Friday, March 9, 2018

The Flash: “Enter Flashtime”

Speedster Party!
This week’s Flash is evidence that not every show needs or should have season-long fights against a single, overarching villain.


There was no DeVoe in this episode of the Flash. Just a tense, fairly gripping, hour of TV where The Flash, moving at superspeed for almost the full hour, has to figure out how to defuse a nuclear bomb that’s already started to explode. It’s not part of The Thinker’s plot, it’s just a thing that also happens, and it was such a relief. I spent the whole hour dreading it being tied in to the main storyline, and was so happy when it wasn’t.

And I think this is a structure that suits The Flash best. Have three to five episode arcs throughout the season, broken up by standalone episodes like this, and use those to carry the character and relationship developments forward. There was a time, 20 or so years ago, when the idea of even connecting more than two episodes of an hourlong drama was some soap opera bullshit. Now everything is 13 to 22 episode stories, and just like one size didn’t fit all before, it doesn’t fit all now. The Flash should move faster.

Anyway, they stopped the bomb. Yay! And Jessie got shuffled off to yet another Earth so they don’t have to keep paying her.

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