The Flash S06E01 Review: A-ah! King of the Impossible!

The Flash, Season 6, Episode 1: Into the Void

So the previous season was... it wasn't the best. One would argue that some of the CW shows have outgrown their age, and with a lot of shakeups among the superhero TV shows, with many shows ending, some long-runners concluding and many new ones starting, it does make me wonder, sometimes, where it leaves The Flash. I absolutely loved the first season to bits, and I might go as far to say that it's my favourite superhero live-action season ever, but at the same time, there are so many problems plaguing seasons two through five that it's hard to recommend the show as a whole to people that aren't already DC fans. The second half of season two, as well as most of seasons four and five, were easily the biggest offenders here. Honestly, at this point the only reason that really does make me excited about this show is just how well the cast's chemistry is.

Season 6 does seem to be building up to something. With the 2019/2020 season building up to the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover which will also conclude Arrow, it genuinely feels like we're at least building up a huge epic. And while I am enough of a fanboy to have little shivers down my spine when the Monitor shows up at the end, proclaiming that the Flash must die for billions to live... I do wonder about where the rest of the season is going to go.

The season six premiere just seems so... muted, and more of the same. It does some of the things you expect from a season premiere, lobs in a threat-of-the-week, a villain-of-the-season, and an ominous bigger-picture teaser for the Crisis at the end, but ultimately I feel like there were a lot of the same road being retread. I do acknowledge the need for Barry and Iris realizing that they really do need to cope with Nora's death, which is a neat little storyline for them this episode -- both are overworking themselves and are refusing to admit that they have a problem, because, honestly, how can they? Candice Patton and Grant Gustin really do sell their scenes when they finally break down, and that's a pretty neat emotional sequence.

The plot-of-the-week is... simple enough. We get a fake-out with Godspeed, who turns out to be just another random mysterious impostor, although we do get a pretty awesome sequence with Flash clothes-lining him. The actual threat of this episode is in fact Chester "Chunk" Runk, a kid who accidentally became comatose thanks to an experiment gone wrong, and his mind ends up manifesting black holes in Central City. We get some neat effects, and a glorious, glorious usage of Queen's Flash Gordon Theme, and Chester does seem like he might be a potential new supporting character for the future, but it's... it's kind of just another superhero plot, y'know?

Meanwhile, Caitlin ends up dealing with Killer Frost incontinence, and I do really appreciate that it ended up being Ralph that correctly guesses that Killer Frost is kinda being tsundere about wanting to live her own life, and both Caitlin and Frost end up agreeing very happily to share their body, which is neat, well-acted and all, but at the same time, does really feel like we're retreading some old ground. At least Killer Frost got a sweet, sweet new costume out of it. Caitlin and Frost's dialogue have always been hit-and-miss, and I do hope that this new cooperation between the two is going to finally be the dart that sticks as far as this take on the character goes.


The other big Caitlin thing, of course, is her former colleague, Ramsey Rosso (played by Heroes veteran Sendhil Ramamurthy), who is certainly going to be a main character going forward. Initially being portrayed as a grieving son who refuses to accept his mother's death, he turns out to be trying to find a cure for his family's blood disease, and ends up experimenting with dark matter, which transforms him into a monstrous metahuman at the end of the episode. Our new big bad, or an arc villain?

Ultimately, I do sound a bit too negative, I feel, because it's ultimately a very solid season premiere. I just am afraid that this season will end up like all the previous ones before it, so I'm tempering my expectations a lot. The cast, at the very least, was absolutely fantastic, and I was genuinely surprised to see Carlos Valdez still sticking around as Cisco considering there were so many hints throughout the previous season that he was going to leave. We'll see how things play out from here on out, and we'll see just how my schedule will allow me to catch up with any of these superhero stuff, because, honestly, at the rate my IRL schedule is going, I'm not sure I'll be able to watch any of these in a timely fashion.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Opal City is the hometown most associated with the DC superhero Starman, but the Elongated Man also operates out of that city in the comics. Ralph client, Sue Dearbon, as we've mentioned in season 5, is his comic-book counterpart's wife. 
• Chester P. Runk, a.k.a. Chunk, is an ally of the Flash associated with the 80's-90's run starring Wally West, a scientist who was transformed into a living black hole due to an experiment, and ended up initially abusing his powers before eventually being befriended by the Flash, who convinced him to release the people he had trapped within his personal black hole. 
• Ramsey Rosso, a.k.a. Bloodwork, is a relatively new villain, introduced in 2017 as part of the Rebirth reboot, where he was a hemophiliac who ended up experimenting with his own blood to find a cure, only to gain blood-manipulating superpowers in the process.