a minimum very strongly alludes to — Nash Well actually being Pariah. It was announced back in July that Cavanagh would be playing not only a new iteration of Harrison Wells on The Flash for its sixth season but would also play Pariah as part of the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover.

For fans of the 12-issue comic book limited series of the same name that The CW‘s “Crisis” is adapting, Pariah is a huge reveal. In comics Pariah (real name Kell Mossa) is one of his Earth’s greatest scientists and it’s his unorthodox experiments to view the universe ends up allowing the Anti-Monitor to discover the existence of his Earth and then destroy it with waves of anti-matter. Pariah survives thanks to the Monitor and ends up with the ability to travel from one Earth to another. Because of this, he’s forced to watch world after world after world die. During Crisis, Pariah blames himself for the death of his own world but is ultimately told that he is not to blame. The Anti-Monitor reveals that his scientific experiments didn’t actually unleash the energy to destroy universes, he simply opened an antimatter portal that the Anti-Monitor then converted the energy, and thus destroyed Pariah’s world. At the end of Crisis, Pariah and Lady Quark, whom he rescued from Earth-6, ask Harbinger to join them in exploring a new, reformed earth.

While the name Pariah is never mentioned in this short scene, Nash does tell The Monitor — whom we hear but do not see — that he saved his life. That’s critical as it’s The Monitor who saves Pariah causes him to see the true state of the Multiverse, including the deaths of countless worlds. If we thought Barry Allen seeing “billions” die when he used Jay Garrick’s helmet to send his mind to a day after the Crisis, what Pariah sees is far, far worse.

At this point, it almost seems to go without saying that “Crisis” is going to be a huge event for the Arrowverse and the scene tonight somewhat confirms what Arrow producer Marc Guggenheim told ComicBook.com in that the event would have some very true-to-comics moments.

“Basically, we’re gonna begin — this is an exclusive — we’re gonna begin the way Crisis on Infinite Earths the comic begins, which is the destruction of various parallel universes. And the goal is for us to adapt key moments from the comic, those seminal moments,” Guggenheim told us.

“In fact, yesterday I pitched to the network what the story was going to be and the best part of the pitch, we have a board that DC made up for me, which is covers from key issues of Crisis on Infinite Earths. And we’re like, ‘We’re gonna do our version of this, we’re gonna do our version of this, we’re gonna do our version of this.’ Our goal is, the thing we’ve been saying, is we’re going to make a list of 100 cool things that we want to do. And even if we only get to do 50, we’re still doing 50 cool things.”

“Crisis on Infinite Earths” kicks off on Sunday, December 8 on Supergirl, runs through a Monday episode of Batwoman and that Tuesday’s episode of The Flash. That will be the midseason cliffhanger, as the shows go on hiatus for the holidays and return on January 14 to finish out the event with the midseason premiere of Arrow and a “special episode” of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which launches as a midseason series this year and so will not have an episode on the air before the Crisis.