The Arrowverse crossover is something that fans of The CW‘s connected DC Comics inspired shows look forward to every year and they just keep getting bigger and better. This year’s “Crisis on Earth-X” was the most ambitious event to date, bringing all of the small screen superheroes together to take on their evil Nazi doppelgängers.
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Because the crossovers are so popular, everyone it seems has an idea about what the next major story should be and that includes Kevin Smith. During a recent episode of his Fat Man on Batman podcast, a fan asked both Smith and his co-host Mark Bernardin what story they would tackle if they were called up by Greg Berlanti and told to do the crossover. The pair had strikingly different, but equally interesting ideas on what they would do.
Smith — who is not only a major comic book fan but has notably written a 15-issue run of Green Arrow for DC Comics that brought Oliver Queen back from the dead as well as introduced the future Speedy, Mia Dearden — looked to classic comic book story arcs for his inspiration.
“If they gave me any kind of carte blanche I would try to do “Rock of Ages”, but you couldn’t really do it without the real Justice League,” Smith said, referencing Grant Morrison’s epic JLA story arc. “It would be so compromised. I would go for, I mean, you can’t do the real “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, but they do have a multiverse in that show like Supergirl exists in a different universe than Flash and Arrow, so you could. The worlds are colliding, like the multiverse story, the classic “Crisis on Infinite Earths” multiverse story. That would cover a week of programming and stuff. I would go for that.”
In comics, “Crisis on Infinite Earths” functioned to effectively removed the multiverse concept from the DC Universe, killing off several long-standing characters — including Barry Allen’s Flash and Supergirl — as part of a way to simplify the then 50-year-old continuity that had had gotten quite complicated with conflicting origins and stories. The actual arc centered around the Anti-Monitor destroying realities and, to save the universe as it were, five of the remaining Earths merge into a single, shared universe. While many fans have long considered that a “Crisis on Infinite Earths”-like event would be a handy way to bring Supergirl over from Earth-38, with the recent “Crisis on Earth-X” another “crisis” event seems a little unlikely, but Bernardin had another, more dramatic idea for a crossover.
“I kill Oliver Queen,” Bernardin said. “I would make it the death of Oliver Queen. I think that Arrow is probably starting to run its course and there’s a world in which in a year, two years maybe you come to the end of Arrow. If you’re going to do that, then fucking do it. And if you’re going to do it make it count, make it big and make it real and make the death of Oliver Queen your four-part crossover, like what happens, how, who did it, how they find out who did it, the fallout from it all of it.”
Killing Oliver Queen might make for an interesting story, but it would be a crossover difficult to come back for, particularly for Arrow. While the rest of the shows — The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow — could likely continue without Oliver Queen, it would likely spell the end of Arrow. It’s a possibility that Bernardin said might shift the crossover to a series finale event.
“Maybe that’s your giant season finale as opposed to a sweeps event where you do four episodes that ends the season and it ends with the death of Oliver Queen,” he said.
The episodes of “Crisis on Earth-X” are currently streaming on The CW’s website. Arrow airs Thursdays at 9/8c on The CW.
