The Flash began life as the first spin-off series from Arrow—but it ended as the last bastion of the Arrowverse. When we said goodbye to Barry Allen/The Flash (Grant Gustin) and Team Flash, we also bid adieu to an entire franchise. The Arrowverse lasted for a little over a decade, spawned five other television shows, two web series, and crossed over with almost every single DC Comics live-action property known to exist. The final season of The Flash carried the weight of concluding a decade-long love affair with the renaissance of superhero television. It was quite the burden, and unfortunately, “The Final Run” buckled under the pressure.
The final season of The Flash broke my heart. It wasn’t good; a couple of episodes shone through, as did several of the returning guest stars, but as a whole, “The Final Run” was a disjointed, incoherent mess. The showrunners chose to tell the story of the final, curtailed 13-episode season, as chapters, broken up with different storylines and villains.
To kick things off, the season began with the wonderful “Wednesday Ever After,” an episode about Barry and Iris West-Allen (Candice Patton) stuck in a time loop as they try to communicate what they want from their marriage and future. But then we segued into Team Flash Barry and a band of reformed Rogues fighting Red Death. Seeing Javicia Leslie back in the Arrowverse, albeit not as her heroic Ryan Wilder/Batwoman, but as a truly unhinged and evil doppelganger was cool. Oh, but wait, she’s defeated in four episodes, and Barry and Iris are off on holiday. No, they’re back, and something creepy is happening in S.T.A.R. Labs. There’s more creepiness with Nia Nal/Dreamer’s (Nicole Maines) latest dreams, and even more with Barry’s birthday, and then we’re in “A New World” following the resurrected Eddie Thawne (Rick Cosnett). I got whiplash watching this season.
The audience couldn’t get settled, and neither could the writing, so by the time the finale came along, the whole thing was a whirlwind of wrapping up “A New World,” squeezing in a climactic battle and concluding all the characters’ arcs. And then it was over. The finale was the nadir of the season–the effects were dodgy, the editing was rushed, and the battle between Team Flash and Eddie/Cobalt Blue and his team of supervillain speedsters was too easily won. All of Team Flash had levelled up but we never saw them gain their XP points during the season, so they all came across as deus ex machinas (except for Jon Cor’s Mark Blaine/Chillblaine who just stood about in the final battle). I don’t think it helped that Rick Cosnett was such an effective scene-stealer with his despair and anger in “A New World” that it made me wish we’d seen more of him this season. I was more emotional over the end of Arrow, and I’d long stopped enjoying that show. I’ve always welcomed The Flash into my home, and yet, the finale left me empty. “The Final Run” was an underwhelming send-off for the characters, and for the fans. But, really, should I have been surprised?
The Flash has always been enjoyable, but it stopped being cohesive quite a while ago. Season one remains its strongest (that in itself says a lot)—Barry was finding his feet as a hero and he was up against his greatest comic book nemesis, Eobard Thawne/Harrison Wells/Reverse-Flash, played with sinister charm by Tom Cavanagh. No other villain on the show has quite grasped the charisma and scene-stealing prowess of Cavanagh as OG-Wells. He kept coming back as a different Wells for several seasons, but none of those characters had the same appeal. Subsequent appearances of Eobard also didn’t capture the same intensity as the first season. Thawne and Barry’s battle was personal—Thawne had killed Barry’s mother and framed his father—and the show couldn’t quite find the same emotional heft with any of Barry’s subsequent villains.
Granted, the first season fell into the silly trope where all the men around Barry were told of his secret identity as the Flash, but the love of his life, Iris, had to be “protected” from this. Thankfully the show didn’t stick to that illogical idea for long, and a few seasons later Iris became co-leader to Team Flash.
The first several seasons had one main villain that the team had to defeat, as well as episodic baddies to break the monotony. This uniform storytelling really worked, and it’s what we needed in season nine. The show regularly dipped into the pool of the Flash’s rogues, sometimes even reaching into other DC stories, but always explored the vast canon of comics characters.
Teddy Sears was the second season’s villain. The showrunners cleverly introduced him as Jay Garrick, the original Flash from the comics before revealing his true identity as Hunter Zolomon, the supervillain known as Zoom. The twist was exhilarating. Sears was the right kind of kindly and charming who you could believe was a hero desperate to return to Earth-2, but he also convincingly played unhinged scary. In the comics, Zoom is the arch-nemesis of Kid Flash, but Wally West (Keiynan Lonsdale) didn’t make an appearance till partway through season two, and didn’t become a superhero till the following season. The lost opportunities with Wally are endless, but let’s get through a few more villains first.
I didn’t find Savitar (Tobin Bell) a very compelling villain—you don’t start off a season with “Flashpoint,” and then expect people to be invested in a CGI villain storyline that turns the leading lady into a damsel in distress. But the following season brought Clifford DeVoe/Thinker (Neil Sandilands) into the fray, and he upped the stakes. We finally had a villain who wasn’t a speedster, and he used his intelligence to outwit Team Flash at every turn. He was truly frightening.
After DeVoe, it was difficult to find the rest of the villains that interesting. It also didn’t help that from season five onwards, the show kept bringing Reverse-Flash back, as a villain, an ally, a deus ex machina—the embodiment of hate tamed by Barry who believes in love. Eobard, either played by Matt Letscher or Cavanagh, was like a bad rash who Team Flash could never get rid of, and one whom the showrunners didn’t want to get rid of. I don’t think it helps that the ominous Cicada, villain of season five and the person who was supposedly behind the Flash’s future disappearance, was played by an out-of-his-depth Chris Klein. I know Klein as a comedy actor, but he was surprisingly moving in the emotional scenes in The Flash. As a villain though… he really tried, but that was a poor casting choice.
After a series of white guy villains, The Flash gender-swapped Mirror Master, bringing in Efrat Dor to play Eva McCulloch as well as Sendhil Ramamurthy as the villain Bloodwork; I also love that August Heart/Godspeed was played by Karan Oberoi—how many genre properties have not one but two South Asian origin characters in prominent recurring roles even today?
The villains gave the story impetus, but The Flash bucked the trend of action heroes winning the day with a punch. He often appealed to the humanity of his rivals to save the day, which is the only reason Barry survived endless battles with Gorilla Grodd. Barry wasn’t always the strongest, but he believed in the best of everybody. Barry Allen being christened the Paragon of Love in the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event was signposted from season one.
It was hard to hate Barry on the show, especially since Grant Gustin was born to play the Flash. He captured the pathos of the character, but brought so much energy, positivity and heart to the character. He wasn’t a macho dude who thought he should fix his problems with a fight. Gustin’s performance was effortless throughout the nine seasons; he was compelling and emotive from the start. With a show like this, where the hero is fighting anything and everyone from a walking shark to his wife’s evil doppelganger, if the actors don’t commit, it’s a non-starter. Grant Gustin didn’t just commit; he was the Flash. This guy acted his heart out for all nine seasons.
We’re getting used to our superhero landscape being more representative of the world we live in, but ten years ago, mainstream superhero fare was far behind in terms of diverse casting choices for on-screen, especially live-action, properties. But The Flash made a splash with Candice Patton’s casting. Iris West is a white woman in the comics, but the showrunners selected a Black actor to play the role. Patton has had little peace since, and the studio hasn’t protected her from the racist vitriol she’s had to face for a decade. Considering nothing about Iris’s race affects her characterization, in the comics or on the show, the hate towards her is unfathomable, but many Black women were unsurprised, because racism and misogynoir are something that Black women are made to contend with from all communities, including their own. Noticeably, despite the entire West family on the show being cast with Black actors (Jesse L. Martin as Iris’s father Joe West, and Keiynan Lonsdale as her brother Wally), Patton was the only one that came under constant fire. I don’t know how she stuck it out for nine seasons, but Patton persevered. And because of it, Iris is being portrayed as a Black woman across media—from the DC Extended Universe films, animation, and in some comic runs. She’s made a huge impact, and I credit her as the reason we got another incredible Black actor starring in a superhero show: Anna Diop on Titans. But will the cruelty towards Black actors, especially Black women, playing comic book characters initially conceived as white, ever end?
Patton was quietly effective as Barry’s “lightning rod.” I found her stolid determination fascinating; Iris is restrained and balanced, which is the opposite of Barry who is very open with his emotions. But we can’t escape the fact that Patton was never given the kind of material she deserved. I think the only time she got anything meaty to work on was during the latter part of season seven when the mirror version of Iris was being villainous. Patton disappeared for large parts of season eight—partly because she needed time off, but it meant Iris just wasn’t part of the story. She often didn’t feel like a leading lady at all. It doesn’t help that in the last four episodes of the show, Iris is relegated to being in labour in a hospital, while everyone else is being a hero. I hope Patton goes on to do greater things now that the show is over.
Where Iris West is, Wally West must soon follow. But if you got excited that Kid Flash was part of the show, you were set up for disappointment. The show never figured out how to handle more than one superhero, especially not another speedster, and Wally suffered for it. Lonsdale didn’t get enough screen time, had no character arcs, and was stuck with a romantic storyline that went nowhere. He exited the show after a little over two seasons. I think the writers tried to address how they failed Wally in the season nine episode “It’s My Party And I’ll Die If I Want To” when Wally confronts Barry about how Barry was living Wally’s life—he had two fathers, while Wally had nobody—and Barry thinks he’s the only one that matters. Barry doesn’t, but the writers sure seem to believe that. Lonsdale was such a joy to watch as Wally (especially when he appeared on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), and I’m still gutted we didn’t get to see him as a second main character on the show.
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And I think that’s where The Flash failed the most. The showrunners insisted on making Barry “The One Main Character.” Everyone else was simply set dressing. Carlos Valdes as Cisco Ramon is a massive favourite among fans because he was hilarious and honestly the best (except when it came to love interests, blame the writing in the early seasons), but he steadily had less and less to do on the show, and got less screen time. And then Valdes left and wasn’t even available for the final season. Danielle Panabaker is the only other actor to have as many on-screen appearances as Gustin and Patton, but she’s had an iffy run. The writers didn’t know what to do with a doctor character on a superhero team, so Panabaker’s character Caitlyn cycled through several romances in the first few seasons. Her characterization got so much better once the writers realized that her one true love was her late husband Ronnie Raymond (Robbie Amell) and the only love story she needed to explore was one of sisterly love with Frost. I am still at a loss why we ended up with Panabaker playing a new version of her character, Khione, in the final season, instead of her overcoming her grief for Frost.
The Flash wanted to be a team show, but it was named after a solo hero, so it was a constant tug-of-war over which way it would go. It was the team that usually got left behind. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but Team Flash spent a lot of time being sidelined on the show, especially in the last season. It’s beyond frustrating that the majority of characters who got the spotlight on the show were men, and this is particularly obvious in “The Final Run.”
We can’t not talk about the Ralph Dibny of it all. Ralph is Barry’s best friend in the comics—he was even his best man at Barry’s wedding. Ralph wasn’t introduced till the fourth season of the show and he quickly became part of Team Flash. He essentially took over the role of team funny man, the role that edged out Valdes’ Cisco. This was also the time when the show suddenly started fat-shaming people: Ralph on the show started off portly but shapeshifted himself to have a trimmer body, and somehow that made his, and the team’s, fat-shaming okay? The character was swiftly written off the show when actor Hartley Sawyer’s old tweets resurfaced, and Sawyer was subsequently fired. I can’t say I really missed Dibny, but a lot of folks had fallen in love with Natalie Dreyfuss’ Sue Dearbon, who marries Dibny in the comics, and Sawyer’s exit basically scuppered plans for Dreyfuss to have a larger role on the show. She had brief forays in season seven and eight, but it’s unfortunate the character faded away.
There was certainly a shift away from Barry carrying every single episode from season five onwards. Season five is my favourite, not because it’s the best but because The Flash introduced its best character in that period, Jessica Parker Kennedy’s Nora West-Allen/XS. I may be in the minority here, but I love Nora. Kennedy was a breath of fresh air, an injection of energy, a new life for the show. She was Team Flash’s first almost season-long female superhero, which was a much-needed change of pace (pun intended) on the show. Nora popped up in season four before her official introduction in “Nora”—I haven’t seen that kind of foreshadowing on other Arrowverse fare, so kudos to the showrunners and writers for pulling that off.
Adding Nora to Team Flash gave Gustin some time off, and it took the spotlight off the central white dude for a bit. Nora’s spotlight episode “Cause and XS” was one of the earliest times I noticed that Gustin was off-screen for most of an episode. It’s also one of the best (the best?) time-loop episodes in the franchise. They should have found a way to keep Nora on the show; she was erased from the timeline at the end of the season. The new Nora, sister of Bart Allen (Jordan Fisher) was less confident and played second fiddle to Bart. Like Cavanaugh in season one, Kennedy couldn’t capture the magic of her original run, but it was down to the characterization, not her performance. We got a glimmer of OG-Nora in season nine, though, so that was one positive in the final season.
The show isn’t as bad as its final season—I, and anyone interested in The Flash, can go back and rewatch the first five. “The Final Run” isn’t the show’s legacy. The Flash has made waves with its inclusivity, with its positive representations of masculinity through Barry, Eddie (pre-resurrection), and Joe West It raised the bar for performances in genre properties, and the show had gorgeous comic-accurate supersuits (Godseed’s suit, anyone?).
But I am frustrated that The Flash ended on such a low because this show means so much to so many people. The Flash got made because people loved Gustin when he appeared in a two-episode backdoor pilot on Arrow. It was part of the rise of superhero TV and it expanded representation at a time when mainstream superhero properties, like Smallville and the Marvel franchise, didn’t try all that hard. The Flash was campy, silly, funny, while also exploring raw grief and loss. This show effectively created the Arrowverse and gave us characters like Martin Stein/Firestorm (Victor Garber), Leonard Snart/Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller), Mick Rory/Heatwave (Dominic Purcell), all three of whom formed a core part of the original Legends of Tomorrow. We invested nine years in The Flash, and we had fun for a lot of it. Us viewers deserved better with the final season. The characters deserved better. The people making the show, behind the scenes or not, deserved better. In the words of Nora West-Allen, the last season should have been shway. It wasn’t, and now I wish I could put some The Flash-physics to the test and turn back time to fall in love with The Flash again.
Monita Mohan champions diversity, inclusivity, and representation through her writing at Collider.com, Women Write About Comics, HuffPost, Bam Smack Pow, and Show Snob.
Trying to do a rewatch of the full Arrowverse on streaming is a logistical nightmare. Episode jump between shows in order of release date? Watch one show until you hit a crossover episode, stop, watch the next show until it reaches the same point?
I largely blame Eric Wallace, who ran the show after Crisis. It became a pale reflection of its earlier seasons and had very little sense of direction. I still don’t understand why they fought so hard to bring back Gustin for one last season and then sidelined him repeatedly.
I think the end of the Arrowverse is probably indicative of the slow winding-down of the era of superhero dominance in pop culture. I confess, apart from Supergirl, I only followed it intermittently after the first few seasons, but what I loved about it was that it was utterly unashamed of its comic book origins. Grodd, for example: he’s a gorilla. Of course he’s a gorilla, what else would he be? But I just know that, if the character had appeared ten years earlier on Smallville, he would have just been some blandsome hunk with golden contact lenses or the like. I hope that we’ll be able to retain that energy going forwards.
“The first several seasons had one main villain that the team had to defeat, as well as episodic baddies to break the monotony. This uniform storytelling really worked, and it’s what we needed in season nine.”
I’m not sure I agree. I’ve soured on the tendency to give a superhero one “big bad” arc per season. It requires the hero to keep losing over and over again until they finally eke out a win in the finale, which isn’t very heroic. The Flash has generally been better about this than, say, Superman and Lois, because it still had villain-of-the-week stories within the larger big-bad arc, so it found a good balance. But I liked the way that the latter several seasons of TF were broken down into “graphic novels,” telling 2-4 distinct story arcs per season, instead of just one year-long one. I mean, it’s damned contrived when a superhero gets a new arch-nemesis every year and needs the entire year (or at least from fall to late spring) to defeat them, then repeats the same timing the following year. I like the variety of having story arcs of different lengths.
I agree the early seasons were stronger in most respects, but I could’ve done without them doing three speedster nemeses in a row. What I wish they’d done was to commit to a whole season about the Rogues, signing the performers to season-long contracts so they could develop all the Rogues as a team over the course of the season, instead of having to do it piecemeal and have them never quite come together. There could’ve been hints of a mysterious mastermind behind the scenes, a shadowy figure controlling the Rogues, and then it would eventually turn out to be Grodd, allowing them to make him a major presence in the season without having to blow the CGI budget. They ultimately did something similar in the Thinker season, but it wasn’t quite the same.
As for Wally, he never impressed me that much, and the yellow Kid Flash costume with that weird topless cowl did not look good in live-action. I often thought a cool way to do it might’ve been to wait until Gustin was ready to leave, then bring in Wally to replace him as the new lead from then on — although it didn’t work out that way. Or, they could’ve made the show a direct sequel to the 1990 TV series, with John Wesley Shipp reprising Barry Allen and Gustin playing Wally West, taking over from him after a career of 20-plus years. (Although the way they eventually brought in the 1990 Barry as an alternate-universe doppelganger was cool, and I was moved by the way they paid him off in Crisis, though it probably meant little to people who weren’t fans of the original show.)
I wasn’t a big fan of Iris’s mirror-world storyline. It seemed to start a span where Iris was mostly cut off from Barry and the rest, even for most of the following season after she got back. I didn’t like seeing them spend so much time apart. (Also, if Iris was stuck alone in the mirror world for months, how come her hair didn’t revert to its natural texture?)
I agree that losing Ralph was a shame. Even if the actor had to be dropped, Ralph was a shapeshifter! How hard could it be to recast him? Just say he had some reason to permanently adopt a new appearance, or that he got stuck wearing another face somehow. Or just don’t address the recasting, like they did with Jon Kent on Superman and Lois.
I appreciate the final arc bringing back Eddie Thawne and giving him some closure, but I agree it was a disappointing wrap-up to the Arroweverse as a whole. I wish it had been feasible to do a final big Justice League crossover with all the surviving Arrowverse heroes.
@3/jaimebabb: “I think the end of the Arrowverse is probably indicative of the slow winding-down of the era of superhero dominance in pop culture.”
I don’t think it has anything to do with that. The Arrowverse shows always got relatively low ratings, but The CW kept them on because it was profitable to sell them to Netflix. The reason for the cancellations is the sale of Warner Bros. to Discovery and the retooling around a more profit-driven mentality. The CW isn’t just dropping its superhero shows, but most of its scripted dramas. The Arrowverse is a casualty of that, not of any shift in pop culture.
Since I didn’t really have anyplace to complain about it at the time:
In the episode with Iris and Dreamer, the threat that gives a time limit is that both of the heroines were running increasing fevers that would eventually make their bodies break down.
So they’re in the medlab. And there are two members of the team who can project cold. Are those two members in the medlab, trying to do what they can for Dreamer and Iris? No, they’re out clubbing. Say what?
First off, at least we can all agree this final season sucked.
Secondly, straight out the gate, since it sounds like you’re biased towards the showrunner’s choices on representation, I’m expecting a moderator to silence me.
No, seeing Ryan Wilder’s evil doppleganger was NOT cool. Many of us dropped Batwoman after season 1 because of the cringe, politically-driven decision to go with an original character, not from the comic books. Plenty of us would’ve been fine with a race-swapped Batgirl like Gotham Knights did with Carrie Kelley. The idea that BLM and possibly Hartley’s firing drove the Batwoman team to make up some character with the goofy name of Ryan Wilder is what’s cringe.
Anyways, inter-show crossovers ended with Crisis and as such each show ending before Flash focused on wrapping itself up instead of forcing fans to accept a character they chose not to acknowledge. But Eric Wallace, without our consent, forced us non-neo Batwoman fans to watch an off-brand Red Death and an off-brand Batwoman.
On top of Cecile and Allegra being pushed when their characters had already been ruined in season 8. Zoom, Thawne and Godspeed got butchered for them.
Speaking of being representative, and tying into Wally’s storyline, is the matter of Jesse Quick, regardless of whether Violett was willing to return to the role. Wally got his story wrapped up, but he didn’t get a happy ending necessarily as it was clear Eric hated Jesse. As such, we only got that one mention of her after three seasons that went nowhere, and he brought in her off-brand successor, Jess Chambers, instead of giving Jesse Quick a proper sendoff. These two instances are the few times the show failed with representation because they tried too hard due to Eric’s personal extreme political enthusiasm towards black pride and queer pride. I don’t know why he had to get so greedy either, we got a final sendoff for Jefferson Pierce in season 8, which was cool and something everyone loved, not something that just appealed to a small group of people.
Other than that, representation has always been the show’s strong point. The West family and scenery-chewing villains Bloodwork and Goldface are the best examples of this.
Expanding on Iris, I think most of the hate is really more so towards the character’s writing. Candice never really got to perform after season 2, until this final season. Season 2 is basically where the character peaked, and then the writers just threw that away with Flashpoint. From then on, she felt like a mirror copy (ironically before season 6) up until the end of season 8, where she felt like a real character in season 9 and not the caricature that spewed out iconically cringe moments in season 4 and 5 or just randomly kept falling into life-threatening situations. That’s why a lot of us hated Iris from season 4 onwards.
It is funny you include the Hartley tidbit and mention you didn’t feel much about Ralph leaving, though. Candice had past tweets that were much worse, encouraging suicide, being transphobic, and racist towards Thai people. Of course she kept her job, because there was racism against her, as well as the publicist and CW as a whole covering up for her. In addition, the showrunner, and Skai Jackson, who got Hartley fired, are both black, hence this bias meant Candice being on the show was always a safe bet. It’s unfair Hartley got fired and wasn’t brought back after Candice’s situation, which occurred a year later than his
As for season 5, it’s interesting that you liked original Nora West-Allen, but also not so much, because by comparison Ryan’s Red Death made her look good. But season 5 was essentially filler on Barry’s front, Nora’s death doesn’t stick and he doesn’t improve massively, so it mainly progressed Ralph and Cisco’s characters.
Stephen Amell’s return as Oliver Queen was the only flash of gold in a plot sea of muck. Not even Grant Gustin’s charm could save this final season. Gustin catching Covid at the end of filming didn’t help either.
SUPERMAN AND LOIS divorced itself from the Arrowverse, but it’s proving to be the best and most consistent superhero show on the CW. I hope it survives the slaughter at the CW.
@7/MByerly: It was announced yesterday that Superman & Lois has been renewed for a fourth season, but it will be only 10 episodes and will reduce the size of the regular cast for budget reasons. Meanwhile, the only other DC show on the network, Gotham Knights, has been cancelled after one season. Which is a shame, since I find it more engaging than it has any business being.
As for S&L being consistent, I’ve found it just the opposite. Season 1 was reasonably good, season 3 is very good, but I found season 2 an unpleasant, gratuitously dark mess with an uninteresting main villain. And the juxtaposition of the gritty, serious tone with the Silver Age ludicrousness of the cube-shaped Bizarro World was jarring. (Not to mention other bits of nonsense like Clark being able to survive the vacuum of space and the lethal heat of the Sun while his powers were gone.)
It’s sorry of not surprising to me to hear this. I’d had issues with some of the writing becoming a bit lackluster for a while (one thing I found particularly annoying is they could never figure out how fast he is; can he deliver hundreds of wedding invitations across the city [and perhaps out of town] in less than a second, or can a bad guy anticipate where he’ll be and trip him up? If he can spend what to him is all day in flash time and a nuclear explosion only expands a few feet, if he can carry a man much heavier than himself to China and run back in a few seconds, he should be invincible. Why would he ever come out of flash time long enough to let a villain do anything?)
Where the show absolutely lost me was in the (not-quite) post-covid season, when mirror lady suddenly decided she was good and the Speed Force became incarnate and started going HAM on the other Forces. Not only was the writing/dialogue really bad, but the actors seemed to be completely phoning it in a well. I simply couldn’t force myself to watch anymore. It was then that I gave up on pretty much all the Arrowverse. Even Batgirl, which was only in its second season. None of the shows were really holding my interest anymore, and it felt like an effort to try and spend my time on them. The one exception was Superman and Lois, which I thought was surprisingly good for a Berlanti show. Though I never did find the time to watch season 2.
It’s sorry of not surprising to me to hear this. I’d had issues with some of the writing becoming a bit lackluster for a while (one thing I found particularly annoying is they could never figure out how fast he is; can he deliver hundreds of wedding invitations across the city [and perhaps out of town] in less than a second, or can a bad guy anticipate where he’ll be and trip him up? If he can spend what to him is all day in flash time and a nuclear explosion only expands a few feet, if he can carry a man much heavier than himself to China and run back in a few seconds, he should be invincible. Why would he ever come out of flash time long enough to let a villain do anything?)
Where the show absolutely lost me was in the (not-quite) post-covid season, when mirror lady suddenly decided she was good and the Speed Force became incarnate and started going HAM on the other Forces. Not only was the writing/dialogue really bad, but the actors seemed to be completely phoning it in a well. I simply couldn’t force myself to watch anymore. It was then that I gave up on pretty much all the Arrowverse. Even Batgirl, which was only in its second season. None of the shows were really holding my interest anymore, and it felt like an effort to try and spend my time on them. The one exception was Superman and Lois, which I thought was surprisingly good for a Berlanti show. Though I never did find the time to watch season 2.
*sort of, not sorry.
I read they were expecting a full season or more than they got and had plans for like a Legends crossover. It feels like they had to cut down last minute and had to rush. And such a shame they couldn’t get the original Team Flash together one last time, but I get it.
Still, there were many characters they couldn’t seem to figure out what they wanted to do with and thus wasted the talent they had. Candice Patton especially.
I fell out the show weekly the season of the evil forces. I’ve seen it and made sure to not miss any of Tom Cavanagh. But… Yeah.
Get some rest, Flash. The Family of Strel will take it from here for however long they given.
I haven’t really watched The Flash for several years (I think starting in season 4 I only watched the crossovers), but I recently starting re-watching Arrow while doing some of my more menial work, and that show’s still incredible season 2 led me to start Flash over again. I’m only a few episodes in, but I’m remembering how delightful it was at the beginning. Jesse L. Martin’s Joe West is one of my favorite TV characters ever; he’s like if Martin’s Detective Green from Law & Order was fused with Captain Benjamin Sisko to create a super TV dad.