As the Arrowverse recovers from Crisis On Infinite Earths, Arrow revealed how the superheroes and their allies are able to remember the events of the crossover without the aid of J’onn J’onzz aka The Martian Manhunter (David Harewood). The penultimate episode of Arrow, “Green Arrow and the Canaries,” was a backdoor pilot for a spinoff set in Star City of 2040, centering on Mia Smoak-Queen aka the next Green Arrow (Katherine McNamara) joined by Laurel Lance aka Black Siren (Katie Cassidy) and Dinah Drake aka Black Canary (Juliana Harkavy). In the episode, Mia regains her memories of the Crisis — without the help of the martian.

Crisis On Infinite Earths ended with the Oliver Queen aka The Spectre (Stephen Amell) rebirthing the Multiverse at the dawn of time after he defeated the Anti-Monitor (LaMonica Garrett). Oliver created a new merged world, Earth Prime, so that Supergirl and Black Lightning could co-exist on the same planet as The Flash, Arrow, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The Spectre also rebooted the Multiverse and created new alternate Earths, a fact the heroes of Earth Prime are presently not aware of. Meanwhile, the billions of people on Earth Prime are blissfully unaware there was ever a Crisis at all, although there are numerous changes, big and small, to their new reality. One of the people who had no memories of the Crisis was Mia Smoak-Queen; her father gifted her with a perfect life in an idyllic, crime-free Star City of 2040 — until Black Siren tore down that curtain in “Green Arrow and the Canaries.”

Black Siren used a device created by The Flash’s Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) to “wake” Mia up and return all of her memories of what life was like pre-Crisis. Cisco’s gizmo resembled a ring that Laurel rotated on her finger and pricked Mia on the shoulder, which caused an instant memory reboot. It’s a handy gadget that efficiently duplicates a story point introduced on Supergirl that the Martian Manhunter, who was the Paragon of Honor during the Crisis, used his telepathy to return the pre-Crisis memories of his friends at the D. E. O. As a fellow Paragon, Supergirl’s memories were already intact, but J’onn used his psychic powers to “wake up” Alex Danvers (Chyler Leigh), Dreamer (Nicole Maines), and Brainiac-5 (Jesse Rath).

While the Martian Manhunter’s telepathy is a convenient story fix for the Crisis memory issue, and even though all of the heroes now live on Earth Prime, it’s logistically still problematic to get David Harewood to appear as J’onn on every Arrowverse series just to “wake” the rest of the characters up. The various shows’ creative teams had to think of their own catch-all solutions, hence, Cisco’s gadget that Laurel happened to acquire offscreen. It’s safe to assume that over on The Flash, which returns for the second half of season 6 on February 4th, Cisco has already used his tech to “wake up” everyone on Team Flash.

Meanwhile, other Arrowverse characters have shown that they don’t need Martian telepathy or Cisco’s doohickey to get their pre-Crisis memories back. Lex Luthor (Jon Cryer), the Paragon of Truth, ensured that his sister Lena (Katie McGrath) would have her memories intact. And over on Legends of Tomorrow, the time-traveling misfits were all aware of the Crisis even before Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) and Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh) returned to fill them in on what they experienced. In fact, the memories that the Legends are actually missing revolve around Zari Tomaz (Tala Ashe), whose history as a Legend was erased from the timeline at the end of Legends season 4.

In typically bizarre Legends of Tomorrow fashion, it was the hypnotic powers of the Mad Monk Gregori Rasputin (Michael Eklund) that “woke up” Nate Heywood’s (Nick Zano) memories of his lost love Zari. So, as convenient as Martian Manhunter’s telepathy is as a solution to the Crisis memory problem, it was a lot more fun to see how the rest of the Arrowverse got around this conundrum after Crisis On Infinite Earths.

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