The Flash S01E04 – Review

Monogamy has always been a problem with superhero romances. Once a cape falls in love with someone, that is pretty much it, even if he has a couple flings along the way. I get the resistance to a superhero actually cheating on their lover/spouse—hardly the kind of behavior you expect from good guys—but there should be more room for them to be attracted to and maybe even fall in love with someone else, especially if the sparks aren’t there between the one they’re with anymore.

It’s way too early in The Flash‘s life to decide that’s what’s going on with Barry and Iris, but each episode seems to move the two of them deeper and deeper into the friend-zone. And the thing is, they both seem very comfortable there, not just Iris. Whether it’s due to good or bad acting (or good or bad writing), Grant Gustin and Candice Patton are way more convincing as siblings than romantic partners. No matter how many longing looks Gustin wears, he struggles to make Barry seem genuinely attracted to Iris, rather than attracted to her by canonical decree.*

There is no such struggle with Felicity, with whom Barry has not only an easy chemistry, but a sexual one as well—awkwardly sexual (“I wanna see it,” she tells him, “and by it, I mean your speed, in case you thought I was talking about something else—which I was not.”) but then they’re both adorably awkward people. Forget Barry teasing Iris about her food obsession, which yields diminishing returns every week; this episode generates more romantic comedy from Barry and Felicity than the last three (and probably the next three) combined.

They’re helped by the fact that each knows the other’s secrets and moreover, Felicity is a veteran of the vigilante business. She’s as amazed as anyone else by Barry’s powers (“Your shoes are smoking!” she gasps as he frantically stamps out the flames), but she’s so used to secret identities and danger that she can grasp the humor of it all. “I’m really good at keeping secrets,” she assures the S.T.A.R. crew.

“Yeah, Felicity works with the Arrow!” Barry adds enthusiastically.

“And, apparently, you are not!”

In a lot of ways, this episode gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what The Flash can look like if Felicity wasn’t already committed to another superhero. Besides the good thing she has going with Barry, she fits right into the S.T.A.R. gang of nerds, both as technical support and emotional support. Her Team Arrow experience allows her to keep a cool head when tensions heat up between Cisco and Barry later in the episode, putting her in the position of veteran showing the rookies how this work is done.

While the episode is smart enough to address how perfect Felicity and Barry are for each other even if they don’t ultimately hook up, it fails to convincingly explain why they have to stay apart. The fact that both have unrequited crushes on other people only establishes another connection between them, and while the one Felicity has on Ollie is more credible, you just don’t buy Barry’s rueful conclusion that it’s opposites that attract. There’s plenty of attraction between them in that train car.

The rest of the episode—yes, there’s more to it than Barricity—is just as solid. The portrayal of Leonard Snart (a.k.a. Captain Cold) as a calculating and committed thief is an improvement over roughnecked crook, even if Wentworth Miller’s rasping, menacing performance is more along the lines of a mad genius than a young thug who just happened to pick up Cisco’s cold gun. It may actually be the gun rather than the man wielding it that gives the episode its several conflicts: Barry’s anguish at failing to save an innocent bystander, Wells’ dark reaction when Cisco confesses he invented the gun, Barry’s hostile reaction when he discovers the same. Snart is due to return (along with roguish back-up), so let’s hope he makes a better impression then.

I’ve said this before, but it always bears mentioning how great Joe is as the show’s grounding force. Jesse L. Martin has the enviable gift of delivering these long, emotional speeches that bring reality into The Flash without stopping it cold. He’s so utterly convincing in everything he says that when he tells Iris how anxious he feels risking her boyfriend’s life in his line of duty, you do resent Iris for dating Eddie. You want to tell her, “Dump the guy! Can’t you see how your dad’s suffering?” That’s good acting.

Perhaps even better than Martin’s acting are the special effects on the show, which grow more refined and ambitious as Barry does. Seeing superpowers in live action can have a magical effect when done right, and there’s a lot of magic in this episode. Watching Barry play games with all three S.T.A.R. employees at the same time (frustrating Caitlin at Operation, winging Cisco at ping-pong, losing to Wells at chess) is pure delight to watch, but it’s joy and wonder you feel when he runs, leaps, leapfrogs from target to target during an armed robbery sequence in an exhilarating series of blurs and slow-motion. And let’s not even debate the spectacular train-derailment scene, in which Barry repeatedly zooms through the flying cars to rescue all the passengers inside. It’s exactly the Flash as you always imagined him, made real, and that’s all you really ask for from a superhero series.

– Minhquan Nguyen