When the producers of The CW’s Arrow announced that they would be moving forward with a spin-off for fellow DC Comic stalwart Barry Allen aka The Flash, it seemed shortsighted at best, laughable at worst.
For starters, The Flash has always been one of the goofiest characters to ever walk the Hall of Justice. While DC animated properties have endeared the Scarlet Speedster to a generation of young fans, Barry’s rogues gallery have been a long-standing punchline among comic fans (one of his most famous nemesises [not a word] is a guy who throws goddamn boomerangs. Another is a gorilla.). The Flash’s previous excursions into live action have been almost ridiculous and short-lived, leaving no indication that this could work as a serious network show.
And then there was the creative pedigree of the proposed spin-off. Arrow got off to a very rough start, dry-humping the Christopher Nolan playbook until its junk was rubbed raw within ill-fitting leather pants. Around the mid-point of season one, the writers finally cracked the show’s tone and narrative style, but was a half season of solid episodic television indicative of an ability to create an entirely separate series within the same universe?
When Barry, played by Glee alum Grant Gustin, popped up for a brief arc during Arrow’s second season, he immediately established himself as a likable and upbeat presence, a healthy contrast to the knowingly brooding and morally murky characters of Arrow.
But even knowing they had the right guy, the question still remained:
The Flash as a weekly show? Can that work?
There has been no happier surprise this fall than the immediate and out-of-nowhere excellence of The Flash. From its outstanding pilot through the most recent run of episodes, The Flash has had an absurdly strong opening run of episodes, rapidly becoming one of the shows I anticipate most each week.
In this imagining, Barry Allen is a young forensic scientist whose life has been marked by his steadfast belief in the impossible. As a child, Barry witnessed the murder of his mother by what appeared to be a man moving amongst lightning. The cops did not buy the lightning-murder-man story, and so Barry’s dad was sent to jail for the murder and Barry was raised by Jesse L. Martin. Despite trading up in dads, Barry was still pretty bummed about the whole watching-his-mom-brutally-die thing. As as he probably would be.
Anyway, cut to the present and Barry’s a happy go lucky young man still eager to prove that the impossible is possible. One night, local mad-ish scientist Dr. Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanaugh, aka JD’s brother from Scrubs) turned on a particle accelerator which accidentally bathed the city in a radioactive glow. Barry is zapped and goes into a coma, awakening to discover that he can now run at supersonic speeds. Unfortunately, the city is now full of similarly super-powered folk, many of whom do not share Barry’s helpful world view.
The Flash suffers from the usual problems that you would expect from a 22-episode season on network television. Because the season is so long and because the network hopes to entice semi-regular viewers, the long-form narrative and emotional arcs are stretched to a maddening degree, with the show’s meta-narrative being dribbled out in tiny chunks from episode to episode.
This would be more easily assuaged if the show did a stronger job with the Monster of the Week episodes, but so far Barry’s villains have been largely forgettable, and the episodic storylines surrounding characters like love interest Iris West (Candice Snow) have been inexcusably dull.
Iris actually ends up embodying a lot of what is wrong with The Flash in these early days. As appealing a screen presence as Snow is, and as smart and self-sufficient as Iris has been written to be, the character still feels half-formed. You can feel the show hitting its brakes whenever the character comes onscreen, as if the writers know precisely where they want this character to go, who they want her to be, but can’t upset the establishing status quo.
That goes for almost all of the characters and stories. You can feel that great show right beneath The Flash’s surface, a show that embraces its wildest potential and indulges in the cosmic corners of the DC universe, and you can feel the desire from the people behind the show to just rip the fucking training wheels off an dive right in.
But, again, network show, first season, 22 episodes. Things need to be drawn out.
But I’ll tell you why these frustrations are worth wading through: Because what The Flash gets so right, so frequently, is tone.
Tone is an impossibly tricky thing to pull off, especially when you are trying to balance something as visually ridiculous as The Flash with genuine emotional drama. The balance could easily, EASILY, tip and render the entire endeavor a hysterical farce.
To bring Arrow back into it, the early episodes of that show were so slathered in “THIS IS SERIOUSLY GRITTY AND GRITTILY (probably not a word) SERIOUS GODDAMNIT” that the show was mostly a slog between the exceptional action sequences. Once the show embraced its identity as crackling pulp, the po-faced emotional arcs and broad declarations of characterization flew much better.
The Flash has not had such growing pains. It announced itself from the first frames of the pilot as an optimistic and relentlessly positive experience, and has not deviated from that course since.
Barry Allen, we quickly learn, is good. He’s an endlessly chipper nerd who gasps things like, “My chest feels like that one time I smoked a cigarette!” after inhaling poison gas.
More importantly, Barry Allen defines his heroism entirely around the number of people that he saves, not the number of jerks he punches.
With many modern superhero narratives, even the good ones, rescuing and protecting people is a side effect or a perk that crops up during the epic super battles. But with The Flash and The Flash, rescuing people from harm’s way is the rubric by which success is determined. Punching out a supervillain means nothing if even one civilian is injured, and both character and show take that responsibility with the utmost seriousness.
Taking this approach has resulted in The Flash being perhaps the single most optimistic superhero story currently in live action, an endlessly joyful celebration of heroism and altruism. Whereas so many superhero narratives approach powers and responsibility as a crushing weight, The Flash delights in the notion of being special, of putting yourself on the line for your fellow people.
There’s a lot of ground to cover before The Flash can be counted as a truly great show. This could be a Heroes situation, where a creative team is all sizzle without even a sense of what the steak should fucking look like.
But if the show can maintain that tone, maintain that joy, I’m happy to give it all the time it needs to straighten out its narrative concerns. As it is, The Flash is a near-constant joy delivery system, brightening up some dark recent days and doing it…in a flash.