The Flash S01E01 – Review

By: Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, Geoff Johns (story)

The Story: Lightning gave him super-speed, but will it cure his geekiness?

The Review: As soon as Barry Allen starts narrating the cold open, you can hear The Flash‘s determination to be a different kind of superhero series. His voice thrums with enthusiasm as he points himself out on the screen (“You see that red blur? That’s me! That too. There I am again!”) and even the cinematography is all wide shots, open spaces, winking brightness, and warm colors. It’s a major departure from the gloominess pervading most of the genre, which makes The Flash a necessary show.

Most of the sunniness radiates from Grant Gustin’s performance as the young Barry, who takes the everyguy, Peter Parker model—complete with boyhood family trauma—and removes the addiction to broody angst. To combat the vanilla that often poisons Barry’s character, Berlanti-Kreisberg-Johns (“BKJ”) turn up his nerdy vibe and awkward factor, which get good mileage from Gustin’s commitment to being as uncool as possible. Whether it’s snatching another cop’s pen to take a fecal sample from a crime scene (“My dad gave me that pen—before he died.”) or enduring what can only be called a red leotard for his first long-distance Flash run, Barry is endearingly hapless.

While we’re on the subject of running, Barry’s power set is mostly handled with grace. TV CGI has come a long way and besides the lightning-strike scene (which first dazzled in Arrow
and is even more spectacular here) the show convincingly captures the slowing world around him, short bursts of speed, his vibrating abilities, etc. The special effects only fall short during sustained runs, which is more the conceptual difficulty of depicting high speed in slow motion than with the capability of the technology.

The impressive visuals aren’t the only evidence of the investment being put into this show.* The Flash boasts a monster cast in its pilot and, somewhat surprisingly, they’re almost all fairly well-defined and active in spite of how much goes on in those forty-five minutes. As a further contrast to Arrow (and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., for that matter), the character interaction has credibility even in this early stage, with the warmth of Barry’s relationship to the Wests—father Joe, daughter Iris—especially standing out. Despite obvious racial differences, they seem very comfortable as an adoptive family, with none of the three actors pushing the familiarity and sweetness too far. Mostly, you’re just impressed that Barry and Iris can pull off a genuine brother-sister affection despite a strong hint of romantic chemistry.

Focused as the show is on checking off the necessary parts of Barry’s origin story, we only get a basic idea of what future episodes will look like. With the particle accelerator explosion seeding metahumans across the city (in a most Smallville meteor shower-type manner), The Flash will probably follow the CW’s favorite monster-of-the-week format. Hopefully, there’ll be more development of the villains than the pilot gives to the generically troublemaking Clyde Mardon (a.k.a. Weather Wizard), and hopefully, it’ll take more of Barry’s CSI smarts to stop them. The show has a great resource in the Central City Police Department, even the smarmy Eddie Thawne and rigid captain David Singh, and it should make even greater use of hip visuals to depict Barry’s deductive abilities.

Future episodes will also have to withstand the CW’s persistently soapy dialogue. The bluntness of the characters more than once induces cringes: boy Barry complaining the bullies he fought (“Those guys were picking on kids, just ’cause they thought they weren’t cool. It wasn’t right”); Caitlin Snow’s recital of her grievances (“I just noticed you don’t smile too much.” “My once promising career in bioengineering is over; my boss is in a wheelchair for life; the explosion that put you in a coma also killed my fiancé. So this blank expression kind of feels like the way to go.”).

Even so, the pilot gets a lot of things right, most importantly the balance between accessibility and devotion to the source material. In addition to stocking the cast with DC mainstays, we have references to Grodd and Ferris Air, a somewhat gratuitous guest appearance from Green Arrow, and hints of a future world that even more closely resembles the DCU. Setting aside [Spoiler Alert!] the revelation that Dr. Harrison Wells of S.T.A.R. Labs is no paraplegic at all, the newspaper from the future he examines contains all kinds of intriguing headlines: “Flash Missing: Vanishes in Crisis,” “Red Skies Vanish,” “Wayne Tech/Queen Inc Merge”. If this show and others play out even one of these prophecies, we have some exciting superhero television ahead.

Conclusion: A very charming introduction to the series, slightly dampened by the usual defects of CW programming.

Grade: A-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Or, at least, the pilot. I’ll be very curious to see how things look for episodes going forward.

– I do appreciate that when Barry’s rushed into the emergency room, you can see he’s got no abs, but once he wakes up from the coma—abs. Continuity!

– Thoughts on the costume? I think it’s okay, but a bit bulky. I guess it’s hard to make what is essentially a speed-skater’s outfit look cool.