"Invasion!" is the third Arrowverse crossover event, with episodes of the television series The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow on The CW, and is inspired by the 1989 comic miniseries Invasion!. Events at the end of the Supergirl episode "Medusa" on November 28, 2016, marked the beginning of the crossover, which began on November 29 with The Flash, continued on Arrow on November 30, and concluded on Legends of Tomorrow on December 1. Each of the main three episodes were titled "Invasion!". In the crossover, Barry Allen recruits Kara Danvers / Supergirl from Earth-38 to Earth-1 to help his team, Oliver Queen and his team, and the Legends to defeat the alien race known as the Dominators.
Development of a crossover between the three series and Supergirl began in May 2016, when it was learned that Supergirl would move to The CW from CBS for its second season. By the following September the scripts for each episode were written, and were filmed in October 2016. The premise and episode titles were also announced in September. In "Invasion!", the main cast members of each series appear in (at least) their own series; Melissa Benoist appears as Supergirl in the entire crossover. A number of actors and characters from previous Arrow seasons returned to reprise their roles, since Arrows episode doubled as its 100th.
The three episodes of the crossover received positive reviews, with critics praising the interaction among the actors in each series and each episode's advancing season storylines as part of the crossover. The Dominators storyline was regarded as its weakest link, with reviewers finding the alien race's motivations unclear. Ratings for the episodes were high, with each breaking records in viewership and the 18–49 rating and contributing to the most-watched week on The CW in six years. A fourth crossover, "Crisis on Earth-X", occurred the following year.
Plot Barry Allen investigates a meteor crash outside Central City, which turns out to be a spaceship from which aliens emerge. Lyla Michaels tells the team that the aliens are known as the Dominators, and that they had landed on Earth during the 1950s, but mysteriously departed. Barry assembles the original members of Team Arrow, Thea Queen, the Legends, and Kara Danvers, Supergirl of Earth-38. The team begins training at a S.T.A.R. Labs facility, sparring with Supergirl to prepare for the aliens. Kara struggles to earn Oliver Queen's trust, and Cisco Ramon finds and reveals a message Barry's future self sent to Rip Hunter, which exposes Barry's manipulation of the timeline and its effect on other team members. As a result, only Oliver, Kara, Felicity Smoak, Martin Stein, Jefferson "Jax" Jackson, and Caitlin Snow still trust Barry.
After the Dominators abduct the President of the United States, the team goes to rescue him, with Barry sitting the mission out and Oliver staying behind in support of him. Kara leads the group, but the Dominators kill the President and activate a mind control device to take over the group. The controlled heroes return and attack S.T.A.R. Labs, where Barry and Oliver confront them. While Oliver holds them off, Barry lures Kara to the device and tricks her into destroying it, freeing everyone from the Dominators' control. When the team regroups, Ray Palmer tells Barry that everyone forgives and trusts him. Sara Lance, Ray, John Diggle, Thea, and Oliver are then abducted by the Dominators.
They are held in pods on a Dominator ship, each unconscious except for a shared hallucination of a simulated reality. In the hallucination, Oliver is living at Queen Manor, having never gotten on the Queen's Gambit, and is about to marry Laurel Lance. His parents are alive, and Diggle is operating as the Hood instead of Oliver. The captives begin seeing flashes of their real lives, and realize what has been done to them. Their escape attempt is blocked by personifications of their enemies: Malcolm Merlyn, Deathstroke and two of his Mirakuru soldiers, who killed Ray's fiancée Anna Loring, along with Damien Darhk and two of his H.I.V.E. soldiers. The adversaries are defeated, and the five awaken in the Dominators' ship and escape in a shuttle. Felicity, Curtis Holt, and Cisco try to hack into the Dominators' mainframe. Aided by Barry and Kara, they recover a device to locate the captives, who are rescued by Nate Heywood in the Legends' timeship, the Waverider. Aboard the Waverider, Ray deduces that the Dominators were gathering information about metahumans, using the hallucination as a distraction, to help them build a special "weapon". Meanwhile, the Dominator mothership heads towards Earth.
Nate says that the first Dominator invasion occurred in 1951 in Redmond, Oregon. He goes there with fellow Legends Mick Rory and Amaya Jiwe and Felicity and Cisco to kidnap a Dominator for information. Although they are successful, the three Legends and their alien captive are taken prisoner by N.S.A. agents. The Legends learn from the Dominator that the aliens have arrived to assess humanity's threat, now that metahumans have appeared and formed the Justice Society of America. Felicity and Cisco rescue the Legends, and also set the Dominator free, carelessly altering history. In 2016 Central City, the team learns that the Dominators know about Barry's manipulation of the timeline, deem him a threat, and are demanding his surrender in exchange for peace. After the Legends return, the team discovers that the Dominators' weapon is a bomb that will kill all metahumans on Earth, with millions of collateral human casualties. The teams dissuade Barry from surrendering, and he and Cisco reconcile. The team manage to destroy the bomb and force the Dominators to retreat with a pain-inflicting nano-weapon. As the heroes celebrate their victory, Oliver offers Kara his friendship, and Cisco gives her a device which will enable interdimensional travel and communication between Earth-1 and Earth-38. Martin persuades Jax not to tell the others that his daughter Lily's existence is the result of a temporal paradox he inadvertently caused when the Legends were in 1987.
Cast and characters
Main and recurring + Actor Character Episode The Flash Arrow Legends of Tomorrow Grant Gustin Barry Allen / Flash colspan="2" Candice Patton Iris West colspan="2" Danielle Panabaker Caitlin Snow Carlos Valdes Cisco Ramon / Vibe colspan="2" Keiynan Lonsdale Wally West / Kid Flash colspan="2" Tom Cavanagh Harrison "H.R." Wells colspan="2" Jesse L. Martin Joe West colspan="2" Stephen Amell Oliver Queen / Green Arrow Franz Drameh Jefferson Jackson / Firestorm Victor Garber Martin Stein / Firestorm Willa Holland Thea Queen / Speedy Caity Lotz Sara Lance / White Canary colspan="2" Dominic Purcell Mick Rory / Heat Wave David Ramsey John Diggle / Spartan Emily Bett Rickards Felicity Smoak / Overwatch Brandon Routh Ray Palmer / Atom colspan="2" Melissa Benoist Kara Zor-El / Kara Danvers / Supergirl colspan="3" Christina Brucato Lily Stein Donnelly Rhodes and Jacob Richter (young) "Glasses" Echo Kellum Curtis Holt / Mister Terrific Paul Blackthorne Quentin Lance Nick Zano Nate Heywood / Steel Amy Pemberton Gideon Maisie Richardson-Sellers Amaya Jiwe / Vixen colspan="2" Despite being credited, Josh Segarra does not appear in the Arrow episode.
Guests
The Flash Audrey Marie Anderson as Lyla Michaels Jerry Wasserman as the President of the United States Vigilante
Legends of Tomorrow Lucia Walters as President Susan Brayden
Arrow John Barrowman as Malcolm Merlyn / Dark Archer Neal McDonough as Damien Darhk Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance Susanna Thompson as Moira Queen Rick Gonzalez as Rene Ramirez / Wild Dog Joe Dinicol as Rory Regan / Ragman Jamey Sheridan as Robert Queen Erica Luttrell as Laura Washington Colin Donnell as Tommy Merlyn Colton Haynes as Roy Harper An uncredited stand-in portrays Deathstroke.
Production Development
In May 2016, after it was announced that Supergirl would air its second season on The CW instead of CBS, CW president Mark Pedowitz said that all four series—Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl—would cross over during the 2016–17 television season. In September 2016, Greg Berlanti, creator and executive producer of all four series, said that the crossover event would only involve The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow; the event begins at the end of the Supergirl episode "Medusa", with Barry and Cisco Ramon arriving on Supergirl's Earth to recruit her. Andrew Kreisberg, executive producer on Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl, explained why the crossover did not include Supergirl: since "Medusa" was the mid-season finale for Supergirl and the other three series had theirs in episodes after the crossover, they "wanted to make sure that ["Medusa"] spoke to what had been happening on the first seven episodes of Supergirl and not just as a tie in". He added that it would have been logistically difficult to incorporate the four series, noting that finding the time for Melissa Benoist to shoot material for the other three series was complicated. Benoist did not appear in much of "The Darkest Place", the episode before "Medusa", to make her available to appear in each of the crossover episodes. He expanded on the difficulties, saying that "built-in shut-down days" for Supergirl were not planned on, in part because the series switched from CBS to The CW, and that this inability to shut down normal production prevented it from having a larger role in the crossover.
It was announced the following September that the villains in the event would be the Dominators, in a story inspired by the 1989 comic miniseries Invasion! The Dominators were chosen because the writers "collectively wanted the superheroes to face an external threat," meaning "a threat that came from outside of the shows", rather than extraterrestrial. The following month, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow creator and executive producer Marc Guggenheim said that the title of each episode of the crossover would be "Invasion!".
In November 2016, Kreisberg said that the Dominators would appear during the later part of Supergirls season after the crossover event. Guggenheim said that in the initial script for The Flash, Lynda Carter appeared as the Vice President (becoming President after his death in the episode); Carter appears as President Olivia Marsdin on Supergirl. This did not occur because a note from the studio felt it would have been too confusing, having Marsdin appear as president on one series (and another Earth) and vice president on the others. Guggenheim added, "In the midst of time travel and aliens, it was just one sci-fi problem too much" and conceded that "if people at the studio were confused by the script, it was probably not particularly friendly to casual fans."
Writing Scripts for "Invasion!" were written in mid-September 2016, with Berlanti creating the story for the event and Kreisberg helping to craft the story of The Flash episode. The teleplay for The Flash was written by showrunners Aaron and Todd Helbing; Arrows was written by showrunners Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle, and showrunners Phil Klemmer and Guggenheim wrote the teleplay for Legends of Tomorrow. When the Dominators were chosen as the threat for the crossover, the writers were able to justify the heroes' uniting; since Supergirl "is knowledgeable about these particular enemies, the Legends can help better understand the last time the Dominators visited Earth thanks to their time travel capabilities, and both Teams Flash and Arrow have a diverse array of capable heroes who are able to understand and counter just about every imaginable threat."