The Flash, Season 7 [2020-2021]
Part two of my review of Flash's seventh season. This one has been a bit of a rockier season! The first half of the season had wrapped up the plotline of season 6, and we just completed an arc involving the other 'Forces'. The remaining seven episodes cover a mini-arc of its own. Without further ado...
_______________________
We start off this half of the season with episode 12, "Good-Bye Vibrations", which the show has basically been sort-of building up in the background. I've seen a lot of original cast members leave CW superhero shows, particularly the long-running ones, but in the case of Cisco Ramon, he's been... I don't know. The actor, Carlos Valdez, has always brought great energy to the show, particularly in this episode, but he's also been very much under-utilized in the past couple of seasons. The constant back-and-forth on whether he is a metahuman or not, whether he's an on-field superhero or not, Chester already being pretty obviously a shoo-in for a replacement, and the two rather mediocre romances he's stuck with... the character already kind of feels like he's got one feet out of the show already at times. But this one is a pretty good episode. It's also a goofy-ass episode with a couple of very well-done heartfelt moments, and I felt like it's a much stronger send-off to the character and actor compared to Cavanagh/Wells's exit earlier this season.
Anyway, Cisco leaves to work with ARGUS, and helps to solve the case of Rainbow Raider 2.0 for this episode. Which involves Rainbow Raider turning both Cisco and Barry high for the first half of the episode, and there's a "I'm angry because you guys act like you don't care" "but we do care, we're putting up a brave front" cheesy plot. Unlike the cheesiness of the Speed Force hullaballoo, though, it's one that works pretty well. Rainbow Raider 2.0 has a bit of a Robin Hood plot and Barry arranges for her to work with the mayor or something, but is just an impetus to get everyone to vent their emotions. Oh, Kamilla also has a very minor sub-plot, but let's be honest... the show really hasn't done anything too interesting with her, and I'm thankful that this episode still gives her a decent exit even if it's basically a mirrored version of Cisco's plot. It admittedly ran a bit too long, but I enjoyed it.
Episode 13, "Masquerade", is a... weird one? Speaking of under-utilized characters... now, Cecile is nowhere as under-utilized as someone like Kamilla is, but she's been dipping in and out of relevance. This is a full-on spotlight episode for Cecile, and just like the previous one, a rare standalone episode for The Flash. It's a pretty good one, too, actually, perhaps because it's so different. In the real world, Cecile's body has been taken over by the immortal mask of the Psycho-Pirate, and our heroes have to figure out how to do a heist which is subtly (well, as subtly as this show can get, anyway) influenced by the Psycho-Pirate mask. We get Sue showing back up, but the main character here is Chester, who basically goes through a typical 'gaining confidence' story arc. I really have no complaints here, it's a pretty solid storyline.
Where the episode really shines, though, is the absolutely fun horror movie shots inside Cecile's mind. The mask traps Barry and the real Cecile inside an asylum, and while the obvious 'conquer your inner demons to break free' is pretty much par the course for this sort of episode, this one also deals with an interesting bit of Cecile's backstory -- she blamed herself for her mother dying alone, was overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. Other than the rather heavy topic, though (which both Barry and Cecile's actors deliver well!) it's pretty simple 'fight your inner demon' stuff. Again, nothing too surprising happens here, but Danielle Nicolet really got a rare chance to shine as multiple versions of the same character. It's fun.
Our last standalone episode before the four-part arc to close out this season is "Rayo de Luz". And another under-utilized cast member gets the spotlight here! Allegra (does she even have a superhero name? I don't think she does) has been a character that... is kind of there. Yes, she's more prominent than Chester, and she's got that whole storyline with Nash Wells and she has an evil cousin. But for the most part she feels like a bit of an afterthought, so it's nice that she gets a bit more screentime. I guess with so many original cast members bowing out, it's inevitable. Through a series of coincidences, this episode features Allegra, Chester, Sue and a little bit of Caitlin dealing with Ultraviolet's return. And it's... it's there? It's an all right standalone story, as our heroes go hunt down the evil scientist that experimented on Esperanza, but one key problem here is that Esperanza is such a cipher that when the episode pulls the twist that 'oh, she's actually hunting an evil scientist', and the subsequent 'oh, she tries to kill Allegra because the evil scientist promises to give her voice back', I really didn't care all that much. While most of the episode is pretty decent if unimpressive, the climax is another 'power of your heart'. Quite literally, because Allegra's power-up quite literally involves a surge of light energy emerging from her chest. At this point I just eye-roll and go on.
A neat outing for the newer characters, I guess. Joe gets to pull the B-plot this time around, having spent his time after quitting CCPD investigating Kramer throughout the background of the past couple of episodes. And this episode he confronts her, and turns out that she, just like Esperanza, has a bit of a sob story to go through. I really want to care about this, but Kristen Kramer is another character that's kind of a cipher. I guess we set up a new villain, but ultimately it's not a particularly interesting one.
Episode 15, "Enemy at the Gates", is where the Godspeed arc finally begins, and... and I'm going to say it straight -- it's handled better than the Speed Force arc. It's most certainly not the best Flash has ever been (I don't think the show has ever been the same since... oh, the Thinker season, I guess) but at least the story was competently done. And interestingly, Godspeed is a villain that we've seen before, on-and-off, in the fifth season. So it's easy for me to think that this episode was going to be another one-off episode. And we get multiple Godspeeds this time around. And they speak in bizarre garbled modem-speech. The actual plot part of this episode is actually pretty cool. All the Godspeeds hunting down our heroes and causing them to feel despair, and being utterly besieged in STAR Labs? Hell, for perhaps the first time in this season, we even get a pretty decent fight scene with Flash, Killer Frost and Chillblaine fighting against the Godspeeds. Flash doesn't even win this episode, not really, because six other modem-speaking Godspeeds show up to beat up on the first six Godspeeds.
Of course, the rest of the plotlines in this episode are... well, I am comparing it to the terrible "we're the parents to the Force children" plot earlier in this season, and it looks good compared to that, but it's not the most engaging thing ever. Barry's main plot is, after some comedy moments in the three breather episodes, trying to hide from everyone that he's trying to test for Iris's pregnancy. Because he got a weird dream -- a situation that feels extra-dumb when I sit down to type it. While the episode also very pointedly not show Iris at all for the whole episode... which I thought was going somewhere, but I guess Candice Patton just wasn't available for a couple of episodes? They explain it in the next episode, but the explanation was a bizarre one.
The Killer Frost/Chillblaine storyline finds its conclusion in this episode, and I'm kind of glad it did end this way. Chillblaine never felt anything like an utter jackass that flirts a lot, and while this episode does give some typical romantic flirting lines between the two, I'm so glad that they're not trying to rewrite Chillblaine into Mr. Redeemed Villain out of nowhere. His team-up is cool, but turns out he's playing Frost like a fiddle and buggers off by the end of the episode. There's also the ongoing Allegra/Esperanza plot, and in this one, Caitlin operates on Esperanza and frees her from her mind-controlling neck-implant thing.
Episode 16, "P.O.W." gives us JOHN DIGGLE! I mean, shit, I can't really review eight seasons of Arrow without falling in love with John Diggle, and I actually audibly whooped when he returned for a guest star spot that took me completely by surprise. This episode basically deals with the previous episode, with Team Flash enlisting John Diggle's help to fight the new Godspeeds, who are having a huge rumble in Central City and destroying everything. Diggle shows up with a Cisco-made entropy speed field thing that they create from Time Trapper (who presumably shows up in another CW show that I haven't watched) technology. And, again, all the Godspeed action stuff is pretty neat! With Diggle's help, they manage to capture a Godspeed, and interrogate him -- finding out that the Godspeed Civil War is caused by two different factions of clones. One faction serves the original August Heart, and the other faction wants to kill him to gain their independence.
The huge theme (tm) that John Diggle gives Barry this episode is that family is more important than anything, and Barry decides to take this advice and try to travel to 2049 to check on Nora, only to find out that time-travel is blocked by an army of Godspeeds (the original Godspeed came from the future, I think). Somehow. Okay. We get the aforementioned explanation -- Iris is apparently hiding in the Still Force because of... something? Something-something shifting out of the timeline, which the show immediately forgets about in the next episode? It's bizarre, and something that the show kind of drops on us and forgets, because we've got a lot of sub-plots in this episode. Anyway, they end up finding the real August Heart, but he's just some bloke with utterly convenient amnesia. And then we get a non-dream Nora West-Allen actually showing up... but she also brings in Bart "Impulse" Allen from the future. Okay.
The first B-plot! Esperanza, after being healed by Caitlin, continues to be a one-dimensional bonehead, and goes off to fight Black Hole on her own despite being clearly weakened by the operation. In a surprisingly not-consequence-free episode of The Flash, she gets straight-up shot to death and dies in Allegra's hands (right after she overhears the Family speech, too!), cursing her as she goes. A bold move, actually... if only Esperanza was written to be more than a one-dimensional satellite character to Allegra.
After spending the background of the previous episode hunting Adam Creyke, Joe and Kramer basically trick Creyke into revealing himself. Creyke apparently has immortality metahuman powers, but he gets his leg caught in Joe's meta-cuff gun. He gives a very basic motive rant about how he justifies killing people by giving half his money to help kids from the reservation... and while I'm glad that this plot didn't actually get that much screentime comparatively, it's also easily the least interesting part of this season. Jesse L. Martin is an entertaining actor, but this plot is really not that entertaining at all.
Oh, and to top it off, Diggle keeps getting headaches throughout the episode which has something to do with the Green Lantern ring calling out to him and stuff... but we don't get any resolution here, and I don't even know what show Diggle will join! Anyway, this episode... really feels like it's cramming way too much. Toss in Iris's bizarre non-subplot, and we get a whole lot of buildup for the two-part finale and a bunch of subplots being tied up. Again, though, none of them are all that interesting, so they really do feel like stuff that just incidentally happen in the background.
And we start off with the first part of the two-part finale, "Heart of the Matter". On one hand, I do find this heightened pace actually pretty refreshing. We immediately jump into trying to get us to know Impulse, Barry's son from the future, and... and he's a pretty fun character, for what little we see of him in these two episodes. A lot more bubbly and yolo-ing it, as we get to see them fight a gloriously speaking Godspeed, who gives absolutely fun hammy monologues of a villain with a god complex. Nora/XS gets a lightning whip! It also explains just how Godspeed got from 2049 to 2022, which... you know what? I actually forgot that Godspeed was a future villain while watching these episodes. It's not that there are a lot of Flash episodes; there are a lot of timeline retcons in Flash is what's annoying.
Speaking of timeline retcons, Jay Garrick is back with his metal hat and his speed is restored. I genuinely don't remember, I thought he was dead, but that might be a different old Flash played by John Wesley Shipp? Going to the Wiki tells me that this is Earth-3 Jay Garrick, who apparently got folded into Earth-Prime... you know, maybe just one scene even before this would've worked to actually remind us that this character exists? But the Godspeeds show up and kidnap Jay -- and in the future, because Godspeed is "Bart's Thawne", apparently Godspeed killed Jay in the future, and they're trying to replicate it here.
Having Bart show up with Nora is also pretty cool -- the audience presumably still remembers Nora from season five, so there's a point of reference for these future kids, even if we did get an eye-rolling reprise of the "I'm your dad, so listen to me even though I don't really know what's going on" nonsense we had with Nora. Only these didn't take entire episodes to angst through, so it's less annoying. Flash, XS and Impulse basically take turns being beaten up by Godspeed as they race around and try and fail to figure out how to stop Godspeed, until Cisco shows up as (Mecha?) Vibe and saves the day. So they finally decide to tap into the amnesiac August Heart to figure out what his main plan is.
There's a B-plot with Allegra and Chester that happens in this episode, too, with Allegra being unable to access the full spectrum of her powers because she' grieving over Esperanza. I can't really blame her for being angry, honestly. In a fully-realized season, I actually think that the Allegra/Esperanza storyline could've made for an actually dramatic standalone episode.
...and it's interesting, because previous seasons have over-stretched their villains for a bit too long. Thinker was probably the worst example of this, but Cicada was also pretty overblown. This is interesting because, just like Bloodwork and Mirror Monarch (pre-season-7, anyway) before him, Godspeed does prove that The Flash could make for a decently compelling villain by just leaving their monologue speech saved up for a single episode. Granted, this does mean that Godspeed is a pretty shallow character... but honestly? At least he's a shallow villain that leaves an impact. In the fake Zauriel Cathedral (I get that reference!) of August Heart's mind, Barry and August get to talk with each other, and August Heart gets to give a gloriously hammy performance. He's a man with a god complex, believing that he's the only one deserving of being called the 'god of speed'. Again, not particularly three-dimensional as far as superhero characters go, but it sure is a fun, hammy performance. The real August Heart, trapped inside an amnesiac mind, delivers Barry an ultimatum -- give him organic speed, or else the Godspeed clones will keep returning.
As the final episode that still has to deal with a huge crisis on their hands, the episode quickly wraps up some side-plots. Joe and Kramer are probably the one that's the hardest to care about, and the resolution to the cliffhanger last episode is 'they didn't die'. At the end of the episode we learn that Kramer has the metahuman ability to mimic other metahuman abilities but only if she's near death, and that's the solution to a mystery that I wasn't even asking. Allegra is sad about causing Esperanza's death, and while this could've gone to a discussion about toxic family members or gaslighting... all we get is Chester giving a motivational speech about how vital and crucial Allegra is and she's back up as a productive team member of Team Flash. Kind of eye-rolling, but I guess they made do with the best they can do. Cisco gets one last hurrah, getting some action scene team-ups with Killer Frost.
And then... I honestly can't say that I really care about Barry and Iris angsting about being parents to time-traveling kids who are superheroes in their own right, but at least the actors are given far, far better dialogue than the tripe they got in the Speed Force arc? This episode goes for a mid-episode climax by having Barry, Iris, Jay, Nora and Bart all dress up as a huge Flash family. Oh, the Speed Force (they call her 'Big Nora') also shows up to help out too. That action scene was pretty fun -- Impulse has lightning shurikens! Impulse himself is kind of interesting. We get just enough out of his interactions with Nora and Barry within these two episodes to make us care about him, and he gets a pretty neat -- if short -- subplot with Jay telling him to know when to stand still.
But then Godspeed continues to prove unstoppable... which begs the question as to why Godspeed even needs organic speed. It's the principle of the matter, I guess? And Team Flash decide to give it to them... but, in a surprising move, Barry and Iris actually have a plan beforehand. Godspeed gets said speed through some handwave-technobabble, and proceeds to regain his memory, reabsorb the twelve clones, and proclaim his desire to kill all the speedsters and become the God of Speed. (Cecile's sub-plot of talk-of-friendship-ing Godspeed, mercifully, gets subverted) Flash faces off against Godspeed... and then Reverse-Flash comes in out of nowhere to help out.
Which... okay, Tom Cavanagh is back, that's neat, but just like Jay, I really felt like this was a plot twist that they could've foreshadowed. Probably also because I wasn't even sure where Reverse-Flash is beforehand, or that he's an option in Earth-Prime -- wasn't he expelled like an exorcised spirit out of Nash? And then... we get Star Wars with lightning lightsabers. Reverse-Flash stabs August (but is nice enough to not kill him) and is about to kill Flash, but then apparently Barry is now faster than Eobard, and Eobard swears some 90's cartoon vengeance before running off.
No idea why Barry didn't go catch Eobard if he's faster now and chucking him in an anti-metahuman cell. Or why they kept August Heart, the criminal from 2049, in Iron Heights. Or why we need a whole scene talking about Kristen Kramer because that's clearly the sub-plot the audience wants to know about the most, right? And then the episode comes to a close without a cliffhanger, with Barry and Iris renewing their vows and Bart singing a song. The end.
_____________________________________
That's it for Flash's seventh season. After just how much this show really felt like a gigantic mess in the first half of the season, at least while this second half-season felt rushed, it also felt like the stories that the show-runners wanted to tell was a good one. Just one that's paced badly and perhaps could've used with some B-plots in the previous episodes tossed out... the Kristen Kramer storyline really didn't go anywhere, and I do feel like stuff like Frost/Chillblaine or Allegra/Esperanza could've been moved into the 'filler' episodes, while Jay or Impulse perhaps could've appeared an episode or two earlier. But, again, comparing it to the Forces subplot it was handled a lot better. Still, it's also pretty clear that The Flash is pretty far from its glory days, and while real-life problems have caused the handling of this season to be messy, it's also... not very good overall.
I'm experimenting with how I'm handling superhero TV shows on this blog... I'm not sure if these half-season reviews are how I'm going to talk about shows in the future? Or which show I'll watch next. There are so many superhero shows out there that I definitely am never going back to 'watch all the episodes weekly' grind as I did several years ago. And I'm thankful this year doesn't have any crossovers? I'm not sure which of the CW shows I'll cover next, but we'll see. If I'm covering those shows I'm definitely going to do this method, because sometimes, some of the filler episodes really don't give me too much to talk about.
No comments:
Post a Comment