The Flash, S3 Ep08 – Invasion!

This week’s episode of The Flash serves as the second part of The CW’s 4-night crossover event dubbed “Heroes v Aliens”. In actuality, “Invasion!” is really the first part of this crossover as Monday night’s episode of Supergirl had nothing to do with this crossover, with the exception of that episode’s final scene which saw Barry and Cisco travel to her Earth and request Supergirl’s assistance. While it is a bit disappointing Supergirl didn’t share more of a connection with this event, this week’s episode of The Flash gave fans of The CW’s DC universe plenty to be pleased with. Simply stated “Invasion!”, the episode unites heroes from all of The CW’s DC properties including Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and pits them against an invading race of aliens referred to as the Dominators. While the episode spends enough time addressing The Flash‘s own developing plot lines, it also addresses recent issues explored in Legends of Tomorrow.

Green Arrow meets Supergirl

“Invasion!” is pure fun throughout, throwing us right into the action from the beginning as the episode flashes forward to The Flash and Green Arrow taking on a mind controlled Supergirl, Thea Queen, Diggle, Sara Lance, Firestorm, Ray Palmer, and Heat Wave. Fans of all four of The CW’s DC series should definitely get a kick out of seeing all of these heroes share the same screen together for the first time. It really is great to see this happen and see how far this universe has gone since season one of Arrow. On the negative side, it’s a bit unfortunate that every time these CW heroes first cross over into their respective series they have to fight each other, but at least it’s only happening in this one episode.

It would have also been nice to see more characters from Supergirl show up in this crossover. The Flash has brought along his team, Green Arrow has brought along Thea, Diggle, and Felicity, and all of the Legends showed up, but it would have been cool to see Supergirl’s D.E.O. agent sister Alex Danvers, Mon-El, and maybe even Martian Manhunter show up as well. Adding Superman would have been too much. Although, it was definitely great to see Thea suit up again being that she has not suited up all season on Arrow. There’s a character that has definitely improved since we first met her in 2012.

The set up for this week’s crossover is very simplistic, though the alien invasion story merely serves as a backdrop for these characters to unite and strut their stuff. The simplicity of the set up isn’t a negative aspect of the episode, and allows for the episode to focus some time on threads left open in previous episodes. “Invasion!” further addresses Wally’s speed, explores Cisco’s recent justified hostility towards Barry, and brings to light a cryptic message from future Barry that was discovered on Legends of Tomorrow.

For the most part it’s easy to feel sorry for Wally, but Iris was completely right for turning him away when he wanted to join up and fight aliens. Wally is nowhere near ready to fight crime and he does need to be trained, but not by jumping right a battle with aliens. Having said that, one of the episode’s better moments was seeing Wally rebel against Joe and Iris and decide to help Barry and Oliver after the rest of the team was mind-controlled by the Dominators. Sadly, his assistance was short lived as Supergirl knocked him out.

The effects of Flashpoint remain apparent as now the rest of these characters, like Diggle, know about how much Barry has changed the timeline. I’m interested in seeing how Diggle copes with the news that he once had a daughter instead of a son, and seeing how Dr. Stein addresses the reality that he now has a daughter of his own.

Flash Fact: Supergirl is from Earth-38

While the simplicity of the set up works for this episode, we still don’t know what the Dominators’ motives actually are by the episode’s conclusion. Are they simply trying to take over the planet or is there more to it than that? Why kidnap Oliver, Sara, Diggle, Thea, and Ray in the episode’s cliffhanger? These are questions that will hopefully be addressed in the next two episodes of this crossover, but for this episode, watching Green Arrow fight in hand-to-hand combat against White Canary, and witnessing The Flash hold his own against Supergirl, was very enjoyable.

If you’ve been enjoying everything The CW has had to offer in regards to their DC properties, then “Invasion!” is definitely worthwhile and is pretty close to what Felicity refers to as the “best team-up ever”. However, let’s hope that by the end of this crossover we get to see these heroes actually fight these aliens rather than each other. Like Marvel’s Avengers, we should see each team member appropriately use their respective abilities and pool their resources together in defeating this new enemy.

“Heroes v Aliens” continues with the 8th episode of Arrow‘s fifth season, which also doubles as that series’ 100th episode. My thoughts on that will be up soon, but in the meantime feel free to check out The CW’s trailer for next week’s episode of The Flash entitled “The Present” below, and let us know what you thought about “Invasion!” in the comments.