When you’re the one normal dude in a picture that is otherwise a sea of brightly coloured pleather and Spandex, you’re going to stand out. But Osric Chau stands out for more than one reason in the new batch of pictures from the CW’s impending DC TV crossover.
After a sneaky tease earlier today, the CW just dropped a new batch of pictures from the third episode of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the last episode in the five-episode series that’ll actually air this side of the new year.
Airing in The Flash’s slot on December 10, the episode sees Pariah (played by Tom Cavanagh) take a quick dip over the Black Lightning section of the DC-CWniverse and recruit Cress Williams’ titular hero to aid in the impending battle for all realities.
Or maybe it’s just about all of our united heroes standing around looking serious at things off camera? Because friends, that’s literally all these pictures.
So serious.
So concerned.
It’s almost like there’s some kind of crisis?
On Infinite Earths?
OK, jeez, sorry, no need to pull all those faces.
Anyway, while the new images do have some fun little things—like Elseworld’s book of destiny making an appearance, or Batwoman getting to tie up and detain Lex Luthor, an absurd thing I can’t quite believe we get to say about live-action television happening in 2019, but here we are—it is the most seemingly normal-looking person in all these pictures that has the most intrigue.
Standing there in the background next to Black Lightning is Osric Chau, who we know is playing a very familiar name to comics fans in Crisis: Ryan Choi.
Ryan Choi, a university physics professor, was described in casting material as literally “just a normal guy,” so that’s how you know the CW really wants to brush over the fact that comics fans know Ryan is quite a bit more than that—he’s Ray Palmer’s replacement as the Atom.
Ryan became the third character to take on the Atom moniker after Ray disappeared, filling in his beloved mentor’s staff position at Ivy University while also stepping into his superheroic shoes. He eventually got controversially killed off as part of the Brightest Day event, but he was revived as part of DC Rebirth and took on the mantle of the Atom once more, after helping Ray out as the tech support for his adventures in the microverse.
Given we know that the current season of Legends will be Brandon Routh’s last as a regular, Ryan’s arrival here seems very much aligned with a potential replacement—no matter how many times the CW downplays Chau’s addition to the motley cast appearing in Crisis as anything but a set up for him becoming a replacement Atom. I mean, come on. This is what these shows do.
You don’t bring a Ryan Choi to a superhero fight and not have us speculate how long it’ll be before he suits up too! Even if it’s not in Crisis, given Ray’s impending exit on Legends, it feels like it’s only a matter of time (and a non-insignificant amount of comic book wackiness, of course).
We’ll find out more when we meet Ryan and his amazing friends when Crisis kicks off from December 9.