YMMV / Crisis on Earth-X

• Abandon Shipping: It is this event, more than anything else, that killed the popularity for the Olicity pairing and for Felicity for a lot of fans. On top of Felicity's constant wangsting about how she didn't want to marry Oliver, her decision to selfishly hijack the long awaited WestAllen wedding to tack on her own wedding to Oliver was in such poor taste that even solid Olicity fans and anti-WestAllen fans bashed her for it, with many wondering how Oliver could ever agree to marrying her after that.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Some fans believe that the real reason why Felicity made a 180 on her opinion of marrying Oliver was because she wanted to be remembered as the wife of the Green Arrow. This was after Eobard gave her "The Reason You Suck" Speech by revealing that, in the future, everyone remembers Green Arrow, Black Canary, and the Flash, but no one remembers her, and only supported by Felicity's abrupt decision to tack on her wedding to Oliver to Barry and Iris' own wedding soon afterwards. Most ignore or downplay the fact that Felicity almost dieing at the hands of Dark Arrow right in front of Oliver's eyes might have also played a factor.
• Ass Pull:
  • Oliver having a Kryptonite arrow, considering he had not encountered any Earth-1 Kryptonians or gear aside from Earth-38's Kara beforehand, and Kara never mentioned the substance to anyone from Earth-1 in any of the Crossover episodes. It's on par with the likes of Batman, furthering their connections.
  • Reverse-Flash coming back from being erased from existence a second time. His only "explanation" is basically a Hand Wave, as well as a gibe towards the Arrowverse's infamous Timey-Wimey Ball. He doesn't even indicate why or how he's wearing Wells' face again (apart from a single line saying it's "for old times sake") or where in the timeline he's even from. Even some fans of the character got annoyed by this.
• Awesome Music: The closing credits theme is an incredible mixture of the closing credit themes from all four Arrowverse shows.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • It's basically four straight episodes of your favorite characters beating the shit out of Nazis. What more could you ask for? Many women, minorities, and LGBT viewers noted how satisfying it was to see white supremacist fascists presented as unambiguously evil and punished accordingly.
  • Also, the final battle can be considered completely one-sided (aside from fighting its three leaders), but it's easy to theorize that the heroes are simply seething with Tranquil Fury, fighting on behalf of Martin Stein.
  • Felicity getting a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Thawne is cathartic for her large group of detractors.
• Complete Monster: Eobard Thawne, see here.
• Crack Pairing: Oliver/Kara actually started off as this in the among the fandom, but then the show made it happen via their Evil Doppelgänger counterparts from Earth-X who actually make this work.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The waitress at the wedding, despite having only one scene, has captivated the fans' imagination for her clear personal investment in Barry and Iris, her sweet and funny, if awkward, personality and the strong implication that she is Barry and Iris' daughter leaving the hope that she will appear in future episodes, particularly on The Flash. She would eventually turn out to be Nora West-Allen, daughter of Barry and Iris, becoming a regular cast member of The Flash in Season 5...but ironically the character's fan reception throughout that season was divisive, to say the least.
  • Prometheus-X/Tommy Merlyn, also nothing more than a One-Scene Wonder, but a very memorable character.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Earth-X Prometheus not being Adrian Chase naturally opened up all the old Prometheus theories that were jossed the first time around. Turns out he's Tommy Merlyn of Earth-X. A resurrected Tommy Merlyn was a popular choice to be Earth-1 Prometheus before he was revealed to be Simon Morrison.
  • The identity of the mysterious waitress at the wedding. Later revealed to be Barry & Iris's future daughter Nora.
• Even Better Sequel: Even with the controversial elements or its infamous ending, most generally agree that this was even better than last year's "Invasion!" crossover, which had set a very high bar to meet.
• Fan Fic Fuel:
  • A brief exchange about how there can be another Kara finally confirms that Earth-1 has its own Krypton and all the people on it.
  • Thawne reveals in the future he fought Superman.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Many have labelled Prometheus-X using a combination of Tommy and Prometheus as "Tommetheus".
  • "Kommandant Lance." His rank isn't actually "Kommandant", and we don't hear his name onscreen, but it's easier to remember and type than "Sturmbannführer", and a good guess, respectively.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Legends episode "Freakshow" had Martin wishing death on the architect of the Titanic. It's an Actor Allusion with a dose of Self-Deprecation, and in this miniseries, Martin would actually get his wish.
  • Upon meeting Alex and Sara in "Part 1," Overgirl says "One wedding, two funerals." She's wrong; "Part 4" ends with two weddings and just one funeral.
  • In the "Luck be a Lady" episode over in The Flash, a gag involves Iris getting so scared of what the meta's power might do to her wedding plans, so she decides to get hitched with Barry right away, just after a funeral. In this event, Barry and Iris only officially tie the knot right after Martin Stein's own funeral.
  • In the wedding ceremony, Barry assures Joe that Henry and Nora are right there with their son in the most important moment of his life. This gets an Ironic Echo at the end of the first episode after the winter break: Barry gets convicted of murder, and he was placed in the very same cell Henry Allen was incarcerated in, with the words "Henry Allen Was Here" written on its walls.
• He Really Can Act: After almost two years since "Falling", Melissa Benoist gets a chance to showcase her superb portrayal of the nastier side of Kara once again playing her Evil Doppelgänger Overgirl.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the Arrow-part Oliver angrily reminds Kara and Barry that he doesn't have superspeed like the other two do after they had to wait for his arrival. But guess what? The next time the three of them meet, Oliver has superspeed thanks to changing lives with Barry.
• I Knew It!:
  • Many fans were right on the mark that Eobard Thawne managed to worm his way back from non-existence yet again, appearing on Earth-X as the Dark Flash.
  • People theorized that either Tommy Merlyn or Roy Harper was Earth-X Prometheus, since Colin Donnell was reported to be seen on set and Colton Haynes tweeted he would be returning to Arrow. It turned out he was the former.
  • Ever since Victor Garber announced he was planning to go back to Broadway, it was teased that Martin Stein will be retiring. And because of Retirony, many people correctly guessed that he would die in the crossover instead of actual retirement.
• Love to Hate: The New Reichsmen are fanatical, bigoted, despicable, and overall depraved and disgusting people, but at the same time they’re badass, well-written, interesting, and their actors did a great job portraying them and their main universe counterparts that you can’t help but be impressed by them.
• Misblamed: Of all the controversial decisions Mark Guggenheim is responsible for regarding Olicity, he actually isn't responsible for the double wedding. While that honor actually goes to Greg Berlanti, that doesn't stop most of Olicity's detractors from happily blaming Guggenheim for one of the few things that genuinely isn't his fault.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Eobard Thawne aligning himself with a world-oppressing Nazi regime is a whole new low and level of evil, even for him. And remember the horrific process he pulled to steal Earth-1 Harrison Wells' face? His final taunt to Barry all but states that he's going to do it again, on anyone, just to screw with his nemesis.
  • Quentin Lance of Earth-X crossed it when he killed his own daughter (Sara's Earth-X counterpart) for being bisexual.
• Narm:
  • Joe describing Barry and Iris' relationship as based on trust is hilarious considering how much this particular team has lied to each other, including Iris being kept in the dark about Barry being the Flash for almost a year.
  • While everyone in the heroic team has a Lock-and-Load Montage, Kara's consists of doing what amounts to a runway walk toward the door before turning around to face...well, the only excuse is the camera, to do the classic shirt rip. Compared to the others, it's rather ridiculous.
  • Paul Blackthorne gives a very effective and chilling performance as the Earth-X Quentin. Unfortunately, the other doppelgängers keep the accents of their Earth-1 counterparts, making him stick out horribly.
  • Stein's death. It should have been one of the emotional centers in the entirety of the Arrowverse canon but Franz Drameh's very dramatic grief soils it for some.
  • Overgirl mocking Supergirl for not having a boyfriend, a very dangerous, very powerful, very evil, woman who up until then had been played very seriously has the hero in her mercy and she acts like a high school Alpha Bitch.
• Narm Charm:
  • As hypocritical as Joe's speech about Barry and Iris' relationship being built on trust is, it's still very heartfelt and Jesse L. Martin's delivery is still good.
  • Yes, Barry and Iris' aborted wedding is all sugary saccharinity personified. Then again who out there doesn't like a little sugar, artificial or otherwise, on their palate every now again, especially after all the crap they've been through in The Flash. In particular, Melissa Benoist's performance of "Running Home to You" as Iris walks down the aisle is so over the top cheesy that it quickly became one of the most popular parts of the crossover.
  • Jewish Felicity standing up to Nazi Dark Arrow when defending a weakened Kara. Cliche, yeah. Pandering to a Creator's Pet, yeah. Amazing, Fuck Yeah!
  Felicity: My grandparents didn't survive the Holocaust so the world could be ruled by Nazis. So if you want Kara, you gotta go through me! And even if you do you're not gonna win, cause we will not back down we will keep fighting. So get the hell off our Earth while you still can!!!
  • Barry and Iris' reaction to Felicity and Oliver hijacking their wedding. Instead of rebuking their friends for their selfishness, they graciously allow them to join in. The fans may be pissed off by Oliver and Felicity's disrespectful decision, but we are given another demonstration of Barry and Iris' never ending kindness and generosity to others, which almost makes up for it. The next episode of The Flash then confirms this actually is what the writers were going for.
• Never Live It Down: The double wedding became this for Felicity. Even when the Arrow writers were trying their hardest to make her a likable character again, a person only has to bring up the double wedding for any fan trying to give her a chance to hate her again.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • King Shark in the cold opening fighting Barry.
  • The waitress at the wedding, who was revealed to be Barry and Iris' future daughter Nora, is also remembered fondly.
  • Earth-X Tommy Merlyn has only one major scene. But boy, does he make it count.
  • Earth-X Red Tornado, who had quite a small but very important role.
• Romantic Plot Tumor:
  • Given that the episode is supposedly set during Barry and Iris' wedding, you'd think the baggage of Olicity, Kara's moping over Mon-El, Alex's second guessing her broken engagement with Maggie, and her harping on a one night stand with Sara, would take a back seat. It doesn't.
  • Ironically, the two less dreary in their love lives (aside from of course their wedding being ruined) is Barry and Iris, who agree to set aside their problems to focus on repelling the invasion.
• Rooting for the Empire: While fans were certainly not wishing for the victory of Nazis, there were those supporting the relationship between Dark Arrow and Overgirl.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Tommy Merlyn being Prometheus-X.
  • Atom enlarging only his hand to beat down some NAZIs, something he has never been shown doing before.
  • The reveal of the NAZI Waverider.
• Signature Scene: The Final Battle between the Nazis and the Earth-1 heroes, starting with the Team Power Walk and the Crowded-Cast Shot of the heroes lining up and then including Mirror Matches between Green Arrow and Dark Arrow, Flash and Dark Flash, Supergirl and Overgirl, as well as the Waverider and the Nazi Waverider.
• Special Effect Failure: After Cisco fires unsuccessfully on the Nazi Waverider and we get a long take of various secondary characters taking down Nazi soldiers, time slows down to get a better look at Barry and Eobard's fight. Except a Nazi soldier knocks a civilian to his knees and takes aim before freezing in place. Above them and to the left, Oliver and Dark Arrow were already frozen, showing that time is supposed to have slowed down already.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • Earth-X's Guardian is easily killed by Dark Arrow in the opening scene.
  • The Team Arrow Recruits getting laid out by the Dark Arrow after neither John joins them nor former members Thea and Laurel (Canary or Siren) being slated to appear. However, it's tempered out by the fact that fan favorites Mick Rory and Caitlin/Killer Frost also are brutally attacked.
  • After years of being the biggest Creator's Pet in the entire Arrowverse, Eobard Thawne's "Reason You Suck" Speech to Felicity was greatly enjoyed by her detractors.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: To be expected when there are loads of characters, but it's still jarring that most of the supporting characters of all the four shows are either locked away from part 2 until part 4, or just don't appear at all for an unexplained reason, especially the fan-favourites that people were hoping to see in action more than the previous crossover event. While there wasn't time to give everyone some focus, along with the fact that some of them had to suffer Deus Exit Machina to avoid their Story-Breaker Power(s) from shortening the plot, fans were still disappointed in how underutilized they were. The only characters that appear in all four episodes are Kara, Alex, Oliver, Stein, Felicity, Sara, Wells, Iris, Jefferson, Caitlin and Barry.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some people wanted to see an evil version of Barry Allen, as Savitar was seen as a poorly executed villain and Earth-X Barry could have been an improvement over Savitar.
  • With Tom Cavanagh playing both of his well known roles, it's a shame we didn't get a scene with both characters together. However, it later turned out there was a Deleted Scene.
  • While the crossover was about Barry and Iris' wedding and a Nazi invasion, the reaction of Nazis over an interracial marriage was overlooked, even if this was Iris' first crossover.
  • Sara having to deal with the fact that a doppelgänger of her own father almost had her executed in a Nazi death camp (and the fact that said copy also killed her own doppelgänger because of her sexuality), whether that would have to be Sara getting help from her friends or having to talk with Quentin directly, isn't ever followed up on.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • Rest in peace, Martin Stein.
  • On the villain's side, we have Prometheus-X who has the coolness of both Prometheus and Tommy Merlyn but dies shortly after his big reveal.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Guardian appearing in the very beginning, i.e. his Earth-X counterpart, at least. And he bites it only after a few minutes.
  • King Shark's brief cameo in the start of Part 1 qualifies, since the last time we saw him he was in Argus custody.
  • At the start of episode 1, Supergirl is doing battle with a Dominator, who up 'til this point haven't been an active on-screen villainous force since last year.
  • No one saw the appearance of Barry and Iris' future daughter coming, least of all on what's technically a Supergirl episode.
  • Dark Flash not being Earth-X Barry Allen and instead being played by Tom Cavanagh was surprising, but what was especially surprising was he was actually Eobard Thawne from Earth-1 with the appearance of Harrison Wells.
  • Given that he had been dead since the first season of Arrow, seeing Tommy alive in Earth-X caught a lot of people off guard.
  • Thanks to a quite clever inversion of Spoiled by the Cast List, the rest of Team Arrow. Part 2 features an early scene with Curtis that gives the impression they'll be sitting this one out, but then they do show up in the flesh, and since this is technically an Arrow episode the actors' names in the credits wasn't a tip-off.
  • Metallo, especially in a brand new, comics-accurate version as opposed to his previous appearance on Supergirl.
  • Earth-X Oliver and Kara were expected from the beginning due to promo pictures. Earth-X Quentin Lance, on the other hand, was completely out of left field.
  • Winn appears in Part 3 as part of La Résistance, catching many off-guard since they thought Kara and Alex would be the only Supergirl characters with prominent roles.
  • Red Tornado, whose entire role in the 'verse before this was a single episode of Supergirl.
  • Earth-X's final card to play being the Earth-X Waverider was a very well-hidden surprise. Or the fact that its Gideon AI is voiced by Susanna Thompson, known to the audience as Moira Queen.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Felicity and Oliver interrupting Barry and Iris' wedding to get married without asking for permission first made them look less like a couple coming around and more of being inconsiderate to Barry and Iris, who had to postpone their wedding due to a Nazi invasion that cost the life of one of their friends.
• Wangst: Felicity's constant bitching about not wanting to marry Oliver during the second part of the crossover, to the annoyance of the majority of the audience. Especially since all Oliver wanted to do was talk about it, not insist they get married right at the moment. It made what she did at the end of the crossover so much worse.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: Many fans cannot believe Oliver agreed to marry Felicity after she interrupted Barry and Iris's wedding vows to tack on their own wedding instead — after their friends' original wedding had already been interrupted and ruined by invading Nazis from another Earth. As these fans pointed out, such a self-centered action is usually considered a massive red flag, and that it makes more sense if Oliver had broken up with Felicity after what happened instead of agreeing to make a lifelong commitment with her. This reasoning is one of the many factors that led to people abandoning the Olicity ship, as many felt it made no sense for Oliver to stay with Felicity after this.