The Flash (CW)

I had the same questioning reaction you did at first, Bleed. Why watch Gordan muck around a pre-Batman Gotham? Well, the answer is the same as to the question “why watch anything?” Compelling characters, great actors, high production values, and entertaining story lines that take place in a setting I enjoy.

Side note:

How’s the second half of S2 of Arrow, and how much interplay between The Flash & Arrow does there seem to be (or has been announced, if they’re being so straightforward?). Several elements of Arrow’s plot “stress me out” (I like it, but certain kinds of drama and awkwardness in show plots–everything from every George side plot in Seinfeld ever to the Slaid plot in Arrow–make me squirmy and uncomfortable enough to stop enjoying a show as much), so I stopped not long after the Flash “introduction” in that series last season and never picked it back up. But, I’m super intrigued by Flash and want to enjoy it to the max, and DID like Arrow just fine, the forthcoming awkward stressfulness notwithstanding.

If I remember correcly, not much interplay at all…I may be getting a little confused with the trailer for The Flash which has the Arrow in it ;)

Definitely watch. This is a mad season for superhero/comix tv stuff, and it’s all pretty good quality.

I think what I like most about this show is Grant Gustin’s depiction of the sheer glee of being superpowered. We’re so used to superheroes being troubled by their abilities, it’s refreshing to see some joy about the thing.

It’s an amazing time to be a fan. Between this and the films we’ve been treated to over the past decade, there’s never been so much quality entertainment available. We’re living in nerdvana.

I liked the first episode.

A couple of observations:

There seem to be two overarching mysteries for the show.

  1. Who murdered his mother. Given the setup, and how the Flash came to be, it is interesting that someone else with similar powers seems highly unlikely. And yet…

  2. Who is the mysterious vigilante he talked to near the end of the episode? The one with the hood and the arrows on his back? I’m assuming we’ll find out more about him as the season moves forward and the flashbacks fill in more of the gap between his mother’s murder and his getting super powers.

The vigilante is Green Arrow, a DC hero I’ve never had any interest in but who has a successful and well regarded show on the CW.

Question 1 is more complicated. We don’t see the yellow blur actually kill his mother. Perhaps that speedster is trying to protect her from a third party. Also, it’s wearing a yellow uniform, which various Flash incarnations have done. Who knows? Maybe it’s Barry Allen himself and he’s come back through time from 2024 to protect his Mom but fails.

No Arrow thread? Season 3 premiered tonight. It hit me hard…

Also had another superhero appear.

Interesting. I just looked up the show. I’ve never heard of Green Arrow before, but the show gets good reviews. And it’s on Netflix, so I guess I’ll check it out. It’s just the way the character was introduced in The Flash, I figured they already knew each other. Does that mean that the Barry character, his younger self, is also on that other show? They seemed to know each other fairly well.

I don’t watch Arrow, but it’s my understanding that Barry was in a previous episode and that they plan some future crossovers.

Barry was on Arrow last season for a bunch of episodes at the beginning. Then he went back home and got hit by morning while in his lab, feel into a coma, etc. Rumor has it he was going to show up at the end of the season to help with the big bad, but then they decided to spin him off into his own show.

Basically they were cleared for a full pilot, and decided to go that route rather than the back-door pilot (essentially a pilot brought in the back door via an existing show’s budget). It’s a stronger launch this way, I think.

I mostly liked this premiere. I liked the Flash effects, I liked that they aren’t afraid to have people die. I think the pacing is great. It pretty much has everything going for it that took Agents of Shield an entire year, almost, to get going. I loved the ending where we see something from the distant future, that’s out of left field and very intriguing.

The only real downers were A) the lead actor is just too bland and spineless and B) another superhero origin story yay! And the death of a parent too yay! And the old “you can’t let her know about your powers” thing too yay! MY GOD, it feels like I’ve seen this done a million times now!

The evil(?) boss angle is interesting. I’m looking forward to how that plays out.

I’m hoping it’s not that simple, that he’s neither good nor evil. It could be that he knows something about the future that causes him to take actions here in the present, but what if those actions are of questionable value to the future AND are self serving AND harmful to the present?

If he is who I think it is…it’s not that simple. Nice to see that they are not afraid of time travel at all.

Also: Grodd.

I still say the “killer” of Barry’s mom may not have killed her at all. The yellow and red blur was spinning in a circle around her. Why, if not to protect her? A speedster could have destroyed her with ease in a fraction of the time shown. And remember, Barry is taken out of the house by said blur and deposited on a nearby street before the killing takes place. Again, why except for protection? The blur could be a future version of Barry, a different speedster from the past or future, and so on, but I’m not at all convinced that speedster killed his mom.

I really liked the main actor. Things feel optimistic around him. It sets the tone for the show. It could be to I’ve been watching season 2 of arrow lately.

Just caught up on the premiere from last week. Definitely has promise! Feels very much like Arrow in the casting (look at all the pretty people!) and interesting mix of drama and nerd-dom. Plenty of potential star-crossed romance for the drama lovers, lots of comic references for the nerds. I spotted all kinds of interesting stuff, from Grodd to that very last future-paper bit nod to the Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Reverse-Flash seemed obvious to me (and I suspect all comic-nerds) as the culprit when they first showed the bit with his mom dying, but Arrow has taught me that the writers like to play around with our assumptions when it comes to how the TV show parallels the comics, so we’ll have to see. The biggest pitfall I see coming on this show is the time-travel…it’s really easy to make a plot so unrealistic as to kill the suspension of disbelief when you’ve got villains that know the future and go back into the hero’s past. We’re already using up a lot of our ability to overlook silliness in allow for the superpowers here, please don’t make it harder with giant plot holes.

My son and I are going to record Tuesday’s Flash episodes to watch them while Arrow airs on Wed, and then immediately watch the recorded Arrow for a 90 minute, commercial free TV session each week. Tonight is the first test of that, but since we have other shows to watch on Tuesdays (actually, Tuesday’s are sort of loaded with great TV for us) it shouldn’t be hard to pull off. I am very jazzed to catch the second episode of the Flash, I can’t wait to see what they do with this stuff.