While Marvel has been owning the movie theaters with its Avengers movies, DC has been quietly taking over our T.V.s. The 3 most important and interconnected DCTV shows are Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow, which all air on the CW.
What makes the DCTV Universe so special is how it’s interconnected and linked like their comic book counterparts. While the shows have their own identities, Arrow is a dark, vigilante-crime drama, Flash is a fun superhero romp, and Legends is a crazy time traveling adventure, they are all contained in one same, comic book universe.
Like Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, what happens on one show can affect and change the other. However, because they’re on T.V. the shows can reference each other and intertwine much better because they air on a weekly basis. Because Marvel is using movies to tell its stories, big events like Hydra taking over Shield are contained in one movie and aren’t brought up again or mentioned until another movie several years later. In the DCTV universe big events or villains can move between the shows which makes the universe feel cohesive and real.
A great example is this season’s ‘Flarrow’ crossover. The ‘Flarrow’ crossover is a two-part story that is told between The Flash and Arrow on two separate nights. That means the story will start on The Flash of that week, and then continue onto next day’s Arrow episode. Flarrow feels like the live-action justice league show I’ve always wanted, with heroes teaming up to fight awesome villains. These crossovers are big spectacles like The Avengers movies, but made on a T.V. budget. Still, these episodes have great villains and showcase the relationships between our favorite characters from both shows.
Relationships are another great thing that the DCTV Universe uses to unify its shows. The evolving friendship between Oliver Queen (The Green Arrow) and Barry Allen (The Flash) is fantastic because it feels like a comic book hero relationship. When they first meet, Oliver is a mentor to Barry, but can’t stand his excitement over being a superhero. Over the next two seasons the heroes would fight against each other, and together against common enemies. Now they and their friendship is a pillar on both shows.
Even though the characters meet only twice or three times per season, you can see the effect of their relationship on how they overcome obstacles and villains over the course of the season. Just like a DC comic book, heroes will call on their superhero friends to help fight their arch-rivals. This happens on Flash and Arrow too like when Oliver helped Barry fight the Reverse Flash, or when Barry went on Arrow and saved Oliver’s friends from Ra’s al Ghul.
The DCTV universe has even taken one of DC’s weirdest concepts, The Multiverse, and translated it fantastically onto T.V. In the comics the DC universe exists in a Multiverse, with many alternate realities and earths, where certain things are different on each one. For example, on Earth-3 all of our favorite heroes are villains, and on Earth-2 the 1940s, golden Age DC comic book characters are alive and well. On the Flash this season Barry travels to the T.V. version of Earth 2, an amalgamation of the comics’ Earth 2 and 3. We got the chance to see evil versions of Barry’s sidekicks and the golden age Flash, Jay Garrick, was introduced.
The DCTV universe is like a comic book come to life on the silver screen. While the Marvel movies might have a bigger budget and a A-list set of heroes to work with, the DCTV universe feels much bigger and more realistic. The T.V. shows are able to emanate hard comic book ideas, and make them work in this interconnected world.
Picture courtesy of The CW network.
