DC Comics' TV properties have been quite successful at establishing a shared, live-action universe on the small screen, but as ambitious as shows like The Flash, Arrow, and DC's Legends of Tomorrow are, there have always been hints at something bigger. A lot of those hints come in the form of Easter eggs, nods to the comic book source material which are included to give longtime readers a little pleasurable jolt of recognition and as a nice bit of nostalgia for the shows' writers. And yet there's the possibility that these casual mentions and asides might be pointing to a vast expansion in DC TV's current field of view.

Few DC Comics' properties are as broad in scope and scale as the Green Lantern franchise. Though there are currently no reported plans to bring the wielders of the power rings into the TV universe, there have certainly been a lot of nods to the beloved, long-running comic series. Perhaps that's because The Flash co-creator/writer and Arrow writer Geoff Johns has quite the history with Hal Jordan and the Corps, but recent events on the superhero series suggest there might be more to it than that. We might not be getting a Green Lantern standalone series, but we might be getting a storyline that approximates Johns' 2009 DC Comics' cross-over event, "Blackest Night."

To be clear, the idea that we'll be seeing some version of this fantastic and impossibly epic story is complete speculation on my part, and nothing has been reported from the powers that be. But there's something about the continued references to Hal Jordan, the Green Lanterns, and "Blackest Night" that are starting to connect for me. Also, let's keep in mind that Johns' Green Lantern nods may be a parallel to the borrowed Batman storylines for the Arrow series, an example of a mythology that can't be used directly for contractual/legal/common sense reasons, but are still good stories to mine nonetheless.

Before we get into what makes "Blackest Night" an exciting possibility, let's take a look at the history of Green Lantern references from The Flash and Arrow so far. The best place to start is with perhaps the most famous Lantern of them all, Hal Jordan. In the Season 4 premiere of Arrow, we actually saw Jordan in the flesh, sort of. A flashback sequence featuring Oliver Queen and Amanda Waller saw them bump into a man in a Coast City bar, a man wearing a bomber jacket with a nametag reading "Jordan" stitched onto it. (The name Hal also pops up on Barry's trip to Earth-2 where it's found on Barry and Iris' phone list.)

Coast City is a reference that comes up fairly often on these shows and is featured on 12 of the shared universe's episodes, including one of the animated Vixen shorts. That's a fair amount of groundwork to set up a character they never plan on introducing; for comparison, it's on par with the number of references to Keystone City, which plays host to a number of heroes and villains often appearing on the show. But back to Coast City.

The city's slogan, seen on a billboard, is a send-up of the famous Green Lantern oath, reading, "In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night; Come to Coast City, When the money is tight." It also happens to be the home of Hal Jordan and the location of Ferris Air, Jordan's employer and the last place he was seen alive. The airline company, its products, and logo have factored into both The Flash and Arrow plots, with The Flash episode "Rogue Air" referencing a missing pilot from the company's Central City testing facility; that pilot is, you guessed it, Hal Jordan.

One small reference that's easily more Easter egg than foreshadowing of something else to come is the mention of St. Walker's Hospital, a psychiatric ward referenced in Arrow episodes, but clearly a nod to Saint Walker, a member of the Blue Lantern Corps. This is an interesting one if only because it introduces the idea of other Lanterns beyond the Green Lantern Corps to the TV-verse. That's important if they're establishing any sort of world in which a "Blackest Night" storyline is possible.

Okay, so what is "Blackest Night" exactly? The basics are these: Centering on the spectrum of emotions, this eight-month long story arc featured a death-obsessed Green Lantern villain named William Hand. Hand, after killing his family and committing suicide, was resurrected as Black Hand, the herald of the powerful Nekron, a personification of death known as the Lord of the Unliving. In his bid to drive all emotion and life from the universe, Nekron resurrected full cities of the dead, including superheroes, in order to aide in his campaign. Resurrected superheroes in Nekron's Black Lantern Corps included Batman, Green Arrow, Superman, and Wonder Woman.

What followed was an epic battle of death versus life that ultimately pit Nekron against Hal Jordan in the decisive final battle. Sounds fantastic, right? Before you get too excited, there's no way the current slate of DC TV could handle anything approaching a decent adaptation of "Blackest Night." And yet recent events on both The Flash and Arrow have suggested that a similar storyline might be in the works. Here's where my major speculation comes into play:

Recently, on "The Runaway Dinosaur," the villainous Tony Woodward, a.k.a. Girder, was resurrected by the second particle accelerator explosion's dark matter wave. If the first explosion created the city's metahumans and the second wave resurrected them (and maybe created some more, too), the door is open for Nekron, the personification of death itself, to resurrect superheroes as well. Alternately, this citywide resurrection wave could be a stand-in for Nekron himself. And if it's an entire city of the dead that Nekron/The CW is looking to resurrect, well Damien Darhk just nuked tens of thousands of people on Arrow's "Monument Point" episode, so maybe there's something more to that cataclysmic event than just wanton destruction.

Back to The Flash for a moment. The most recent episode, "Invincible," featured the words "blackest night" during Iris' reading of her article on the metapocalypse. This might just have been a nod to the Green Lantern oath again, but in light of other events, it stuck out like a bright, green beacon for me. During the metapocalypse, there was one curious character flying through the battle and throwing green fire everywhere. Now this could be a nod to an evil version of other famous Green Lanterns, maybe even an Alan Scott doppelganger. It looked for a moment like an Earth-2 version of an evil Firestorm, but that character, Deathstorm, has already appeared and was quickly killed by Zoom. (Though Deathstorm, too, had ties to the "Blackest Night" arc as well, having been resurrected as one of the Black Lanterns.)

In keeping with the theme of resurrected heroes/villains who are related to "Blackest Night," remember that Eobard Thawne, a.k.a. Reverse-Flash made his return to the show, though not by coming back from the dead as the Black Flash but rather through some twist of time-travel trickery. It basically amounted to the same thing, dipping into the "Blackest Night" mythology without going all-in. Let's also remember that Supergirl will be heading to The CW, so if ever there was the opportunity for a huge cross-over event featuring all the gathered heroes, it's now.

Let's face it, there are two things that remain popular on TV today: superheroes and zombies. The CW has the first in spades while The Walking Dead has cornered the market on the latter, with HBO's Game of Thrones making a valiant effort to capitalize on them as well. Now imagine a three-series CW crossover special that folds in the mythology of one of DC Comics' greatest and most beloved superheroes with a season-long conflict against zombified humans, heroes, and Death itself. That'd be completely insane.

Yeah, it's wishful thinking and fanboy dreaming, but I would be surprised if something related to "Blackest Night" didn't come out of all of the references mentioned above. We might never seen the Green Lantern make his way to the small screen, especially with Warner Bros.' Green Lantern Corps movie in the works, but this would be a fantastic way to introduce some of that mythology to a whole new generation of audiences. I'm sure you have thoughts on this idea, so be sure to share them in the comments below!