I Watch TV: The Flash

The Flash

The last season ended on a cliffhanger, production closed down thanks to coronavirus. So it restarts with Team Flash down but not out; Barry slowly losing the dying speedforce and trying to resurrect it, while his wife Iris is trapped in a mirror dimension.

They manage to restart the speedforce (the secret is love, Barry was the Paragon of Love in Crisis On Infinite Earths), which causes other problems; they accidentally create three other forces, each of which has an avatar. The speedforce, incarnated as Nora, Barry’s mum, insists that the others be destroyed. The actual answer is, of course, love, or possibly family.

Having dealt with this there’s a shakeup in the team with Cisco Ramon, the technical expert, leaving to work with ARGUS, the super-spy agency. This is poor timing as Godspeed, yet another evil speedster, returns, and in fact does so as a series of drones and/or clones, in two groups that start fighting each other, causing enormous damage. He’s also messing with time travel, at the same time as Iris seems to be pregnant, leading to two of Barry and Iris’s speedster children coming back in time in an increasingly confusing finale. SPOILERS: The answer is not love or family.

There’s a lack of crossovers due to covid, which is sad as this is a unique selling point of these shows (John Diggle, formerly of Arrow makes an appearance). There’s a certain amount of characters coming in and then leaving, and the new ones are struggling to make themselves known with the strong focus on Barry and Iris and their relationship. There’s a sub-plot with Joe West, police chief, having a metahuman-hunter placed in charge of him, and then hunting down Killer Frost with the plan to make her a precedent for depowering metas against their will legally, then the two of them teaming up to uncover her backstory. In all it feels a bit awkward, failing to balance multi-episode plotlines with character arcs and individual episode stories. Still, there are a few good ones, my favourites being when they do a bit of time travel.

Watch This: Despite all the problems it still has charm, and heart and pace
Don’t Watch This: Not a good jumping on point