The Arrowverse Was Never the Same After Crisis on Infinite Earths

The end of The Flash: Season 9 marks a bittersweet moment for DC fans. The Arrowverse has officially come to a close, 11 years after Arrow kicked off this massive superhero universe. But as sad as it is to see this era of DC TV end, many viewers would probably agree that the time had come. The Arrowverse of recent years wasn’t what it once was. 

In fact, one could point to 2019’s Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover as the turning point for the Arrowverse. It was the Arrowverse’s biggest and most ambitious crossover by far, and things were never quite the same afterward. Here’s why Crisis turned out to be the beginning of the end for the Arrowverse.

After Crisis: The Smaller Scope of the Arrowverse

Arrowverse fans knew years ahead of time that a Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover was coming. The very first episode of The Flash in 2014 ended with the reveal of a futuristic newspaper headline dated April 25, 2024 – “Flash Missing: Vanished in Crisis.” That was clearly the climactic end point the show’s writers were building to, leaving viewers with the promise of ten years of adventures and dramatic twists building to a massive battle for the fate of the multiverse. 

However, it eventually became clear that Crisis wasn’t the destined end point of The Flash, but merely another stop along the way. The Flash’s Season 5 finale changed the newspaper’s date to December 10, 2019, laying the foundation for a crossover in the middle of the 2019-2020 TV season. Essentially, this meant that shows like The Flash, Supergirl and Batwoman were forced to press pause on their ongoing storylines for one episode before returning to business as usual the next time around.

In hindsight, this approach seems to have diminished the impact Crisis had on the surviving Arrowverse shows. The crossover itself is massive in scope, chronicling the death and rebirth of the DC multiverse itself. But once the dust did finally settle, the actual, tangible effects of Crisis were surprisingly small. Crisis mainly served to streamline Flash and Supergirl’s respective Earths into one world, while setting up a handful of ongoing story threads involving multiverse doppelgangers and Lex Luthor’s rehabilitated public image. Only Arrow was fundamentally transformed by the events of Crisis, and that series ended two episodes after the crossover.

But once the dust did finally settle, the actual, tangible effects of Crisis were surprisingly small.

There never seemed to be a clear plan for how to move the various surviving shows forward following the conclusion of Crisis. Most shows were limited in what could really be accomplished given their ongoing storytelling needs. Supergirl immediately returned to its overarching Leviathan storyline. The Flash raced headlong into a new storyline involving Mirror Monarch. The Arrowverse became too focused on what was next for its individual heroes and not enough on exploring the far-reaching ramifications of the Crisis.

There’s also the issue that, once your heroes fight a battle to save existence as we know it, everything else becomes small in comparison. The Arrowverse never came close to delivering a conflict on the scale of Crisis again, not even in The Flash’s four-part finale. If anything, the series began to turn inward and focus on smaller, more self-contained stories. 

Under showrunner Eric Wallace, The Flash transitioned away from season-long storylines revolving around one major villain to a series of smaller “graphic novels” and multiple main villains per season. That approach certainly had its merits, allowing The Flash to dig deeper into the character’s rogues gallery. But at the same time, that approach left less room to actually explore and develop these villains. That problem was especially felt with Season 9’s Red Death storyline, with the bulk of the conflict being compressed into two episodes that couldn’t do full justice to the character.  

The Arrowverse just felt like a smaller universe with smaller stakes after Crisis. If there was nowhere to go but down from there, then perhaps this shared universe would have been better off if Crisis were kept on the back burner for a few more years.

The Changing Casts of The Flash, Batwoman and Legends

The various Arrowverse shows hinge a great deal on the core ensemble. Arrow established the formula by pairing Stephen Amell’s Oliver Queen with right-hand man John Diggle (David Ramsey) and tech genius Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards). The Flash arguably perfected the formula with its original Team Flash ensemble – Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen, Carlos Valdes’ Cisco Ramon, Danelle Panabaker’s Caitlin Snow and Tom Cavanagh’s Harrison Wells. The other Arrowverse shows feature their own variations on that group dynamic, while Legends of Tomorrow broke the mold by introducing a true superhero team with no one, main character.

That ensemble focus is a major reason why shows like Arrow and The Flash worked so well, at least in their early seasons. But as many Arrowverse viewers will attest, these shows often struggled to maintain their quality over the long haul. Part of that has to do with the challenge of growing and expanding upon the core team dynamic. New characters are added as new seasons begin. Some veteran actors move on, leaving holes in the shows that need filling. Unfortunately, the Arrowverse as a whole has never been very adept at rolling with these punches. Team Flash grew bigger and more eclectic with time, but the series never actually improved upon the core Barry/Cisco/Caitlin/Wells unit from the first two seasons.

Crisis may not have been responsible for these struggles, but it marked a turning point where these shows really started to feel the burden from the ever-shifting ensemble casts. In its final few seasons, The Flash was hit hard by the departure of Valdes and Hartley Sawyer’s Ralph Dibny (the latter of whom was fired from the series), as well as the more sporadic appearances from Jesse L. Martin’s Joe West. Newer additions like Kayla Compton’s Allegra Garcia and Brandon McKnight’s Chester P. Runk never quite filled the void. Even Cavanagh, easily one of the strongest actors in the series, struggled to keep pace as The Flash continued to shake up its approach to Harrison Wells with each new season.

That’s to say nothing of the struggles faced by Batwoman, which dealt with the sudden departure of lead actress Ruby Rose after Season 1. The CW was forced to rework the series to focus on a completely different main character, Javicia Leslie’s Ryan Wilder. And while Ryan was a solid protagonist in her own right, that massive shakeup proved to be a momentum killer the series never really recovered from.

Even Legends wasn’t immune to these problems over the course of its seven-season run. While better than the rest of the shows at dealing with a constantly shifting ensemble cast, the revolving door of actors did start to weigh Legends down toward the end of its lifespan. By the final season, only Caity Lotz’s Sara Lance remained of the original Season 1 cast. Legends became the superhero TV version of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Is it still the show you fell in love with if nearly all the original cast members are gone? Though to its credit, the rotating cast was always part of the plan for Legends.  

The Lack of Crossovers and the Multiverse

Crisis on Infinite Earths ends with a big tease for the future of the Arrowverse, introducing the newly reborn Earth-Prime’s version of the Justice League, simply known as “The League.” The expectation was that Arrowverse fans would see more epic team-ups between Flash, Supergirl, Batwoman and the rest of the League as bigger and more terrible threats to the world arose.

Except that never actually happened. After establishing the League at the end of Crisis, the Arrowverse went on to almost completely ignore the team for the remainder of its run. The team was rarely even referenced in shows like Supergirl and The Flash after that point, much less actually featured onscreen. In fact, fans never saw the full League lineup in one place again. The closest the Arrowverse ever came to getting that gang back together was in the “Armageddon” crossover, where Barry and Cress Williams’ Black Lighting are shown meeting at the Hall of Justice. Until The Flash: Season 9 finally started opening the doors to more guest stars, “Armageddon” was really the only post-Crisis crossover of any note.

Even ignoring the League itself, the Arrowverse was strangely light on inter-show crossovers following Crisis. Even though that crossover had the benefit of remaking the world so that Team Flash and Team Supergirl now exist on the same Earth, the two groups didn’t cross paths very often. At best, characters from one show would make offhand references to characters from another. The shows began to feel more confined and self-contained, despite having a larger sandbox in which to play.

To be fair, there were no doubt some external factors getting in the way of more League appearances. The COVID-19 pandemic alone was surely a major hurdle. The pandemic caused most of the Arrowverse shows to prematurely halt production in 2020, and on-set safety protocols limited the potential for inter-show crossovers for a long time afterward. 

It’s also enough to wonder what sorts of constraints were being imposed by Warner Bros. in terms of the Arrowverse’s use of the League. Warners has long taken a frustrating approach to live-action DC projects by refusing to allow multiple incarnations of key characters to exist simultaneously. Arrow lost out on Amanda Waller and Task Force X thanks to the Suicide Squad movie, and it also found Deathstroke increasingly off-limits after Season 2. The fact that the Arrowverse couldn’t use the full “Justice League” moniker for its super-team suggests Warners wasn’t keen on putting the spotlight on this version of the team.

The League, more than anything else in the Arrowverse, feels like a major wasted opportunity.

But whatever the reasons involved, it’s frustrating that Crisis laid a foundation for a proper Arrowverse Justice League and none of the shows attempted to build on it. The League, more than anything else in the Arrowverse, feels like a major wasted opportunity.

Even if the League turned out to be DOA, the Arrowverse had no shortage of gold to mine when it came to the larger DC multiverse. Crisis solidified a live-action TV multiverse, revealing exactly how shows like The Flash, Supergirl, Titans, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing and Stargirl fit together and leaving room for those characters to cross paths in the future.

Except here, again, the Arrowverse made no real effort to capitalize on that potential. Crisis even went so far as to leave the denizens of Earth-Prime ignorant of the fact that the multiverse exists. Only towards the end of The Flash: Season 9 did that change, and by that point, it was too late to begin delving back into the multiverse. It instead fell on Titans to pick up the slack, with the Season 4 episode “Dude, Where’s My Gar?” offering a tantalizing glimpse of what can happen when the walls of reality fall away and the multiverse opens up again.

The Flash showrunner Eric Wallace recently gave fans a glimpse into what might have been had the series gone on a little longer. Wallace envisioned an adaptation of 2009’s Blackest Night, with the casts of Flash, Superman & Lois and Titans and Stargirl battling hordes of undead Black Lanterns. That’s exactly the sort of crossover that should have happened already. Blackest Night would have been a perfect way to build on the fallout of Crisis and bring the heroes of the newly formed League together in a battle for the fate of all worlds. The Arrowverse needed that level of ambition to keep the momentum going. Things were just never the same after the Crisis receded and the red skies vanished.  

For more on the end of the Arrowverse, check out our breakdown of The Flash’s convoluted ending and our look back at the biggest DC characters who never appeared in the Arrowverse.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.