The Flash S01E02 – Review

As much as I like the brighter, more upbeat tone of The Flash, I see the red flags for a day when it becomes downright cartoonish. Today is not that day (or, more accurately, two days ago, when this episode actually broadcast); the show is still establishing its basic identity and reaching out to new viewers, so attention-seeking broadness is actually reasonable—from a marketing standpoint—even if it grates against the story a little bit.

But this episode does bear traits you tend to see in comics rather than TV, even from the cold open. As Barry speeds in and out of a burning apartment building to save those inside, the people he brings out look soot-stained and bewildered, more like they’ve had a bad run-in with a chimney than experienced a raging firestorm. It’s silly to the point of being family-friendly, which is at odds with the darker turns the episode takes later on.

Emotional cluelessness is also something I’d expect from two-dimensional characters, but find exasperating from real live humans. Barry’s lovelorniness for Iris gets more obvious by the week and the longer he fails to act on it and she to pick up on it, the more ineffectual they seem. At one point, he spends a good ten seconds silently gazing at her with those puppy-dog eyes, causing her to demand, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

A pregnant pause later: “…You look really nice.” The fact that Iris doesn’t confront him at that moment is already proof that she’s not cut out for journalism, even if she doesn’t admit it herself.*

The thing that really stands out as comic bookish to me, though, is the exposition. Although the show admirably avoids a long spiel at the top of the episode, it spoils the achievement by simply injecting exposition for the rest of the hour into awkward spots in the conversation. This is common practice for the recap-pageless DC comics, so I blame Kreisberg and Johns. These things don’t trip up the episode, but they do slow it down.

The show still struggles to fit in Barry’s “day job” at the CCPD, which inevitably overlaps with his metahuman-hunting with the S.T.A.R. Labs crew, especially now that Joe’s working with Cisco, Caitlin, and the rest. I’m not sure how necessary the CCPD is if it becomes merely the preliminary investigation before S.T.A.R. blows the case wide open with their sci-fi wackiness. There’s Barry clumsily trying to imply weirdness from criss-crossing identical footprints (which just sounds like one lively culprit running over his tracks a couple times—which is not exactly out of the question during a robbery). Meanwhile, you’ve got Caitlin scraping off cells and generating a whole, inert man out of them.**

The excitement generated by the pilot stays healthy thanks to enthusiastic advances in Barry’s powers, and a few interesting vulnerabilities. Super-speed, if applied correctly, can be a cure-all for almost any problem, so it’s good for the show to start setting limits now: a special diet to ward off hypoglycemia and Barry’s own lack of actual fighting skills, notwithstanding newborn abs. This allows the duplicating Danton Black (a.k.a. Multiplex) to pose a fairly serious threat for most of the episode before Barry makes his first breakthrough and shuts him down.

Hopefully, the villains will be more developed than either Black or his backstabbing boss Simon Stagg (former associate of Wells) going forward. The writers at least attempt to give Black a semi-heartfelt backstory (inability to save loved one is always popular) before tossing him out, but Stagg merely exists to tar Wells as the one truly formidable antagonist. With Barry’s natural softheartedness, he needs villains with real weight behind them if he’s ever going to toughen up.

– Minhquan Nguyen