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The Flash

Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 11:22 am
by Lunkhead
I got curious and started watching this. I think it's not great but enjoyable. The main actor is a bit annoying, but maybe he will pull a Luke Skywalker/Mark Hamill and develop into something. The actor who used to be "Ed" is doing an amazing job as the (spoiler alert) secret uber bad guy, though. He's great.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 11:46 am
by ken
Flash is a very good spin off from Arrow. It has a much lighter tone, which helps it distinguish itself despite the almost exact copy of the intro. The two cross over episodes really highlight these differences by making each "team" exist in the other's world. It actually seems to be getting a bit darker as everyone's secrets come out. I'm not sure where this show is going ultimately, but it seems like they will have to hold off on that climax as long as possible before moving in a new direction.

Anyone think there will be an ATOM spin off too?

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2015 10:59 am
by JonPorobil
The lighter tone is nice, definitely. I appreciate a comic book property that isn't all darkness and existential dread. This new show appeals to me for similar reasons to why I liked the old Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, or the current Thor franchise.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 2:48 pm
by JonPorobil
ken wrote: Anyone think there will be an ATOM spin off too?
Brandon Routh is much better here than he was in Superman, I'll give him that much.

I doubt the writers have much in the way of long-term plans for Ray Palmer. The inside scuttlebutt I heard was that his character was originally supposed to be Ted Kord, but the higher-ups at DC wouldn't let them use him. That, in and of itself, is exciting, but I'm guessing that any future plans for Ray Palmer/ATOM/Brandon Routh are still pretty up in the air.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 3:44 pm
by Lunkhead
I just got caught up yesterday on the latest two episodes, and yeah, for some reason I started to get the feeling like Ray Palmer's days are numbered. He and Felicity are too happy, I just imagine they're going to kill him as some kind of horrible story arc for her. She hasn't gone through any super dark crazy personal stuff yet.

I never saw Brandon Routh as Superman, but this time around he is definitely reminding me of the beginning of his time on "Chuck". He's not really impressing me with his acting, frankly...

Re: The Flash

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 8:50 pm
by JonPorobil
Lunkhead wrote:I just got caught up yesterday on the latest two episodes, and yeah, for some reason I started to get the feeling like Ray Palmer's days are numbered. He and Felicity are too happy, I just imagine they're going to kill him as some kind of horrible story arc for her. She hasn't gone through any super dark crazy personal stuff yet.

I never saw Brandon Routh as Superman, but this time around he is definitely reminding me of the beginning of his time on "Chuck". He's not really impressing me with his acting, frankly...
Routh was Superman in this clunker back in 2006. I don't recommend getting caught up.

I did like him on Chuck. I was never really sure whether to like his character or not, which was kind of the point (and, I suspect, would also be the point here, if you didn't have the wherewithal to Google "Ray Palmer DC Universe"). He's very charismatic, but also a little oily, and that's a difficult line to tread.

Anyway, I'm still not 100% caught up, so I'll refrain from further speculation for now. (Plus we're in the wrong thread... heh.)

Re: The Flash

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 10:04 pm
by Lunkhead
I just got caught up on The Flash, and wow, they really upped the stakes, which felt like a much needed move for this show to try to keep the intensity level on par with Arrow. I was just going to watch the second-most recent episode, but because of how it ended I had to watch the most recent one too. I bet it's going to be more exciting from here to the end of the season.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 8:09 am
by jb
I broke up with The Flash a few months ago, because every episode seemed the same. I got tired of the Iris star-crossed thing, and tired of the guy in the wheelchair who was so obviously who I thought he was, and so tired of the tortured-meta-human thing and then the evil-meta-human-that-we-just-imprison-forever-in-an-isolation-cell thing, and the Dad thing with the crying all the time, and the foster-Dad thing with the worrying and don't-put-my-daughter-at-risk thing.

It was just booooring. Way too CW for my taste, and I had high hopes they were going to break the pattern.

Doesn't help that I grew up with the comic so when they intro a new character I'm like "yep, gonna die" or "yep, leader of the bad guys" or "yep, might see him come back as a good guy" and "yep, they get together eventually".

So it becomes kind of like a waiting game for things that you know are going to happen. Very similar to the most recent Amazing Spider-Man movies when they brought in Gwen Stacy as the love interest. How's THAT gonna end up, do you think, comic fans? You see that character and then have to sit on your mouth for a year every time it comes up so you don't spoiler the whole thing for people who haven't read the comics.

Bah. Phooey.

JB

Re: The Flash

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 8:24 am
by JonPorobil
I finally got caught up again. Here come the spoilers (through the end of Season 1)!

So... basically Barry decides that it's okay to let a time-traveling sociopath to kill his mother, and justifies it because being The Flash is awesome? The show talked around this issue a bit, but it struck me as incredibly selfish: Given the opportunity to 1.) save his mother's life, and 2.) keep his father from languishing in prison for life, he chooses not to because he's "had a great life." (And, I guess, because he got a gesture from an alternate-timeline version of himself. WTF?)

Also bothersome, though somewhat less so: Wells/Eobard/Reverse Flash taunts Eddie for "not getting the girl" (meaning Iris), but Eddie is Eobard's great-great-great-great-grandfather, which means that Eddie presumably would have met someone to have at least one child about. I can see why he'd be heartbroken in the moment about that someone not being Iris, but it's weird that RF uses that "you're such a loser, you don't even get the girl" argument. In the grand scheme of things, he clearly wound up with someone.

I hope Season 2 deals with the paradoxical aspects of Eobard never existing, such as how the particle accelerator came into being, and whether (the real) Harrison Wells survives. With the second spinoff in the works, I'm guessing they're going to be spending a lot of energy getting their hands dirty with time travel nonsense. I'm not terribly excited about that, but this season earned at least a little trust from me.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 9:23 am
by jb
We watched the last episode, which was done well but completely ridiculous. I mean, I'm sitting there going "yep, he fixes it, show's over".

Problem with some of these shows is that they continually use mortal peril of regular characters as the motivating factor. Is Lois Lane going to die? Come on. Is Flash going to save his mother and delete history so he never becomes the Flash? Come on.

(I kind of liked the Grodd episode though. But of course next week they don't mention him at all.)

It was interesting that they showed Wells/Thane eating fast food. As if somebody posted a blog about "what do people in this makeshift prison eat? where do they poop?" and the show felt it had to respond...

The whole private prison thing on the Flash show is, not unlike our regular prison system in many ways, completely unethical and offensive in every way and it disturbs me to watch the show just because of that aspect of it.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 6:04 am
by JonPorobil
jb wrote:We watched the last episode, which was done well but completely ridiculous. I mean, I'm sitting there going "yep, he fixes it, show's over".

Problem with some of these shows is that they continually use mortal peril of regular characters as the motivating factor. Is Lois Lane going to die? Come on. Is Flash going to save his mother and delete history so he never becomes the Flash? Come on.
I have a higher tolerance than you do for the "soap opera" elements, but all your criticisms are pretty much right. The question isn't so much "Is the hero going to die?" because we know darn well he won't (except in that one episode of Arrow, kinda); it's more about "How is he going to save the day this time?" And with The Flash, you can pretty much bet the answer will be "By running really fast."
(I kind of liked the Grodd episode though. But of course next week they don't mention him at all.)
I agree, the Grodd episode was the high water mark for the whole season. Clancy Brown was scary acting "possessed," the sewer was dark and scary, Jesse Martin did a great job of letting go of his take-charge attitude by being scared to the point of tears, and Grodd got away, so I'm guessing we'll be seeing more of him in Season 2. Oh, and it's the episode where Iris finds out that everyone's been lying to her, and rightly takes them to task for keeping vital information away in the name of "protecting" her.
It was interesting that they showed Wells/Thane eating fast food. As if somebody posted a blog about "what do people in this makeshift prison eat? where do they poop?" and the show felt it had to respond...

The whole private prison thing on the Flash show is, not unlike our regular prison system in many ways, completely unethical and offensive in every way and it disturbs me to watch the show just because of that aspect of it.
That scene threw me off. At the beginning he says "Oh, no Big Belly Burger?" And then later they come back and he's licking his fingers, with a bag of fries and a soft drink in his hand. I wasn't sure if the implication was that he'd briefly escaped, or that they gave him the food he wanted in exchange for his help, or if that's just what they've been feeding these prisoners all season. Eww.

The hand-waving in these shows regarding how they treat criminals is unsustainable, I think. They sort of justify it because of how extraordinary a threat metahumans present, but the more of them there are, the less "extraordinary" the concept is and the more imperative it becomes to create a legal infrastructure around them. I'd be interested in seeing one of the CW/DC shows explore that dynamic, kind of like how the Marvel comics did ages ago and the Marvel movies will be getting to shortly. I doubt it'll happen, so we'll go back to enjoying all the action and spectacle while pretending this isn't a show about indefinite detention without due process, or that this version of Green Arrow doesn't torture people with startling regularity.

I guess it all depends on the execution. A good episode makes you forget all that stuff above. If they pull off enough good ones, I keep watching. We'll see what happens.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 7:44 am
by Lunkhead
I felt like the season finale was a bit weak. They spent way too much time on Barry debating with himself and others whether or not he really should go back and save his mom. RF wanted him to do it so bad that it seemed so obviously the wrong thing to do, considering that RF had been manipulating them to do his bidding all along. I guess it was all about him getting a chance for some closure around his mom's death, and I thought that scene between him and his mom was decent. But then things went pretty sideways. How come Eddie killing himself erased RF from history but nothing else changed...?? Wouldn't that have meant no death of Barry's mom, no Barry living with Iris and Joe, particle accelerator, no Flash, etc? Then the whole runaway black hole thing, Barry runs into it, I guess they are setting up for some multiverse stuff, but that does lead to more time travel, parallel universes, etc. That seems like dubious territory for the writers for this show. Hopefully they will keep the time travel crap mostly in the new spin-off series. We'll see.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 7:52 am
by jb
YES! EXACTLY! You can't just erase PART of time.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 8:09 am
by Lunkhead
Maybe being charitable you could say that the real Harrison Wells would have gone on to make the particle accelerator and it would have blown up only this time actually by accident, but by an unbelievable coincidence the end result was everything being exactly the same...?!?!? Talk about a stretch. Urgh. Or maybe for some reason the ripple effect of Eddie's actions caught up to RF first but would have changed everything else shortly thereafter if not for the black hole? I don't know, it's a mess. Dear writers who are not that great, please stop touching time travel, you just get burned by it.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 9:08 am
by jb
Lunkhead wrote:Dear writers who are not that great, please stop touching time travel, you just get burned by it.
But that would mean not working on a property based on DC's "The Flash", because dude goes back in time at the drop of a hat. And then the multi-verse shit cranks up... oosh.

At least the tv show might have Jay Garrick showing up. I always liked that old guy. He was slower. One issue with the Flash for me is that he can move at the speed of light, in the comics, which is kind of an infinite power. Infinite powers are boring because there's no tension.

They do manage that ok on this TV show, by having him only be able to run at like Mach 3 or whatever it was for the season finale. But the faster you go, the more time for everybody else seems to be slower, and the more time you have to figure out a problem.

That was one of the really great things about the way Quicksilver was presented in that X-Men movie. Time slowed down and he made minute adjustments to the whole picture of the room, and then we saw in one fell swoop what the results were. It was the best scene in the whole thing.

It's possible I think about this stuff a lot.

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 10:15 am
by Lunkhead
My plea to poor writers extends to basically all comic book writers as well, unfortunately. If I were the Flash I would go back in time and try to prevent the DC writers from introducing it into the Flash's world in the first place. :P

Re: The Flash

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2015 11:13 am
by jb
jb wrote:That was one of the really great things about the way Quicksilver was presented in that X-Men movie. Time slowed down and he made minute adjustments to the whole picture of the room, and then we saw in one fell swoop what the results were. It was the best scene in the whole thing.
HOWEVER, it wasn't realistic either-- I mean, if you're going to accept the "can run fast" premise. What was more realistic, in one very specific way but basically no others (which is OK since the movie was trying to be ridiculous) was this moment in Baron Munchausen (skip to :55):
It's possible I think about this stuff a lot.
See?