FLASH LEVELS UP [Why The Flash part 6 of 5]

  

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I’m not one to watch things in a timely fashion.  Family (being a father and a husband) and writing come first.  And reading, that’s ahead of watching TV and movies.  This means I am rarely “in the loop” with what’s happening.  But the launch of Daredevil on Netflix spurred me to go back and catch up on some recent Flash episodes. 

Okay, let’s backtrack.  [apologies: wordy bitch ahead]

The rush of adulation for Daredevil on Netflix, at least in my little corner of the internet, has been overwhelming.  Marvel does it again!  That hallway fight scene is the best in a decade!  I can’t wait for more!  Got the character right!  And, according to some (okay, one person), Daredevil is the best show since “The Wire.”  Yes, I heard that on a podcast I enjoy listening to.  I watched the first episode.  It took me four nights.  And I was not engaged to watch anymore after that.  Nothing against the creators—I think they did a fine job translating the grim ‘n gritty Daredevil to television, though there were some campy-feeling moments, particularly with the brooooaaaaadddd villains.  These are not nuanced characters, ala The Wire.  But it’s a comic book adaptation, we don’t need nuance.  Anyway.  I’m not here to hate on the thing.  It is well done, and it is “real.”  But it’s not what I want in my superheroes right now.  Grim ‘n gritty is fine, but remember, there are other tones and palettes available to you as a creator. 

Which brings me to the CW’s Flash. 

I watched the first four episodes and enjoyed them, but as I state above, my time is limited and I fell off that train.  [full disclosure time, if you didn’t know this, the Flash is my favorite all-time  superhero].  But I read about the Flash’s recent travails and travels through time, and that piqued my interest.  Then all of this gushing over DD, and my lack of interest in it, got me to casting my eye back across the spectrum to the Flash.  So, I dove back in with those time travel episodes:  “Out of Time” and “Rogue Time.” 

Wow!  They leveled up with these two episodes.  I’m impressed with how much of the comic book mythology the creators and the network have been willing to include in this series.  We have the rogues, with their crazy costumes and powers, a villain from the future secretly hiding in their midst, the promise (possibly) of other lesser-known superheroes like Firestorm and Vibe, and now we finally see the Flash manage to go back in time.  This is some fun stuff ß emphasis on “FUN.” 

“Out of Time”
I loved this episode.  The way things played out did not feel forced at all.  The threat of Mark Mardon [the Weather Wizard “been waitin’ to use that since week one”], the investigation into Harrison Wells at Iris’s newspaper, the devastation wreaked by Mardon, the death of Cisco at Wells’s hand, it all held my interest, and the pain suffered by Joe West and Captain Singh felt real.  Then, when we got to the end and Barry had to stop the tidal wave by running back and forth so fast that he would create a wind that would dissipate the wave’s energy and he ended up rushing through a wormhole to twenty-four hours in the past—that was pretty great.  But the best moment of the entire episode, for me, was when he revealed his heroic identity to Iris. That moment hit me right in the gut.  His line [paraphrased] “I didn’t mean for you to find out like this,” and the reaction shot as Barry quick-changed and rushed to save the city…beautiful. 

“Rogue Time”

So, now that Barry has rushed back, a day into the past, he feels he must try to head off all the destruction he knows is coming.  He throws Mark Mardon into the “prison” they’ve set up at S.T.A.R. Labs and figures all is good.  Dr. Wells warns him that time will find a way to set things right.  And he is correct.  Heat Wave and Captain Cold return, bringing along Leonard Snart’s little sister, who becomes the Golden Glider—or a replica thereof as she’s not properly named in this episode and does not come with ice skates as her counterpart did in the comics.  And things do not go well.  Barry manages to save many from the physical harm they encountered the last time he ran through this day, but he is not safe from the emotional fallout of restating his affection for Iris—who admitted her own love for him when her father’s life and the lives of all of Central City were at stake the “previous day” but did not feel similarly in this renewed day.  It’s an interesting look at the consequences of mucking with the timeline, in this reality, as well as a fix for the death of Cisco and other bits of collateral damage from the previous episode that works perfectly in this context.  Oh, and we get Captain Cold and Heat Wave with new guns, thanks to their kidnapping of Cisco, along with the Golden Glider’s gun as well.  And the Rogues Gallery gets named.  Yeah, I’m geeking out.  But this show is so damn fun. 

The difference between Flash and Daredevil comes down to the tone of the show, really.  And right now, I’m looking for something other than what has become the default for many, many superhero comics of the past couple decades.  I love how bright this show is, how ebullient a character Barry Allen is.  There are still serious things happening, but it’s all coated with the wonder and excitement of a superhero comic book.  And that, to me, makes all the difference in the world.

THE FLASH TV series – an intriguing hypothesis

Is Dr. Wells actually Barry Allen AND Professor Zoom?

Over at Bleeding Cool, Mark Bristow posits a theory about a deeper connection between the Flash’s alter-ego and his mentor, Dr. Harrison Wells, who has not only taken Barry Allen under his wing to guide him through this trying time of discovery but also gone to great lengths to keep Barry’s life and the evolution of the Flash on track – lengths as far as killing Simon Stagg, so that his scientific rival could do nothing to alter Barry’s trajectory. 

Bristow puts forth the idea that Dr. Wells is actually a future iteration of Barry, who got caught in the past when he traveled back in time to save his mother from Professor Zoom (the more colloquial moniker of the Flash’s arch nemesis, Reverse Flash).  For how Bristow came to this conclusion, I offer a link to his piece.  Go read it, if you haven’t already, then come back here for an expansion on what he puts forth. 

Back?   Okay. 

Bristow’s argument is sound – which doesn’t mean I think this is how it will play out, but I would appreciate very much having this be a narrative thread the creators follow.  And with the opening episode, they have shown a willingness to embrace time travel and one of the core events of DC Comics mythology of three decades past – Crisis on Infinite Earths – with the reveal of the 2024 newspaper in the pilot’s coda. 

He also offers that the expectation Dr. Wells may become Professor Zoom is merely a red herring, meant to put us off the idea that Wells may be an older Barry Allen.  Proof for that is the fact that the character of Eddy Thawne is named after the Reverse-Flash from the comic universe.  With Leonard Snart (Captain Cold in the show and comics), Clyde Mardon (the “original” Weather Wizard in the show and the comics), and Barry himself, we have characters plucked directly from the comics and transposed into the television series, which lends credence to this idea that Thawne will become Professor Zoom. 

But, what if that is a double-feint, and Thawne will merely be a police detective throughout?  It could happen.  Simon Stagg (integral in the creation of Metamorpho in the comics, now dead in the series) and Iris West (who’s still a love interest, if unrequited, of Barry in the series, but far from the same character in the comic) also prove that characters can change drastically in their transition to the small screen.  Why couldn’t Thawne also fall in this group?  That would lead us back to the idea that Dr. Wells will become Professor Zoom…but could still be a future-Barry Allen.

-   We already know he has access to future facts and is most likely from the future, with the revelation aforementioned Central City newspaper from 2024. 

-  With the killing of Simon Stagg, Dr. Wells has revealed a penchant for taking extreme measures to protect Barry and his evolution as the Flash

-  Extrapolating from that, everything Dr. Wells does is working toward this desire to see that Barry Allen becomes the Flash.  It is history to him (as shown with that 2024 newspaper), but apparently not a foregone conclusion, and he does not want anything to alter Barry’s destiny.  Judging by the ease with which Wells killed Stagg, one might reasonably say it is an obsession.  Mining deeper into that idea, one could also argue that Wells judges every detail of his life (if we go with the theory that Wells is a future-Barry) as important to achieving this destiny, even the killing of his mother by mysterious lightning while a child. 

-  Dr. Wells – or Barry Allen – could be so obsessed with the need to become the Flash (his monitoring of Barry the night of the accident at S.T.A.R. Labs strongly intimates that Wells purposefully set the events in motion that would lead to the accident and create the Flash) that he might become Professor Zoom in order to achieve this, going so far as to race back in time to kill his own mother in order to launch his younger self on this path toward becoming a metahuman. 

All of this time-travel theory can bend one’s brain, and if you think about it for too long theories and suppositions collapse under their own weight.  Time travel is an age-old science fiction trope.  With the paradoxes that come from such a narrative thrust, one must often choose between setting down hard and fast rules and explain it as precisely as possible within the story or just going all-in with the craziness of it all and allowing for the audience to be smart enough to follow along, and if the stories and characters are compelling enough, you won’t lose them.  In this instance, if the writers of The Flash are moving toward something of this nature, I hope they would choose the latter tactic and just barrel headlong into the speed force and the insanity that surrounds time travel as a narrative device.  It would go along with the brighter, more fun approach to this show and could make for some interesting plot twists and storylines.