“Elseworlds” Part 2 Has a ‘Batman v Superman’ Homage

The second chapter of “Elseworlds” debuted tonight, and it gave a familiar twist on a pretty iconic moment.

Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Arrow, “Elseworlds Part 2”, below!

The episode saw Barry Allen (Grant Gustin), Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), and Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist) fighting Dr. John Deegan (Jeremy Davies) in Gotham, while ARGUS and Team Flash attempted to figure out what is behind the “red skies” plaguing their cities. Eventually, they determined that the red skies were because someone was trying to break through into Earth-1 — and that person was none other than Earth-90 Barry Allen (John Wesley Shipp).

In his first attempt to arrive on Earth-1, Earth-90 Barry appeared through a sort of blue portal in reality, in which he delivered a choppy message to those watching about The Monitor (LaMonica Garrett) and the Book of Destiny. The portal then closed up, and the group wasn’t reacquainted with Barry until later on in the episode.

For DC fans, this was probably visually familiar in one way, as the DC Extended Universe’s Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) delivered a similar sort of message in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. In one of the scenes of the 2016 film, Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) is violently woken from his sleep, only to see a vision of Barry warning him about what’s to come, and how Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is the key.

Of course, both of these scenes are their own sort of homages to Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which The Flash delivers a similarly ominous message to Batman before fading into dust.

Considering the various teases that “Elseworlds” and the Arrowverse as a whole have already dropped for “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, this probably isn’t too much of a surprise. And while it’s unclear if and when the Arrowverse will eventually get to that event, these little teases are making the journey a bit more enjoyable.

“You think of the scale of it, and what this character means, and him being introduced into the DC TV world, the first person when you think when you think Monitor is you think Anti-Monitor,” Garrett admitted to ComicBook.com. “So, the scale — where’s this going? And then when you think Anti-Monitor, the next thing you think of is Crisis on Infinite Earths. So if you keep doing that to yourself, it makes it too much on your shoulders when you are going into it. You have to think about it later. To me, I’m a former athlete. When you think about the big games, the bowl games, you think about the Super Bowl, you think about the World Series, and you ask those players, ‘what does this mean? This is a huge game, this is the biggest game ever.’ And they downplay it. They don’t want to think of it. After the game, they’ll tell you how much pressure they were under, and how much stress. They couldn’t sleep at night. So leading up to it, it’s like they’re trying not to think about that, because if you make that moment bigger than what it is, it’s gonna get the best of you.”

“I immediately, Anti-Monitor, Psycho-Pirate, Pariah, you just start thinking of all these names…so that’s when I went and looked, and saw who is already in place, and who they would have to introduce to bring on the big picture,” Garrett said. “And that was fun part for me too, ’cause you know, as a fan, as a comic book fan, that’s where I would hope it would go to.”

“Elseworlds” concludes with Supergirl on December 11th at 8/7c on The CW.