Those of you who watched last night’s Supergirl will be aware that the crossover didn’t really start. But The Flash lands us right in the middle of the action with Barry (Grant Gustin) and Oliver (Stephen Amell) suited and booted and under attack, seemingly from an unknown force, but then they nearly get struck by heat vision and you realise that everything is not what it seems.
Back we go ten hours and what Team Flash think is a meteor crashes into Central City. As it turns out, it’s actually an alien spacecraft. Enter Lyla (Andrey Marie Anderson), and her explaining that this isn’t the first time that aliens have come into contact with Earth, but this is the first time they’ve been an all out threat.
Barry then assembles the Aveng- Team Arrow and the Legends in order to create this super line up to face them, but what they really need is an alien to help them face the aliens. So Barry (along with Cisco (Carlos Valdes)) pop over to Earth-3 to go and get Supergirl (Melissa Benoist). This is why you didn’t have to watch Supergirl to watch all of the crossover, because the scene from the end of the episode is repeated in The Flash, we feel a tiny bit cheated, to be honest, but we’ll let it go…
“I thought you said you were bringing an alien?” chips in one of the team, so Kara shows them she can fly and everybody instantly believes that she’s an alien… in a world with metas we wouldn’t really think this is enough, but okay! Barry, as ‘team leader’ suggests (with the very obvious help of Oliver) that they train against Supergirl to prepared themselves. It most results in humorous take downs of most team members and Kara looking completely effortlessly pleased with herself.
As the episode progresses, the aliens managed to whammy most of the collected heroes, with only Oliver and Barry spared from the spell of madness, which brings us to the start of the episode, the team are trying to kill the two of them. Once they get unwhammied all seems to be fine, but then suddenly Sara, Ray, Diggle and Thea all get abducted by the aliens and as Barry runs to grab Oliver before he is taken, but he isn’t fast enough.
That’s the cliffhanger we’re left with. The episode is well paced, it has moments of good humour, emotional bits, Felicity being excited about Kara, and just generally leaving us with quite a good feeling about what is to come.
Our main, and possibly only, gripe, is that everybody keeps raging on Barry for his changing the timeline with Flashpoint. We get it, what he did was selfish and he didn’t do it, but who would have though that the voice of reason would have been Oliver? Given that we’ve found Arrow a little lax this season, his characterisation and involvement in this episode has been superb. Why is Diggle so upset about not having a daughter he has technically never known? What we learn is that the only person affected is Stein, who goes home to visit his wife only to find a daughter. We know Barry messed up, but Cisco continuously insisting they aren’t friends is getting a little old.
