Felicity Smoak stopped by Central City earlier this season on The Flash to help Barry Allen and the S.T.A.R. Labs team deal with Captain Cold, and she revisited soon after along with Oliver Queen and John Diggle to track down Captain Boomerang. Later this season she’ll coming back to visit her friends for a third time, and this time she’s bringing fellow Arrow colleague Ray Palmer along.
It was recently announced that Ray Palmer, played by Brandon Routh, will be appearing alongside Felicity in Episode 18 of The Flash. As is the case with the previous crossovers, there’s a good reason for their visit relating to both Arrow and The Flash. Ray and Felicity will go to Central City to get some help from S.T.A.R. Labs with Ray’s A.T.O.M. suit, which he’s building on Arrow as a means of protecting Starling City.
Executive producer Andrew Kreisberg told ET that Felicity and Ray’s visit will be coming at a time when Barry is dealing with a personal crisis.
“It happens to come at a particularly bad moment for Barry, but that’s partially why we did it. The first episode with Felicity in episode four, she really came along in a time when her experience in being a part of a crime-fighting team definitely helped Barry overcome what he was facing that week. Similarly, when she comes [back], he’s having a crisis of conscience that in some ways only someone like she can help him through.”
The villain this episode will be the Bug-Eyed Bandit, who was an enemy of The Atom in the comics that led an army of mechanical insects, so it only makes sense to include him in the same episode as Ray Palmer. The Palmer Technologies CEO will also find a kindred spirit in fellow tech genius Cisco Ramon, according to Kreisberg.
“There’s even a line in the script where Felicity says, ‘Ray is like Barry in Oliver’s body,’ and went, ‘Oh god, did I say that out loud?’ Ray – even though he looks like Brandon Routh, he’s a tech geek at heart so he and Cisco quickly bond.”
This will be the fifth episode of The Flash that Arrow characters have crossed over to, following the pilot, “Going Rogue,” “Power Outage” (which featured The Clock King) and “Flash vs. Arrow.” Given that Arrow is more “grounded” and deals with less fantastical threats, it makes sense that Ray and Felicity would appear on The Flash to get help with the A.T.O.M. suit. That place has all the cool gizmos.
It doesn’t sound we’ll be getting a Flash/Atom team-up this time around, but with Ray getting closer to finishing his suit, and all the recent talk of giving him a spinoff series, perhaps we’ll see these superheroes joining forces in the coming years.
