Attention: this story contains spoilers regarding the Supergirl/Flash crossover event, “Worlds Finest.” Proceed at your own risk if you’ve not watched the episode!
If you’re looking for a means of dealing with the suffocating grimdark of this weekend’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, look no further than Monday night’s Supergirl/Flash crossover “Worlds Finest” (airing on CBS at 8/7c), which finds the Scarlet Speedster of Central City paying a visit to the Girl of Steel in National City. It’s forty-two minutes of pure joy, wonder, and magic—all the things that made us fall in love with superheroes in the first place. But that joy is not without its repercussions, as we learned recently in speaking with executive producers Greg Berlanti and Andrew Kreisberg about how this very special episode of Supergirl came about. What does such a bold move mean as the show wraps up its first season? Read on to learn more.
“We always wanted to do it,” says Berlanti of the crossover. “From the day we cast Melissa [Benoist], the notion of her in scenes with Grant [Gustin] or someday maybe, in the best of all worlds, with Stephen [Amell] as well…it’s exciting to think of them on screen together. And there was a similar tonality to the shows. But a few things had to go right. We were introducing this notion of Earth-2 and the Multiverse on Flash, and that had to work for us. We always said very openly that Flash and Arrow exist in a universe where there’s no Superman, or you would have heard about him. They would have had at least one conversation about him, and certainly Supergirl as well. And he exists on this show.”
But the multiverse would prove the easier hurdle of the two shows converging—even though they live on different networks (CW for The Flash and CBS for Supergirl. “It was more challenging in that way because it’s not so convenient. It’s two separate cites that they shoot in. You wanted the show to work and stand on its own, and CBS has its own audience. We thought we might wait until the second season,” explained Berlanti. “But after Christmas we came back and we were planning out the final third of the year and we saw a way that we thought we could do it; and it felt like the right time for him to enter her world and help her out. So it all came together. We went to all the powers that be and said, ‘I think we had indicated maybe we’d wait a little longer. But we’d really like to do this now.'”
Thankfully, everyone was on board and into it. “Everybody was very enthusiastic. One of the things that really kept the flame and the torch alive was a lot of journalists and the fans online. That kind of consistent feedback throughout the year and enthusiasm for the idea.”
Though the Multiverse has now been introduced to Kara Danvers and aliens to Barry Allen, Kreisberg says we shouldn’t expect to see related fallout on their respective shows—but other events of “Worlds Finest” will come into play in the remaining two episodes of this season of Supergirl.
“We’re only two episodes away from the end of the season. So for now the centrifugal force of the finale takes over, and the repercussions of this episode are more that she got the city back on her side and she took a fledgling step with James. Those two events play very heavily in the last two episodes.”
As for Barry, Berlanti says his means of entering Kara’s universe will be further explained in this week’s episode of The Flash (airing Tuesday, March 29th, on CW at 8/7c)…
“Supergirl will air Monday, and the Flash episode that sort of hints at how he gets over there and gets back airs on Tuesday. So the audience will have to forgive us that the one will actually air before the other, and they shouldn’t wait to watch Supergirl until after the Flash episode. They should certainly watch it before. But they’ll see the shout-out in the episode. It deals with Barry increasing his speed. I’m very excited about [this] episode of The Flash as well. Had it been all on one network we would have been able to coordinate that. I’m actually surprised we were able to do it as closely as we were, and that it worked out to that degree. So you have to imagine that they’re parallel worlds in different universes and the timeline is slightly different. One’s a day ahead!”
But will there ever come a day where Kara returns the favor and visit Barry on The Flash”
“We would love that,” said Berlanti. “Just like we love this and are excited about this. I think we want to wait and see the audience reaction to something like this. But just as storytellers and fans of the actors, obviously. We love it when we can figure out a way to do it creatively and hopefully everybody enjoys it.”
Of course, the Multiverse does add a tiny wrinkle to this: wouldn’t that mean a Kara already exists on Barry’s Earth? And if so, what might a version of her look like there?
“I would think that any Kara that exists on Earth-1 would also have to have been an alien,” explained Kreisberg. “There can’t just be Kara Danvers from Poughkeepsie. That’s the fun of the Multiverse. We have a really exciting, fun doppelgänger coming up on the penultimate episode of The Flash that we haven’t announced yet. That’s just another one of those ‘Oh, that would be really cool…’ It’s surprisingly easy to justify any of these decisions. Usually when we’re in the writers room, and arguing the merits of doing something or not doing something, it really comes down to ‘Is it cool? Is it fun?’ The logic of how we get to it we find we can make work, especially if you don’t dwell too much on it. Because at the end of the day the audience wants to see the fun thing, they want to see the Flash and Supergirl together. So getting them across—he ran a little too fast with his tachyon drive—it wasn’t a lot of shoe leather to make it happen. Then you get forty-two minutes of the fun stuff.”
As a lifelong fan of the DCU, we posited the idea of Melissa Benoist appearing on The Flash as the Power Girl of Earth-2 to Kreisberg. His thoughts? “Sure,” he laughs. “[It’s] a different costume, but sure!”
As for why the two iconic heroes are first meeting on Supergirl as opposed to The Flash, Berlanti explained that it was “because it was his capacity to come this way,” adding that they “never really considered it the other way” and that “it’s maybe a little bit more fun at first to bring the veteran from that show to the chemistry of a new show.”
As for whether or not the time-traveling heroes of the Flash spinoff Legends of Tomorrow could appear on Supergirl via their ship the Waverider, Kreisberg got our hopes way up, saying that, “The Waverider can go anywhere.”
But before we get ahead of ourselves, we have to bring it back to the episode at hand, in which the evil Kryptonian Non’s Myriad scheme is revealed and unleashed on Earth’s populace. How will this affect the remainder of the season?
“You’re finally going to discover why Astra did it,” Kreisberg explained. “Originally when we were developing the series we were just gonna have Astra—she was trying to mine the core of Krypton and now she was trying to mine the core of Earth. It was just to show the synchronicity. But Greg rightly pointed out that it should be something much more emotional and something much more visceral. Then the more we talked about it, the whole idea of mind control… As you’ll hear in subsequent episodes, you start to get very cogent arguments on the bad guys’ side for why Myriad is the way to go.
But don’t expect Non to go quietly and without explanation. Said Kreisberg: “We always love it when the bad guys have a point … [N]ext week Non actually gives a speech where he talks about ‘What has your free will gotten you? It’s gotten you a planet full of reality TV shows, politicians who can’t stand each other, and all of you are standing around sitting by as global warming is coming to destroy your planet. What if everybody was working in lockstep? What if everybody was moving in the same direction? Wouldn’t that be better?’ Obviously we can talk about how that’s horrible and you’re losing your free will and we’ll all miss our reality shows. But he has a pointy of view you could argue. That always makes the most compelling villains.”
Rest assured, that though Kara appears to be the only person on Earth unaffected by Myriad, she will have help in battling Non.
“She has a couple of surprising players that you wouldn’t expect to be the two people who are completely unaffected by Myriad to help her,” added Kreisberg.
As for how this affects Kara’s sister Alex’s current mission to find her father, Kreisberg remarked, “She is on a mission but Myriad taking over the entirety of National City is going to put into question which mission she should be pursuing. Obviously she knows her father is alive and he’s out there. But the entirety of National City has been taken over, and there’s gonna be some discussions with Hank in subsequent episodes about which danger is more immediate and pressing.”
With Alex’s father in the hands of Cadmus, might we see Superboy eventually appear on the show?
“We can’t speak to that,” explained Kreisberg. “You’re not gonna see Cadmus this season. It’s something that gets saved for season two. We did run out of runway a little bit. So it’s gonna remain more of an evil SPECTRE-y thing that’s out there. But it’s definitely something that we’re gonna pursue. Cadmus has such a rich history in the comics and the animated shows. There’s so much there to mine. It’ll definitely be part of season two.”
Someone else the duo hope to be involved in season two? Oh, you know, only the OG Wonder Woman herself.
“We had the perfect role for [former Wonder Woman] Lynda Carter,” explained Berlanti, before added that they “couldn’t work out her schedule. It’s the biggest disappointment for me of this entire season.”
“We’re gonna do it,” insisted Kreisberg. “We’ll just do it next year.”
“Alright, good!” explained Berlanti. “She’s the female President of the United States.”
Did you watch tonight’s crossover? Let us know your thoughts about it in the comments below!
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Images: Warner Brothers/CBS
