DJ Watches: The Flash Season Three: Episode One: Flashpoint
The Flash is easily the best of the superhero shows that as of late have begun to pop up in abundance due to the current trend in Hollywood. It’s not a perfect show by any means, but it does an excellent job of balancing out the need to adapt the stories and characters to a different medium while keeping true to the spirit and tone of what it’s based on, and as a result manages to present quite a bit of the events and iconic moments of the source material, re-contextualized so that both longtime fans and casual viewers understand and get something out of it. Just the sheer amount of Easter Eggs across both prior seasons that don’t mess with the flow or narrative is staggering, and the fact that they’ve managed to make a DC comic book show that’s light hearted and fun is admirable, since other creative teams in, I don’t know, the film division seem to be having problems. Even its parent show it spun off from, Arrow, is having trouble in later seasons getting a little too mired in trying to be darker and grittier. However hopeless it starts to feel for the DC Cinematic Universe after all the head-bangingly inexplicable decisions they make, this series along with Supergirl has, thus far, kept the DCW television universe be a spot of hope in its media offerings.
So it’s come to this, season three of The Flash, where the last time we left good ol’ Barry Allen, he just defeated Zoom after an entire season of twists, turns, and some might say questionable decision making, but ultimately not without any sacrifices, as he lost his Father when all was said and done. With his head in not quite the right place, Barry decided to be selfish, and takes back his decision to not change his Mother’s fate from the end of the last season, running back to that fateful night once again and saying, screw it, I’m going to be selfish, and utterly breaks everything by stopping the Reverse-Flash and saving his Mom this time around. And so, we waited all summer long, anticipating what kind of brave new world would await us in the new season, especially those who knew an inkling about what happened when comic book Barry tried to pull this stunt and created this episode title’ namesake, Flashpoint.
And….it’s not quite as dire or crapsack as that version. Fair enough, though I for one would’ve liked a random newsflash or paper article about a female vigilante named The Hood in Starling City or rumblings about war brewing between two distant, exotic foreign nations, not necessarily between one of all women and one underwater, but hey, whatever. Still, the episode starts with a seemingly normal Barry, having lived in this new version of the world for the last three months with his parents both alive and well, trying to pick up Iris at Jitters, in this world as someone who only vaguely remembers him from Elementary school. He get interrupted by a running battle between an entirely different Flash – a younger one, maybe kind of a kid? – and another speedster, because damn it, this may be an alternate universe, but it’s a Flash, he needs a rival who’s also a speedster. Here, he’s named……The Rival.
I have to wonder if this was an intentional reference by the writing staff to one of the bigger criticisms about season two, but I digress.
Anyway, Barry didn’t kill Reverse-Flash, since after all, he’s a hero like that and that would be wrong and evil. Instead, he…keeps him locked up in a special cage in a warehouse in an abandoned part of the city, and occasionally visits him to feed him. Because that’ s not at all cruel and unusual or sub-human, don’t be silly. Thawne snipes at Barry, and vaguely warns him of the consequences of his actions, but doesn’t spit it out since hey, we’ve got a whole episode to get through. Still, things aren’t quite as idyllic as it seems in this new world, since while things are fine and dandy for Barry, the relationship between Iris and her Dad has taken a turn for the worse, and Detective Joe West himself is a depressed, drunken mess who doesn’t seem to care about much anything. After another run-in to a battle between The Flash and The Rival, Barry discovers that, surprise, this Flash is in fact Wally, Iris’ younger brother, and at that, she not only knows he is, but in fact helps him with her job as a journalist. After finding out that Cisco, brainy nerdy tech guy from STAR Labs is a billionaire app inventor in this world, Barry also notices that he has flashes of pain where he seems to….completely forget about something, for some reason. Eventually, he goes back to Thawne is his completely humane cage and finally gets the Reverse Flash to cop to what he knew – namely, the longer he sticks around in this “perfect” world, the more he’ll forget about the original timeline, until eventually this is just the way the world will be, and there’s no more turning back, and it seems that the more Barry runs and uses his powers, the quicker that change occurs.
Doing the whole “pretend that it’s all nonsense even though he knows it’s true” deal, Barry reveals himself as (another) Flash to Wally, Iris, and Cisco, as well as kidnapping some poor pediatric optometrist named Caitlyn Snow, and offers to help stop The Rival. One thing leads to another, and both Flashes get into a fight with The Rival, where Wally puts up a good fight, but due to his lack of patience celebrates a little too early like a kid might, and gets impaled by the evil speedster. Barry has some trouble, and looks like he’s doomed after The Rival summons two tornadoes with his speed (leading to Cisco quipping that, huh, he’s some kind of wizard with creating weather there), but after a quick pep talk with Iris via radio, summons his energy and defeats the, let’s face it, pretty lame speedster. Barry also lets himself get distracted a little too early, trying to attend to the gravely wounded Wally, but Detective West shows up just in time to shoot the not-so-defeated Rival stone cold dead just as he’s about to attack Flash. Secret identities are revealed, Barry realizes that, darn it, he’s a hero and he can’t be selfish like this, and promises to make things right.
Typically, this would be where we get a ‘To Be Continued” and this storyline gets dragged on a little longer, but nope, after the commercial break, we get Barry giving a vague good bye to his Mom and Dad with Iris in tow before proceeding to the not-at-all Constitution breaking pen he keeps Thawne holed up in. There, the Reverse Flash gets his rocks off on forcing Barry to ask him to kill his Mom, and a quick time travel leap later, he does so, and drops Barry back off at the exact moment he left him, where everything is all back to normal, and nothing’s been changed.
Except not. Yeah, Wally’s no longer hurt and Joe is back to being sober, but apparently, he and Iris have an even worse relationship then in the altered world, a Barry realizes that, hey, sometimes listening to super villains is just a bad idea, and this is, in fact, a third, completely different timeline. Reminding the audience that, hey, remember, The Flash as a show might not play things the way you expect them to go, but it’s usually so thy can pull the rug out from under you and throw in an entirely different monkey wrench in the plot. And so, we begin this new season even more mystified by what awaits us then we did at the beginning.
So it’s not a bad season opener, and not a bad episode. I’ve already said that I wish that they had done a little more to show how different the world is now because of Barry’s actions, but honestly, it’s for the best they didn’t, since they just did that with Earth 2 last year. Also, the comic book Flashpoint got a little ridiculous with how The Flash doing this one thing which, a tragic as it was to Barry, was just one of the hundreds or thousands of home invasions/murders that occur all the time, and stopping that somehow turned Aquaman from a doting loyal husband into a piece of crap who hit the sack with Wonder Woman the first chance he got and proceeded to get pissed when Mera got jealous, attack Diana, get murdered by Diana, then be BEHEADED by Diana, then pretend none of it was his fault.
I didn’t make any of that up, for the record.
It was definitely a good call to keep the changes down to a personal level within Barry’ circle of friends, because frankly, it doesn’t really matter how the rest of the world is, it only matters what the main cast is up to and how his decision affected them. Does it work? Eh, sorta? Yeah, it sucks that Detective West and Iris’ relationship has fallen apart, but they didn’t do a good enough job of showing how bad it was, and frankly, they should’ve just pulled the bullet and killed Wally outright, nothing else really gave any indication that everything was completely irreconcilable in the West family. Honestly, this situation was handled a lot better in the Haruhi Suzumiya movie, where the new world was actually just fine and dandy, and it was only Kyon, the protagonist, wanting to be with the “true” versions of his friends that made him make the decision to let it go. Barry should have been convinced – by himself – that these versions just aren’t the same people he’ grown close to in the past few years and that while they’re fine, they’re not the same. As it is, I….kinda wonder if he should’ve let it go? Maybe we did need something stupid like nukes dropping on Central City or have an evil Kryptonian Supremacist version of Kara show up and start knocking down buildings to make the case, but whatever. I do like that they seemingly wrapped up the Flashpoint issue to only end up in a world that perhaps isn’t quite right anyway. It seems like everything is well in the rest of the Flarrowverse from the next episode preview (unless it turns out Felicity’s cameo involves her still being in her wheelchair), but I suppose we’ll have to see.
I admit, I got a little emotional at the end hen Barry gave his goodbye to his family, and I like that they didn’t lay it on too thick with his hanging out with them sporadically throughout the episode. You knew they had a good three months, and the knowledge of that was good enough to have the impact that this decision was killing Barry. While they didn’t do much with the different world, I am glad they didn’t go overboard either, like how despite Cisco being an aggravating tech industry rich snob, his past is still for the most part similar, and you can still see parts of him bleed through, such as his knack for naming things. Caitlyn as a kids’ doctor taking the time to shill for Lasik was a small but neat touch, and with the leaked title for episode seven of this season being what it is, I have to wonder if she won’t be quite the same – yet still be familiar from past episodes – when we see her either.
Everyone does a pretty decent job with the script, and at this point I’ve grown numb to the “CW-ness” of it all that this show is required to have, but it wasn’t too horribly overbearing in this episode, so I can live with it. The action was decent and the effects are still as good as always for a network TV show, so glad to see that budget hasn’t seemingly been slashed now that there are four shows being filmed at that studio. I like the way they did bring up Wally being Kid Flash, and while I’m starting to get impatient with all the evil speedsters, using The Rival was a nice touch since he’s a Golden Age/Jay Garrick Flash villain, and though they stuck him in a more modern suit he still had the oversized, non-reversed lightning bolt on his chest. The tease of The Alchemist is interesting too, I don’t know much about the guy, and I’m intentionally not going to look the guy up because I want to be surprised like everyone else, though I swear, if he runs really fast, I’ll have stern words for the writers that I’ll be too chicken to say and just keep watching the show anyway.
So here we are. A solid start to the season, though not the best either, and I for one am anticipating what’ll occur this year. Though, I also wonder how things are going in the rest of this new Flarrow-verse, especially over in Star City, with its new mayor…