By Lucas Shim
The Mirror Staff
“Not only does the season focus on the same kinds of threats, but it also lacks stories with reasonable logic.”
ENTERTAINMENT
Speeding Towards a Downfall?
May 24, 2017
ENTERTAINMENT:
The storyline and character development of “The Flash” has some fans worried about the show’s future
DRASTIC TIMES CALL FOR DRASTIC MEASURES: Barry (Grant Gustin) takes drastic measures to stop Savitar. Meanwhile, H.R. (Tom Cavanagh) continues to push Tracy Brand (guest star Anne Dudek) to design the trap for Savitar and Killer Frost (Danielle Panabaker) returns with an interesting proposal. David McWhirter directed the episode written by Judalina Neira & Lauren Certo (#321). Original airdate 5/9/2017.
Many fans believe that it’s time for “The Flash” to undergo some heavy improvements.
After epic storylines and eye-catching characters in the first two seasons, the third season of “The Flash” seems to be unique only because it is the one that’s not grabbing people’s attention.
Written by Greg Berlanti and Andrew Kreisberg, “The Flash” stars Grant Gustin as Barry Allen or the Flash. Actor Tom Cavanagh is Harrison Wells, Candice Patton is Iris West, Jesse L. Martin is Joe West, Carlos Valdes is Cisco Ramon and Danielle Panabaker is Caitlin Snow.
The story revolves around CSI forensic scientist Barry Allen, who goes into a nine-month coma after being affected by an accidental particle-accelerator explosion caused by a company known as Star Labs.
After waking up, he realizes that he gained the power of super speed, allowing him to team up with former Star Labs scientists, Cisco Ramon, Caitlin Snow, and Harrison Wells, to save Central City from other metahuman threats caused by the same explosion.
While he fights crime and protects the citizens of Central City, the Flash vows to find the mysterious man who murdered his mother so that he can free his father, framed for the crime, from prison.
The first season focuses on Barry Allen’s process of becoming the Flash. As he fights crime and other metahuman villains, he is also guided by Harrison Wells to learn new abilities. His devotion to finding his mom’s murderer, who was also a speedster, gives the audience a sense of intense drama and action.
The second season focuses on the aftermath of events from the first season. Although the Flash continuously deals with Central City’s crime, the show takes things to a different level by introducing the DC comics multiverse, which includes villains as well as the main antagonist from parallel dimensions.
It gives the audience a nostalgic vibe from DC comic books, especially since the multiverse was and still is a very popular concept.
However, the last three episodes unraveled as absurd and illogical decisions were made by the show’s characters—especially by Barry himself.
The third season takes a step backwards and dives even deeper into repetitiveness.
Though fans were expecting something greater, especially after the multiverse concept, “The Flash” still only deals with the same threats. This makes the audience realize that the show missed multiple opportunities to expand and exploit its strengths.
Not only does the season focus on the same kinds of threats as before, but it also lacks stories with reasonable logic. There are situations in which Barry and the team could not find a way to defeat the main antagonist, even though there were multiple solutions right under their noses.
Sometimes Barry, who considers himself as the “fastest man alive,” couldn’t even catch up to a guy riding a motorcycle in less than five seconds. While some may argue that he was carrying a heavy weapon, that is merely an excuse because most viewers still remember the times when Flash was able to deal with greater problems.
Although they were evident in the first two seasons, the number of “pep-talks” have heavily increased in the third season. Back in seasons one and two, Barry was usually the only one who kept on losing confidence about defeating a villain so one of the supporting characters always had to give him a sense of motivation. This lasted from a range of two to four minutes in a 43-minute episode. In season three, it now devastatingly and hilariously includes most of the characters, and the pep-talks occur almost every 15 minutes.
The scriptwriters also added extra silly one-liners in situations that were meant to be taken seriously. For example, when Cisco is back in Star Labs and communicating with Barry to support him to defeat a supervillain, he and another character might be arguing about an irrelevant topic that’s related to the “Star Wars” movies. Meanwhile, Barry is taking multiple hits to the point where he should be dead.
Although the special effects are usually mediocre because of the TV show’s tight budget, the CGI and action sequences have definitely been downgraded this season. This is probably because of the addition of “Supergirl,” another superhero show that was transferred from CBS to The CW network. Maybe the two shows have to share the same budget.
Most of the story this season feels pointless. You can skip an episode, and you will most likely have not even missed a thing that was related to the main storyline. A special crossover between “The Flash” and “Supergirl” called “Duet” felt like a “filler,” where writers were trying to add as many things as they could so that the audience would be distracted from the bland storyline.
Since both actors used to star in “Glee,” the writers may have wanted to show their singing skills to audiences for that specific episode, which received the lowest rating of the season with a 6.0 on IMDB, the Internet Movie Database.
Many fans believe that the use of speedsters as the main antagonists is becoming repetitive. The idea of the team trying to find out the “secret identity” of the supervillain is also becoming a disaster.
However, this is not the writers’ fault because die-hard fans can be very analytical, creative, and predictive, causing the writers to quickly alter the storyline to try to surprise the audience.
The third season still has many positives, including the introduction of new comic book characters.
While “Arrow,” another CW superhero show, deals with an overdramatic relationship between protagonists Oliver and Felicity, “The Flash” uses Barry and Iris’ relationship wisely.
On IMDB, most season three episodes (“Duet,” “Monster,” “Magenta”) remained at the bottom of the ratings for “The Flash”.
The highest rated episode was “Invasion!,” a crossover mashup between “The Flash,” “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow,” “Arrow” and “Supergirl” in which the characters defended the world against aliens.
Image Description The Flash — “Cause and Effect” — FLA321b_0161b.jpg — Pictured (L-R): Keiynan Lonsdale as Kid Flash and Grant Gustin as The Flash — Photo: Katie Yu/The CW — © 2017 The CW Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
