After a nearly three-month layoff,The Flashreturned to The CW on Wednesday night with what was basically the show’s second Season Premiere. Season 8, Episode 6 titled “Impulsive Excessive Disorder” could have been a way for the superhero show to announce it was going to get back on track after a very uneven first five episodes that were billed as a kind ofminiseries forThe Flash. However, instead of hitting the reset button and getting back to what has won fans over to the network’s longest-running Arrowverse show, it seems like the writers decided they needed to double down on what has been a very uneven run so far.
One of the things that madeThe Flashone of the best superhero shows on television when it got its start is that it followed a pretty simple formula. The Flash and his small band of friends would fight a “baddie of the week” and they usually would also be engaging in a “season long villain” that was actually quite a bit tougher to beat. Certainly, along the way, there were the romances and the friends having deep conversations about how they felt about a number of different issues, but those sorts of things usually took a back seat. That formula has been messed with. Perhaps because so many of themain cast ofThe Flashare looking to take an off-ramp, this season has focused more attention on the show’s background characters. In “Impulsive Excessive Disorder” two background characters took center stage for basically the entirety of the episode.
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The Flash Without The Flash?
This episode ofThe Flashactually changed up the formula so much that the titular character barely made an appearance. Instead, the show focused on Nora and Bart, Barry Allen and Iris West-Allen’s grown children from the future. It turns out that something that happened during the final episode of the first half of the season that changed their past and the regular gang’s present. So Bart and Nora decided they needed to travel back in time in order to fix it.
Hijinks ensue because messing with time is a very bad thing to do. Of course, for a show that constantly preaches about how messing with time is a bad thing, it has its characters mess with time quite a bit. It’s also a little odd how almost everyone inThe Flashthese days is able to travel in time without much effort. That’s also something that has changed from the beginning of the series, where Barry Allen had to work quite hard to get up the speed to do it. Now it’s almost as if its something that can be done if someone wants to go back and eat at their favorite restaurant that has since closed. More than the ease in which people are able to time travel, it’s more than a little annoying to hear the characters constantly preach to each other about how time travel is bad, 30 seconds before they time travel.
Of course, more annoying than the constant warnings abouttime travel inThe Flashwere Nora and Bart themselves. There is a reason why both characters have been in the background up until the latest episode. Neither are particularly interesting on their own and the idea that they needed an episode all their own to try and repair what happened to their family in the past seemed a wasted on. That a rather large portion of the episode seemed to want to focus on both brother and sister have a crisis of confidence was an odd divergence as well.
It is of course possible that the series is grooming one or both of them to take center stage when Barry Allen fades into the background as the series apparently begins to wrap up. The fact of the matter is that the audience doesn’t know Bart well enough to really care if he feels bad for constantly screwing up. It seems likely that if they know him at all they know him as a kind of slapstick goof who really does constantly screw things up. It’s hard to feel any sort of empathy for either of the characters. Finally, their trip back through time doesn’t have any sense of urgency that other trips to the past or the future have had, which makes it very hard for a viewer to become emotionally invested in what comes next.
Oddly Timed Installment
While there were enjoyable moments in the show, such as getting to see more of a focus on Joe West, even those tended to be ruined by the writing around them. In particular, one particular scene where Joe is going up against the world’s worst jewel thief was supposed to be funny. Instead, it felt like something that a grade-schooler thought would be humorous.
While some of thevillains inThe Flashwere easier to take down than others, one of the things that makes the show compelling, when it is compelling is that the baddies tend to be a bit harder to handle than normal. A guy who wears the stuff he stole out of the jewelry store because he forgot to bring a bag, and doesn’t know how to handle a gun, didn’t make Joe look like a good cop. That he almost got shot by him actually makes Joe seem like he bumbled into his rep as a good officer.
A bigger issue than that odd scene was the timing and tone of the episode. It’s true that the show has done this kind of thing before. After a big battle with a big bad, the next episode tends to take things down a notch. Of course, usually that still involves Barry Allen and the main gang. This time around,The Flashmanaged to survive Desperoand everything that came along with him. However, there was then a three-month pause after that big battle that allowed more than enough time to rest and recharge. Not only was the reboot episode not needed, but considering this was also a kind of season debut, it was a very bad choice.
The Flashairs Wednesday nights on The CW.
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