CW’S Heroes Vs. FAILiens- How NOT To Do a TV EVENT

The  4-night crossover event between CW’s Superhero shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow could have been something epic. Unfortunately, it just turned into an EPIC FAIL due to the inept writers at Berlanti productions who were just out of their league when it came to writing a story on this scale.

Heroes Vs. Aliens as supposed to be an adaptation of 1988’s Invasion! where the alien Dominators fear that Earth will be a spawning ground for a race of metahumans that will be an unbeatable super-race. And to stop the super race they and other alien planets insist that Earth surrender its super heroes. Earth tells the aliens to drop dead and recruits Captain Atom to lead a force to defend the earth.

This would have been an interesting story if Berlanti decided to do something like Oh, introduce Captain Atom…But Berlanti productions ain’t got that kind of budget to give us Nathaniel Adam and his origin with Miss Martian’s CGI and Mon-El eating up the budget over on Supergirl, and the cast of the new Outsiders-I mean Team Arrow on Arrow. So instead of giving us a good heaping helping of story based on DC’s classic source material, they gave us some artificially flavored slop on a plate loosely based on Invasion! And called it Heroes Vs. Aliens. Extra light on the aliens.

After watching the first three episodes of this so-called crossover event I felt like Clara Peller in those old Wendy’s Commercials.

Hey CW, WHERE’S THE ALIENS?

Seriously, I feel ripped off by the CW’s advertising. The ads and promos for Heroes Vs. Aliens promised us lots of heroes and even a Deathstroke return. From those ads and promos I got hyped up expecting to see DC’s heroes busting up bad guys. But all I got was a big bag of NOTHING. After I watched Heroes Vs. Aliens I reminisced about the first and last time I ate Kaboom! cereal as a kid. Kaboom! cereal looks like a taste treat on the box, but tastes like shit when you get it in a bowl with some milk. That’s how disappointed I was with this so-called crossover.

Plain and simple CW just didn’t have the foundation laid to implement this kind of event even with four TV shows. Due to the misstep of putting Supergirl on another earth, the crossover doesn’t have a solid foundation to establish a structure for storytelling. That makes any form a writer wraps around it awkward and uneven. If Supergirl and Flash and Arrow and the Legends had been all on the same earth they might have been able to pull this kind of event off next year with Arrow and the Outsiders, Deathstroke and Superman and J’onn in the mix to give the story the gravity it would need and the Dominators would be seen as a credible threat.

Unfortunately, due to the poor story structure Heroes Vs. Aliens falls apart right from the first episode. Supergirl was just another Supergirl episode with a Flash cameo tacked on the end of it. The Flash episode was just a jumbled hot mess filled with exposition. Heroes meet, spend 20 minutes discussing who will be the leader, train, then get possessed by the dominator mind control and fight…EACH OTHER. Barry and Ollie break the mind control and then Oliver and the non-powered heroes gets teleported to the Dominator ship where I expected to see Ollie and Team Arrow fighting some aliens.

Nope.

Instead of giving us that story, the writers of Arrow stole most of their script from a Batman: The Animated Series episode, and then tacked on an escape after the dream sequence for the Waverider Ex Machina to save them from being annihilated by a fleet of Dominator fighters. 

If that’s not BAD writing I don’t know what is.

And the cherry on top of this shit sundae with extra diharrea sauce is the Legends of Tomorrow episode. In an effort to stop the Dominators the team goes back to the 50’s to kidnap a Dominator. Finally we get some aliens! For about two seconds. But after Steel, heat wave and Vixen take down the alien then the Area 51 guys come and take down the heroes. Then in 2016 we get told the reason for the Dominator invasion is…Barry Allen’s fault.

WTF?

Yeah, I know Barry Allen’s Simp levels are beyond space and time but this plot point is so DUMB it’s beyond logic. So Barry Allen creating Flashpoint ruined the earth’s timelines and now it’s ruined the entire Universe of Berlanti Earth 1. But how would people from the 1950’s find this out from the Dominators when Barry Allen only went back in time about oh, 10 years? If it’s because the legends team went back to the 50’s and Cisco saved the Dominator that’s Seriously a WTF? Moment.

Aware of Barry Allen from a time anomaly that would have Picard on Yesterday’s Enterprise Scratching his head, the G-men want Barry Allen to surrender so they can give him up to the Dominators. Simp Lord of the Universe Barry is about to give himself up until he’s stopped by…Oliver. Then after another big speech, we finally get a big fight between the heroes and some of the aliens in the last couple of minutes of Legends of Tomorrow. Then Firestorm transmutates the Gene bomb, Felicity turns on a device to give the Dominators pain and the aliens flee Independence Day style. Everything ends with a speech from the Earth 1 president and Supergirl able to come back and forth between Berlanti Earth 1 and Berlanti Earth Super and hints of Barry and Ollie in a bar talking about forming up a Justice Leage or a Superfriends.

Good Gravy, what a mess. If Heroes Vs. Aliens could have kept the tone, pace, and action of the last ten minutes of the fight inLegends of Tomorrow throughout the first four hours it could have been a classic. Instead the writing just was a jumbled mess for the first three hours and fifty minutes. I’m just astonished at how shittacularly bad the writing on this so-called crossover is. Heroes Vs. Aliens is like a manual on how NOT to do a time travel storyline. And all the reasons why most Time Travel storylines SUCK.

Seriously, the writing on this so-called crossover event was shit on a plate. From the horrific mishandling of the Cyborg Superman on Supergirl to J’onn’s Cure Ex Machina, to Wild Dog’s opinions of Metas changing in less than five minutes, to Ollie not trusting Kara for no reason, Heroes Vs. Aliens is literally like a compendium of all the crap writing featured in Arrow Season 2.5-4. All four episodes of Heroes Vs. Aliens look, sound and feel like a first draft of a script, not a polished well thought out story arc with fast pacing. Heroes Vs. Aliens just feels slapped together with no sense of story or even a direction. We get told there’s an alien threat by Barry Allen, but we never got any frames of the Dominators to tell us who they are and why they want to invade earth until second half hour of the Legends of Tomorrow episode. On seeing Dominators, Barry just jumps over to Supergirl’s Earth and asks for her help, even though Superman was just introduced a few episodes ago. This would have been a prime event to feature Tyler Hochelin being a total BOSS, but…that’s what a GOOD writer like myself would have done. But instead of giving us Superman and an actual appearance by Deathstroke to show us the severity of the crisis on this earth we get Deathstroke in an Arrow dream sequence.

Damn. Just Damn.

I won’t even go into how Diggle got totally emasculated in a frame of that big epic fight between the Heroes and the Aliens. Even in the face of an epic Battle they find a way to make the Black man look like a bitch.

Fuck You Berlanti. Fuck You.

What makes the Heroes Vs. Aliens Crossover event an EPIC FAIL is that it hyped itself up to be some kind of event and then didn’t deliver on the payoff. Viewers like myself were anticipating a big epic battle between heroes and Aliens that took us to different places in every episode based on what we saw in the promos and in early episodes of Supergirl. But all we got was some of the worst writing to ever grace a Superhero TV series. I had to wonder if Tyler Perry and Akiva Goldsman were writng some of the scripts under a pen name with all the bad dialogue and inconsistent characterizations. Heroes Vs. Aliens should have flowed seamlessly from episode to epsisode moving the story forward with each episode. Instead it stumbled over its own feet to a clumsy finish. The biggest problem with Heroes Vs. Aliens is that the writers tried to write the story around the characters and their storylines instead of just writing a story with the characters in it.

Heroes Vs. Aliens had the potential to be a TV classic. Instead it became a classic example of how NOT to write a crossover event. Heroes vs. Aliens had a nice concept unfortunately the writers just couldn’t execute it. Yeah, Greg Berlanti has the production team to bring DC Characters to life visually, but it’s clear to me that his writing team is just not ready to push the envelope and take the Berlantiverse to the next level. What should have been the TV Version of Marvel Studios’ Avengers wound up as bad as an old Superfriends episode.