The Flash (TV Series, Season 4)
Jun. 26th, 2018 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroTeam Flash manages to pull Barry out of the speed force and get him back into action, but they discover that in doing so they’ve accidentally created a busload of new metahumans...and that a villainous mastermind manipulated them to do so to further his own nefarious plans.
First off, I very much appreciate that the villain was introduced early on, he was clearly a real threat, and he wasn’t a member of Team Flash who was secretly evil (again). He was a mash-up of the comics Thinker character with the Ultra-Humanite (body-hopping) and Sylar (collecting all the superpowers and using them in tandem), and that worked. I was also okay with the way he was defeated—the plan to find “the good in him” was abandoned halfway through the delve into his mind in favor of just forcing him to lose control of Ralph’s body. And while they didn’t mention it, fitting with the teamwork theme, part of why they were able to beat him was that, by that point, his focus was split between his master plan, the mental assault, the physical fight with the team, and his wife’s betrayal—they’d finally overloaded his mental resources enough to get around him.
Of course, I don’t think the Thinker’s powers are necessarily that he’s super-smart; it’s just that he makes other people around him stupid. That, or Barry is just generally stupid. I mean, the plot to frame Barry for murder in the fall finale: He plants a dead body and a murder weapon in Barry’s apartment, sets off the security system, then presumably calls the police so they’ll bust in, find Barry with the corpse and arrest him. The thing is, he calls Barry on the phone to gloat ten second into this, and Barry is too dumb to zoom back to the party (which he could do before DeVoe has even put down the damn phone) and put DeVoe in a headlock (which would mean the police bust into the apartment and no one is there). Alternately, if he’s too stunned by the phone call to run back, he has a solid fifteen seconds before the police can break through the door, which is an eternity for a speedster. There are no cameras in Barry’s apartment, so nothing could be recording the presence of the corpse. In that fifteen seconds, dump the corpse and the knife on the roof or an alley or wherever they won’t be found for a few hours, use your skills as an amazing CSI to remove the bloodstains and other evidence, and then break a bedroom window or something—which means that when the police rush in, you can honestly say, “I just got here, I came back because something set off my security alarm. Hey look, someone tried to break in!” And when they say, “We got a call from DeVoe that you were murdering him!” You can say, “…say what? That’s dumb. I’m clearly not. Six people will swear I was at a party until [appropriate travel time] ago. He’s not here. When would I even do this?”
(Seriously, that whole plotline was so, so stupid. It required Barry to be a moron, Team Flash to be useless, and Clarice—ostensibly a DA—to be the Worst. Lawyer. Ever. It could have been clever. It could have been a series of Team Flash thinking they’ve got the smoking gun only to find DeVoe had prepared for it. They closest we get is Ralph gets pictures of DeVoe’s wife with his new body, and she makes up some shit on the spot to explain it away. Clearly, the writers thought “the Flash goes to jail like his father did” would be a poignant story, despite not having the faintest clue how to make that actually make sense. So they wrote an Idiot Plot anyway.)
The managed to redeem Clarice as a character in the back half of the season by giving her gestational telepathy—which, while I’m sure a lot of fanboys were confused, is the most realistic thing anyone familiar with pregnancy symptoms will see on this show. (Seriously, I have a friend who spent two months of pregnancy with a stripe of chicken pox across her belly. Nowhere else, no other symptoms. Pregnancy does weird shit.)
And I’ll give them credit that the relationship writing was better than the other seasons: Barry and Iris are getting better at communicating and not going drama-nuts. Cisco and Gypsy have a perfectly rational and understandable breakup. The running gag of the marriage counselor that the entire cast ends up seeing is actually really smart. (The running gag of choosing who gets to do the emotional speech in the hallway after someone storms out is just pattern recognition.) Harry spends most of the season exiled from Earth-2 by his daughter because he’s being an emotionally-stunted, intellectually-elite asshole, and while I thought the execution was a little hokey, his arc is learning not to be an asshole and at the end he goes home.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the random cameo by Jay and Silent Bob (with shockingly network-friendly dialogue), until I found out that Kevin Smith had directed that episode (4x17).
And in our carry-overs to next season: Nora, Barry and Iris’ daughter from the future (I thought for sure she was going to turn out to be baby Jenna, for the record) has apparently made a big mistake. Barry was babbling things from the future when he emerged from the speed force, and I don’t think we’ve exhausted all of the details of that. Ralph is back, but there’s no reason to believe that some bad shit from the Thinker isn’t left in his body—and for that matter, all of the other powers DeVoe absorbed should still be in there, too. Caitlin’s repressed memories and Killer Frost persona need to get explored. And what variation of Wells will appear next? Maybe it’ll be the latest Thawne time-remnant that appeared in Crisis on Earth-X and then vanished?
Overall: There were some missteps (particularly the prison plotline), but I thought this season was pretty decent and, in a bunch of ways, better than season 3.
First off, I very much appreciate that the villain was introduced early on, he was clearly a real threat, and he wasn’t a member of Team Flash who was secretly evil (again). He was a mash-up of the comics Thinker character with the Ultra-Humanite (body-hopping) and Sylar (collecting all the superpowers and using them in tandem), and that worked. I was also okay with the way he was defeated—the plan to find “the good in him” was abandoned halfway through the delve into his mind in favor of just forcing him to lose control of Ralph’s body. And while they didn’t mention it, fitting with the teamwork theme, part of why they were able to beat him was that, by that point, his focus was split between his master plan, the mental assault, the physical fight with the team, and his wife’s betrayal—they’d finally overloaded his mental resources enough to get around him.
Of course, I don’t think the Thinker’s powers are necessarily that he’s super-smart; it’s just that he makes other people around him stupid. That, or Barry is just generally stupid. I mean, the plot to frame Barry for murder in the fall finale: He plants a dead body and a murder weapon in Barry’s apartment, sets off the security system, then presumably calls the police so they’ll bust in, find Barry with the corpse and arrest him. The thing is, he calls Barry on the phone to gloat ten second into this, and Barry is too dumb to zoom back to the party (which he could do before DeVoe has even put down the damn phone) and put DeVoe in a headlock (which would mean the police bust into the apartment and no one is there). Alternately, if he’s too stunned by the phone call to run back, he has a solid fifteen seconds before the police can break through the door, which is an eternity for a speedster. There are no cameras in Barry’s apartment, so nothing could be recording the presence of the corpse. In that fifteen seconds, dump the corpse and the knife on the roof or an alley or wherever they won’t be found for a few hours, use your skills as an amazing CSI to remove the bloodstains and other evidence, and then break a bedroom window or something—which means that when the police rush in, you can honestly say, “I just got here, I came back because something set off my security alarm. Hey look, someone tried to break in!” And when they say, “We got a call from DeVoe that you were murdering him!” You can say, “…say what? That’s dumb. I’m clearly not. Six people will swear I was at a party until [appropriate travel time] ago. He’s not here. When would I even do this?”
(Seriously, that whole plotline was so, so stupid. It required Barry to be a moron, Team Flash to be useless, and Clarice—ostensibly a DA—to be the Worst. Lawyer. Ever. It could have been clever. It could have been a series of Team Flash thinking they’ve got the smoking gun only to find DeVoe had prepared for it. They closest we get is Ralph gets pictures of DeVoe’s wife with his new body, and she makes up some shit on the spot to explain it away. Clearly, the writers thought “the Flash goes to jail like his father did” would be a poignant story, despite not having the faintest clue how to make that actually make sense. So they wrote an Idiot Plot anyway.)
The managed to redeem Clarice as a character in the back half of the season by giving her gestational telepathy—which, while I’m sure a lot of fanboys were confused, is the most realistic thing anyone familiar with pregnancy symptoms will see on this show. (Seriously, I have a friend who spent two months of pregnancy with a stripe of chicken pox across her belly. Nowhere else, no other symptoms. Pregnancy does weird shit.)
And I’ll give them credit that the relationship writing was better than the other seasons: Barry and Iris are getting better at communicating and not going drama-nuts. Cisco and Gypsy have a perfectly rational and understandable breakup. The running gag of the marriage counselor that the entire cast ends up seeing is actually really smart. (The running gag of choosing who gets to do the emotional speech in the hallway after someone storms out is just pattern recognition.) Harry spends most of the season exiled from Earth-2 by his daughter because he’s being an emotionally-stunted, intellectually-elite asshole, and while I thought the execution was a little hokey, his arc is learning not to be an asshole and at the end he goes home.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the random cameo by Jay and Silent Bob (with shockingly network-friendly dialogue), until I found out that Kevin Smith had directed that episode (4x17).
And in our carry-overs to next season: Nora, Barry and Iris’ daughter from the future (I thought for sure she was going to turn out to be baby Jenna, for the record) has apparently made a big mistake. Barry was babbling things from the future when he emerged from the speed force, and I don’t think we’ve exhausted all of the details of that. Ralph is back, but there’s no reason to believe that some bad shit from the Thinker isn’t left in his body—and for that matter, all of the other powers DeVoe absorbed should still be in there, too. Caitlin’s repressed memories and Killer Frost persona need to get explored. And what variation of Wells will appear next? Maybe it’ll be the latest Thawne time-remnant that appeared in Crisis on Earth-X and then vanished?
Overall: There were some missteps (particularly the prison plotline), but I thought this season was pretty decent and, in a bunch of ways, better than season 3.
