That is in fact the very reason it took me so long to get into The Flash. I had watched the first season of Arrow and I only expected The Flash to follow in suit and just be the standard CW superhero show that I’ve come to know from Arrow.
Boy was I wrong.
Arrow always seemed to stem from a sense of reality but with
that CW stink added to it. It was like the CWs attempt at a Christopher
Nolan-esc Batman TV show. Gritty…ish, comic book-y… ish, and full of your
attractive rich people getting into shinanagans that we as Americans seem to
enjoy.
The Flash is totally different.
The Flash centers around a young CSI investigator named
Barry Allen (played by Grant Gustin). Barry’s mother was murdered when he was
young by what Barry says was a red flash. Of course nobody believes him and his
father is wrongfully accused and found guilty of the murder of his mother.
Barry spends his entire life trying to figure out the mystery behind his
mother’s death until he is struck by lightning in the result of a super
conductor explosion done by a science experiment gone wrong at the nearby STAR
Labs.
Barry goes into a
coma lasting for 9 months and awakens with superhuman abilities of
intense speed.
He is joined by the team at STAR Labs, led by the brilliant
but mysterious Harrison Wells (played by Tom Cavanagh), and he makes it his
quest to develop his abilities, fight crime in Central City, and
reveal the
identity of his mother’s killer, all with elements of super human abilities, monsters,
and even time travel surrounding his circumstances. 
I cannot rave enough about The Flash. Where as in both
seasons I’ve watched of Arrow, I’ve always felt it was a CW show that just
happened to have comic book heroes in it, The Flash feels like a comic book
show that just happens to be broadcasted on the CW.
The show just seems to have more fun and its not banking on
attractive rich people carrying the show with their out of touch issues we can
only dream to relate to, instead its focused on the characters and their
struggles. They have a good cast of talented people, new and old, who while not
ugly people, aren’t just there for their looks. And you have a compelling
mystery throughout.
Grant Gustin is the ideal situation for the CW because the
guy is a decent actor and he’s a good looking guy. He made an appearance on
Arrow Season 2, (an episode I watched after I watched the first season of The
Flash) and he’s just a likeable character. While he’s a good looking guy, you
can buy that he was interested in science, was bullied as a kid, and ended up
the way he is. The best comparison I have with this is Felicity Smoak. Maybe
it’s a double standard, but I’m trying to imagine a backstory that ends with a
smoking hot girl working on computers and still manages to look gorgeous doing
it. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I just see it as too good to be true. On
an unrelated note, The Flash actually made me like Felicity a lot more and made
me question why her and Barry didn’t actually end up together, the show itself
says they’re perfect for one another.
But back to the Flash, all the supporting characters for the
most part are really good. Harrison Wells is a great character because he is
shrouded in mystery the ENTIRE time. Cisco and Katelyn, while they could have
turned into those annoying British idiots in Agents of SHIELD distinguish
themselves perfectly and really become the heart and soul of this super team.
Barry’s adoptive father (played by an underrated favorite of
mine, Jesse L. Martin) is the obligatory cop of the show but he’s a lot more
relatable than Detective Lance is in Arrow because he’s a kind guy. He cares
about Barry more than anything and when he eventually figures out he’s The
Flash, he’s totally cool about it and that relationship is conducive rather
than just another drama point.
The only characters I can really point to as the obligatory
good looking people are Iris, Detective West’s daughter and Barry’s adoptive
sister and secret crush, and her boyfriend Eddie Thawne. These two are the only
people in the show that remind me that I’m watching a CW show because they are
the really good looking people doing their best to give a good performance. And
surprisingly, they’re not horrible. They’re not great and I want their time
limited as much as they can be, but the show does that actually. The show is
not focused on their drama as much as I’ve seen CW shows focus on that kind of
stuff in the past. The show is on Barry Allen and his development as The Flash.
Everything they do affects Barry and that is the focus. They’re not going to
disrupt the story because Iris has a party to go to and she doesn’t have a date
or some BS like that. Her personal problems directly affect Barry and his
journey as the Flash and if they don’t they are given a very, very small role.
What’s more, because The Flash evolves the Arrow universe to
make it a universe where there are super powered individuals, it feels more
like a comic book. But what’s more, instead of just bringing in villains for
the sake of bringing in villains, they’re bringing in villains to just have fun
with them. For god’s sake, Mark Hamill was in an episode playing The Trickster.
And it works perfectly because that episode was full of call backs to when
Hamill played Trickster in an old Flash TV show, it had a really funny Star
Wars reference, it was really fun and I had a lot of fun watching it. And I
won’t give too much away but the show just goes all out comic book. It’s
starting to use iconic DC characters that probably won’t get their due in the
movies because they’re either so ridiculous or they’re not known enough. This
was something that Arrow was starting to do once the show had its designated
success but The Flash did it from the very beginning.
There are filler episodes in this season but I do feel like
they are either good episodes, or they tie in, if not at least slightly in
order to create a larger world.
If I had one complaint about the show, it would probably be
the shoe horned in world building with the
Arrow universe. It kind of makes me wonder if the show runners knew
Arrow was going down the tube and wanted to use The Flash to push more fans to
go back to Arrow, but I just felt like Felicity or Oliver showed up too much
and honestly, those aren’t my favorite episodes at all.
I of course only watched the second season and saw a couple
of cameos from people in The Flash, but it seemed like those were more to help
promote the show before it actually started up.
The other thing worth mentioning is that while it feels like
a comic book show that just happened to be on the CW, I still do see the soap
opera-ness that is very present in the show. Some of the acting isn’t
phenomenal and there still is a little bit of that CW drama trying to sneak its
way in.
However, that is overshadowed by the good characters, the
fun and actually memorable villains, and the overall comic book feel of this
show. It looks fun to film and I have to give them credit for that.
The Flash is the very reason I’m doing this 4 parter because
it showed me that there might be some validity this this Arrowverse that is
being created and makes me very excited for what they could do in the future.
To be continued... (World Building/ Legends of Tomorrow)
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