Last night, The CW aired the third and final hour of the infinite Earth crisis for the year. As with any good halftime, it ended so you want the holidays to be over so parts four and five can arrive much sooner.
In the meantime, this is the biggest event that has ever happened to the Arrowverse.
(Ed. Note: This post contains important spoilers for the third episode of Crisis on Infinite Earths.)
Katie Yu / The CW
In the third installment of Crisis, an episode of The Flash, the heroes continue their search for the Paragons, people with certain qualities who are able to defeat the Anti-Monitor. As it turns out, there are already six of the Paragons on the time-traveling ship Waverider: Batwoman (Courage), Sara Lance (Destiny), Supergirl (Hope), Brandon Routh’s Superman of Earth-96 (Truth), Martian Manhunter (Honor) and the Lightning (love). The seventh (Humanity) is Ivy Town Professor Ryan Choi, who is known to the readers of DC Comics as the later second atom.
While Iris, Ray Palmer, and Elongated Man Ryan recruit, the other members of Team Flash set out to find the anti-monitor hiding place and disable their anti-counterfeit weapon before hitting Earth-1, the only remaining world in the multiverse can. Flash, Killer Frost, a newly powered Vibe and the Pariah find the weapon and discover the power source of the antimatter cannon.
It’s John Wesley Shipp’s Barry Allen of Earth-90, who was previously considered dead after the monitor dumped him in Elseworlds last year and is now running forever on the treadmill of a supervillain. The heroes manage to stop the anti-matter wave, even though Barry has to sacrifice his life on earth, and with the assembled Paragons, it seems the day has largely been saved.
That is, until the Anti-Monitor itself appears aboard the Waveriders, kills his brother and triggers the antimatter wave again to consume Earth-1 and shortly thereafter the Waverider itself. At the last moment Pariah throws the Paragons away before the Anti-Monitor devours the rest of the heroes on the Waverider. The whole multiverse is gone.
The seven Paragons are in the vanishing point, a place outside space and time. As everyone gets used to his massive loss, Superman-96 is consumed by antimatter in Supergirl’s arms and replaced by none other than Lex Luthor. When he wrote the book of fate in the previous episode, Lex literally wrote his name over Superman to declare himself Paragon.
The CW
All hope is not lost. In the previous episode, the heroes found a way to bring Oliver Queen back from the dead, but without his soul. His daughter Mia and Johns Diggle and Constantine get with the help of the devil his soul from purgatory. That is, the Lucifer of Earth-666, the title character of the Fox and Netflix show.
But before the trio can go with Oliver’s soul, a man named Jim Corrigan shows up and tells Oliver he has a higher calling. In other words, Oliver Queen becomes the ghost – a hero of the DC Comics, who is traditionally a hybrid of an almost omnipotent divine power of revenge and a mortal host – and fights against the anti-monitor. It will be up to him and the seven Paragons to put an end to the Anti-Monitor and restore all life, as we know it in the arrow page.
The Endless Crisis ends January 14 with a two-parter from Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow.
Justin is a freelance writer from Kansas City, Missouri, and often on Twitter at the address GigawattConduit. He is also an avid lover of McDonald’s M & M McFlurries and accepts that he is addicted to it.