The Flash Season 2, Episode 10: Potential Energy

The Flash is back, after what seems like several months off.

As always, there was a lot going on this week, but for the first time in a long time, The Flash actually told its own story, and didn't spend an entire episode setting up Legends Of Tomorrow. And you know what? It was wonderful. Finally, some progress for the show's own characters and subplots. What a concept!

SPOILERS!

The Plot:

Barry keeps having nightmares in which Zoom kills Patty. Harry continues to try and find a way to increase Barry's speed (so Zoom can steal it). Cisco says instead of trying to speed up Barry, why not try to slow down Zoom (even they already tried that and failed)? Cisco says that for months he's been tracking a metahuman he dubbed "The Turtle," who can somehow project a field that slows down everyone around him. Cisco believes if they could somehow tap the Turtle's power they could slow Zoom. Barry's stunned that everyone seems to know about the Turtle except him.

Joe shows his estranged son Wally around the CCPD, but he's not impressed. Joe then invites Wally to dinner that night in an effort to get to know him better. Predictably, Wally blows off the dinner date. Patty meets with Iris to talk about Barry, and ask why he seems like he's hiding something. Iris tells Barry it may be time to tell Patty he's the Flash. The Turtle appears at the CCPD, uses his power to slow Barry to a crawl, and steals a valuable diamond. The STAR Labs Gang then deduces that the Turtle's next hit will be at an art exhibit. Barry invites Patty to the exhibit, determined to reveal his true identity as he captures the Turtle or something.

Barry and Patty's "date" goes well until the Turtle shows up. Patty sees him stealing the painting and draws her gun, as Barry speeds off to change into the Flash. The Turtle slows everyone down and easily disarms Patty, then shoots at a chandelier above her. Barry, who's also affected by the Turtle's slow-waves, pours on the speed and barely manages to save Patty from the falling chandelier. Somehow Patty still doesn't suspect the truth about Barry.

Cut to Wally, who's street racing in Central City. He win his race, but as the crowd thins out he sees Joe waiting for him. Wally explains that he races to make money to pay for his mother's medical bills. Joe offers to help out, but Wally's refuses, saying he doesn't want help from a man who was never part of his life. Meanwhile Caitlin discovers that Jay Garrick is seriously ill with some vague TV disease, and will die if he doesn't regain his super speed.

The next day Patty stares meaningfully at a letter from Midway City. Barry arrives at her apartment to try and explain why he ditched her at the exhibit. She tells him it's been fun, but he needs to decide if he wants a real relationship or not. This would have been a great time to tell Patty the truth, but in the interest of stretching out their drama for as many episodes as possible, he doesn't, and leaves. Cue the Turtle, who breaks into Patty's apartment. He realized at the art exhibit that Patty was important to the Flash, so he abducts her.

The Turtle takes Patty to his lair, where he plans to turn her into a frozen exhibit, just like he did to his wife when she threatened to leave him. Barry returns to Patty's apartment and finds her missing. With the STAR Lab Gang's help, he tracks her to the Turtle's lair. He desperately fights against the Turtle's distortion waves, eventually getting close enough to knock him out. He frees Patty, who says hugs him and says, "Thank you, whoever you are." Again, this would have been a great time to tell her the truth, but once again he chickens out.

The next day Barry finally decides to tell Patty, but before he can she tells him she's moving to Midway City to become a CSI. Whoops! Wally shows up at Joe's house, and the two tentatively reconcile.

In the tag scene, Eobard Thawne, aka the Reverse Flash, pops out of a vortex. He asks his personal intelligent computer Gideon where he is.

Thoughts:

• The reveal that Cisco's been searching for the Turtle for the past three years is a blatant bit of retconning on the part of the show, but hey, it worked! I particularly liked the fact that everyone seemed to know about Cisco's "Great White Whale" except for Barry.

• Believe it or not, the Turtle's from The Flash comics. There were actually two different Turtles.

The original Turtle first appeared in 1945, and clashed with the Golden Age Flash. He had no powers, instead using "slow, deliberate planning" to trip up the Flash, which sounds like about the dumbest idea ever.

Turtle Man was his successor, and plagued the Silver Age Flash. He first appeared in 1955 and had no actual powers either, instead using slow-themed gadgets of his own invention against the Flash.

This  new TV version of the turtle, who has the power to drain the speed from those around him, is a very nice update of the character. And in a surprising twist, he seemed like the most useless super villain ever at first, but turned out to be every bit as sinister and dangerous as Zoom! Well done, writers!

• The original Turtle was created by Gardner Fox and Martin Naydel. That explains why the TV Turtle's headquarters was in the abandoned Naydel Library.

• At one point Barry types on a STAR Labs computer at super speed. Nice try, The Flash. Barry can tap away on the keys at light speed all he wants, but it's not going to make the computer work any faster.

• Fun lines:

Cisco: "From Hell's heart I stab at thee!" I'm guessing Cisco probably got that from Wrath Of Khan rather than Moby Dick.

Cisco again: "This thirty-something metahuman not-a-ninja turtle."

Barry: "Keep your eyes open for the Turtle. That's a sentence I never thought I'd say."

• Let's talk about the STAR Labs building. We're currently in Season 2, and Barry was in a coma for nine months after it exploded, so that means the STAR Labs particle accelerator exploded about three years ago. 

So just how long are they going to leave that one damaged tower (that looks like it has a bite taken out of it) as is? I'm assuming there must be no critical equipment inside it.

• The priceless painting at the Crystal Ball was from Markovia. The fictional country has been mentioned many times over on Arrow. In the comics, the superhero Geo-Force is secretly Brion Markov, the prince of Markovia. He was a member of The Outsiders super team. 

• Poor Joe. First he finds out that he has a son he never knew about, then he meets him and he turns out to be a bad boy who's a Fast & Furious street racer. But it turns out he's not really bad, he's only endangering himself and innocent bystanders by illegally racing high performance cars on city streets in order to raise money for his dying mom's medical bills. So that makes it OK.

I don't know whose idea it was to make Wally a gear head, but he feels eerily similar to Michael B. Jordan's character from last year's Fant4stic debacle (which I still refuse to watch). I wonder if they filmed this episode before that movie came out? If they were really trying to copy that characters, it was a very, very bad idea.

All that said, it did feel natural for Wally to be a bit standoffish toward Joe, and not immediately embrace his brand new family.

• ARGGGGH! I actually yelled at the screen after Barry rescued Patty and then just stood there like a dope without telling her who he really is. No wonder Patty decided to leave him!

This is a classic example of TV Couples Drama 101. You don't want two people to get together too quickly or have an easy time of it, or the audience will become bored. So you need to throw as many obstacles in their way as possible. 

I'm positive that's what's happening here with Patty moving to Midway City. I seriously doubt we've seen the last of her.

• Writing for superhero shows must be tough. Barry's devastated when Patty tells him she's moving to Midway City, implying their relationship is doomed by the distance between their two towns.

Sorry, but I ain't buying that. Last season Barry actually ran to Coast City and back for pizza, a feat that took him less than ten seconds of screen time. 

There's no such thing as a long distance relationship with Barry. No matter how far it is to Midway City, if Patty called and asked him to come over, he could zoom there before she could hang up her phone.

• After the Turtle's captured, Barry stores him in STAR Labs Secret Super Jail. At the end of the episode, Harry, who's looking for a way to slow Zoom, enters the Turtle's cell and takes samples of his brain tissue, apparently killing him in the process.

How the hell's Harry going to explain the Turtle's sudden and mysterious death to the Gang? 

• I have no idea what's going on with this new Reverse Flash we see in the tag scene. Supposedly he was wiped out of existence when his distant ancestor Eddie Thawne killed himself in last season's finale.

Maybe this is the Earth-2 Eobard Thawne/Reverse Flash?

I love all the comic book insanity on this show, but before long we're gonna need a program to sort out who all's from which Earth!

The Flash Season 1, Episode 4: Going Rogue

This week the Flash gets a visit from an Arrow cast member to remind us that both shows are set in the same universe, and a major villain from the comic finally makes his debut.

SPOILERS!

The Plot:
A gang of thieves tries to hijack an armored car carrying a comically huge diamond, but they're thwarted by the Flash. Barry identifies the leader of the thieves as the improbably named Leonard Snart. 

Meanwhile, Felicity Smoak takes a break from Arrow and pays a visit to The Flash set, which I'm sure was absolutely not an attempt at boosting the ratings of both shows. Iris thinks Barry and Felicity would be perfect for one another, as the audience agrees. Unfortunately Barry is still smitten with dumb old Iris, for reasons that remain unclear. 

Snart manages to acquire a freeze gun that was invented by Cisco at STAR Labs. He becomes Captain Cold and uses the gun to steal the aforementioned diamond from a museum. Dr. Wells flips his wig when he finds out Cisco built the gun to use against Barry, in the event he should ever turn bad. 

Even though Cisco's actions were perfectly reasonable, Barry feels betrayed by him and throws a big hissy fit. He tries to stop Captain Cold, but is zapped by the freeze ray. Just as Cold is about to ice Barry (see what I did there?), Cisco, Caitlin and Felicity show up with an even bigger freeze gun. Not being an idiot, Cold wisely retreats. Cisco reveals that the big gun was really a vacuum cleaner. Wah-wahhhhh.

Felicity tells Barry goodbye as she heads back to her own show. The two of them realize they're right for each other, but they're both too busy pining for people they can't have. 

Thoughts:
• At the beginning of the episode, Dr. Wells is testing Barry's ability to multitask at super speed. To that end, Barry zips back and forth playing chess, ping pong and Operation.

Hmm. The definition of "multitasking" must have changed while I wasn't looking. I thought it meant to perform several functions at the same time. Flitting from one separate exercise to another, even at super speed, is not multitasking. 

Now if he'd been playing chess with one hand and Operation with the other while running on the treadmill– that would have been multitasking.

• The Going Rogue title no doubt refers to the Flash's Rogues Gallery of the comics, which usually featured Mirror Master, Heat Wave, Weather Wizard, The Trickster, Pied Piper, The Top, Captain Boomerang, and of course Captain Cold.

• This week's Easter Egg Alert:

• The armored car that Snart and his gang robs says "Blackhawk Security" on the door. The Blackhawks were a team of pilots who fought crime in WWII.  

• The museum director is named Dexter Myles. In the comics, he was the curator of the Flash Museum in Central City. 

• The Kahndaq Dynasty Diamond also has a comic connection. Kahndaq is the fictional Middle Eastern country ruled by Black Adam, the arch enemy of Captain Marvel (I know, I know. I've been calling him Captain Marvel my whole life and I refuse to start calling him Shazam now. To hell with the corporate lawyers!).

• As always, Emily Bett Rickards is wonderful as Felicity Smoak. Her appearance was like a breath of fresh air on the show. Unfortunately, she's far more interesting than Caitlin Snow. Felicity's bubbly personality only highlights how underwritten and, well, dull Caitlin is.

It's really too bad they can't figure out a way for Felicity to be on both shows. C'mon, Oscar Goldman was on both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, so it's not like it couldn't be done.

• Felicity confesses she knows Barry is secretly the Flash, as she overheard him and Arrow talking on a rooftop a few weeks ago (!). Jesus, yet another person who knows Barry's identity. Why's he even bothering with the mask by this point?

• Barry brings Felicity to STAR Labs and introduces her to the gang. That seems a bit presumptuous on his part. Shouldn't he have checked with the unpredictable and creepy Dr. Wells before bringing her in?

• As Barry shows off his super speed on the treadmill, Felicity worries about the effect his powers may have on his health. She wonders if he ages more quickly when he uses super speed, and fears he could run so fast he "turns to dust in a red costume."

This was mostly likely a shout out to Crisis On Infinite Earths, the 1985 DC Comics miniseries that tried and failed to clean up their continuity. In the miniseries, the Flash battles a god-like being called the Anti-Monitor, and runs so fast he begins aging and literally turns to dust.

• Det. West knows all about Snart and info dumps his back story to Barry. Snart's father was a bad cop who routinely beat him, so of course this troubled childhood explains why he's now a criminal mastermind. Sigh...

Once again, I wish superhero shows would quit trying to humanize and rationalize their villains. Why can't the bad guy just be a colossal asshole who robs and kills because that's what he does? Why do we always need some deep-seated psychological justification for a villain's actions?

• Snart steals the freeze gun from a janitor who in turn stole if from STAR Labs. In most versions of the comic, Leonard Snart invented the gun himself. 

Let's hope for his sake that it never runs out of whatever it uses for ammo, as it's unlikely he'd be able to figure out how to reload it.

• I believe Captain Cold is the first non-metahuman villain we've had on the show so far. Wentworth Miller (now that's a name!) does a fantastic job portraying Cold, giving him a cool, icy demeanor.

• It was great to see Captain Cold in the flesh, but I really wish they'd have given him some sort of costume. Something besides goggles and a gun. Yes, they give him a parka at the end, but it wasn't enough.

The Flash has a costume and this is a superhero show after all, so why do they keep dressing the villains in normal street clothes?

On the other hand, it shouldn't be too hard to cobble together a Captain Cold costume for Halloween. Get a military sweater from the Army Surplus Store, some welder's goggles and a Nerf rifle painted black and you're good to go.

• We're told repeatedly that Snart is a criminal mastermind, who spends months casing a joint and planning out a strategy before robbing it. But he's then he's almost caught because he goes on the same museum tour twice in one day. Doy!

• Cisco confesses that he created the cold gun to use against Barry in case he became a super villain after his accident. When Dr. Wells finds out, he tears Cisco a new one for creating such a thing, saying that weapons have no place in STAR Labs.

This is an odd thing to say, especially for someone who's stabbed another man in the chest a week or so ago.

• Once again I have to give props to actor Carlos Valdes. Cisco, the show's resident kewl & radical genius slacker, could have easily been one of the most annoying characters in the history of TV. Somehow Valdes makes him not only tolerable, but likable.

• Captain Cold's master plan involves stealing a ridiculously huge diamond. Always with the diamonds. What is it with cold-based characters and diamonds? Mr. Freeze did the same thing in Batman And Robin. Is it because diamonds look like ice?

• Um... when Barry and Felicity show up at the Trivia Night Challenge, isn't it, well, night time? So how come a few minutes later when Barry leaves on Flash business, it's now daytime? Whoops!

• The show's doing a good job of making Eddie Thawne likable in spite of himself. It's gonna hurt even more when he eventually becomes the Reverse Flash.

• When Iris says she's starting a blog dedicated to mysterious Streak, Barry says he's thought of a better name for him: the Flash.

Wha...? Hasn't that name already been established? Cisco christened Barry "The Flash" back in the first episode. So I guess Iris and the general public doesn't know that? I suppose not, if they're all calling him "The Streak." Confusing.

By the way, "The Streak" is probably not the best nickname they could have chosen. People who grew up in the 1970s will understand why.

• Cisco tells Barry that the freeze gun is deadly to him because "speed and cold are opposites." Well... I guess so, in some esoteric sense. I get that molecules are constantly in motion and they slow down in extreme cold, but... that doesn't seem to have anything to do with speed.

• Barry's seen running on the treadmill several times during the episode, and according to the speedometer he's going around 280 - 300 mph. Once again, that's way too slow for him to be moving too fast to be seen.

Also, in several episodes we've seen Barry run so fast that everything around him appears to stop. 300 mph is nowhere near slow enough for that to be possible. Heck, Formula 1 cars can go around 250 or so, and I'm pretty sure time doesn't  stop for the drivers.

Barry would need to be running many thousands of miles per hour for the "time stop" effect to occur.

• Captain Cold figures out Barry's weakness– he cares. Despite the fact that this particular plot has been done many times before (I'm lookin' at you, Spider-Man), it pays off pretty well here. The Captain deliberately derails a crowded train in order to make his getaway, and Barry saves each of the passengers at super speed– while the train is still crashing! That was pretty awesome!

• After seeing Barry and Felicity together, I have to wonder what the hell he still sees in Iris, a woman who clearly has no romantic feelings for him. I guess that was the point, to introduce some CW brand relationship drama.

• Joe tells his daughter Iris that he's hurt that she kept her relationship with Eddie a secret from him for so long. Iris apologizes to him and says, "From now on, no more secrets."

Well, except for the fact that your father knows your best friend is really the Flash. But other than that, there's no secrets between you two!

• After Captain Cold is threatened with the vacuum cleaner, er, I mean Big F-ing Freeze Gun, he walks away, resisting the urge to shout, "We'll meet again, Flash, and when we do, you'll rue the day you were born!"

We then see Captain Cold handing out a heat gun to a his former partner Mick. Obviously Mick is being set up here as Heat Wave, another villain from the comic.

Hmm. Villain partners, one with icy powers, the other controls heat. Now where have I seen that before...

The Flash Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot

So I watched the new Flash TV series tonight. I wasn't going to bother with it because I didn't want to start on a new show, but ultimately thought, eh, why not? I'll check out the first episode at least.

I liked it! Much more than I thought I would. In fact I like it more than I do Arrow. They managed to pack amazing amount of story into the 43 minute run time. It was more like a mini movie than a TV show. It set up the series perfectly and was actually pretty true to the comic book too. And best of all, it was fun! No grim and gritty brooding "heroes" anywhere to be seen. Yet.

It got a little too CW from time to time for my tastes, but I suppose that's to be expected, as executive producer and co-writer Greg Berlanti also worked on teen angst-fest Dawson's Creek. Berlanti also co-wrote the recent Green Lantern movie, which I didn't hate as much as the rest of the world.

This is the second time we've had a Flash TV series, of course. CBS aired one back in 1990 that was also pretty good, but it only lasted a season because it just couldn't compete with the ratings juggernaut that was The Cosby Show.

I don't know if I'll review this show every week as my time is stretched thin enough already. Any more shows and I'm gonna have to add to the Bob Canada's BlogWorld payroll.

SPEEDY SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Plot:
Twelve year old Barry Allen (OK, he's in his twenties, but he looks twelve) is a geeky crime scene investigator who absolutely isn't meant to remind of us Peter Parker. He's in love with his best friend Iris West just as much as he is with the particle accelerator built by his hero, Dr. Harrison Wells. When Wells activates the accelerator, it overloads and sends a weird energy discharge throughout Central City, the realistically named home town of Barry.

The accelerator discharge causes a bolt of lightning to hit Barry, knocking him into a rack of "unidentified" chemicals, because all scientists keep such things in their labs without knowing what they are. This accident follows the comic book origin very closely for once, and puts Barry into a coma.

Barry wakes up nine months later, which I'm sure wasn't meant to be any kind of rebirth metaphor, and discovers that he now has super speed. Dr. Wells, who's been confined to a wheelchair as a result of the accident, which I'm sure wasn't meant to be ironic, wants to study Barry and his new abilities. Wells' assistants, Dr. Caitlin Snow and Cisco Ramon, who absolutely will never become Killer Frost and Vibe, help Barry deal with his condition.

They give him a special suit that can withstand super speed and Barry becomes the Flash, Central City's protector. He apparently has never heard of a secret identity, as he blabs it to his surrogate father, Detective Joe West. Joe asks Barry to keep his powers from Iris for plot complication reasons, and vows to help Barry clear his father's name.

Thoughts:
• I'm not totally sold on Grant Gustin as The Flash. His acting was OK; it's his youthful looks that are throwing me. As one of the characters pointed out in the pilot, he looks like he's about twelve years old. 

Not only is it hard for me to buy him as a superhero, but I'm also having trouble picturing him as a crime scene investigator. Is that a job high school kids normally have? No wonder his boss doesn't take him seriously, it's like watching a little kid reciting forensic dialogue. Hopefully he'll grow on me as I keep watching.

Gustin bears more than a passing resemblance to Andrew Garfield, and plays Barry Allen in a very Peter Parker-like manner. Barry even gushes over Dr. Wells' particle accelerator, just like Parker did with Dr. Octavius' technobabble machine in Spider-Man 2.

• This is at least the third show on the air right now that begins with the exact same "My name is _________" narration (the other two being Arrow and Forever). I don't watch all that much TV, so there may even be others I don't know about.

It works, I suppose, but it's not as much fun as the "explain the premise theme songs" that The Beverly Hillbillies and The Brady Bunch had.

• Although Arrow has featured super powered characters from time to time, it's a fairly grounded and relatively realistic show. Adding the Flash to the same universe means that Oliver Queen suddenly lives in a world filled with people who can run so fast they go back in time or generate tornadoes with their mind. I wonder how all this will affect the overall tone of Arrow?

Dr. Wells explains to Barry that the accelerator explosion bathed Central City in other-dimensional energies, which may have caused others to develop superpowers.

This is the exact same thing they did on Smallville, in which the kryptonite meteors caused a rash of super folk that popped up one per week. Maybe that's how they'll explain the increased metahuman population on Arrow.

• In a flashback scene, Barry sees his mother surrounded by a vortex of red and yellow energy. A blurry yellow shape comes into focus for a second before his mother disappears.

I'm assuming the yellow shape will turn out to be the Reverse Flash, also known as Professor Zoom. He's the Flash's nemesis from the comic. Lord knows what they'll call him here though. I'm betting either name would probably be too comic booky for this comic book show.

• The Arrow appearance felt a little forced to me. Barry runs (!) the 600 miles to Starling City for no real reason other than to shoehorn in a cameo by his pal Oliver Queen. Any second I expected Oliver to say, " Well Barry, I look forward to seeing your adventures every Tuesday night at 8pm, 7 pm Central Time."

Of course this isn't the first time the two characters have met. Barry wandered onto the set of Arrow a couple of times last year in Season 2, to lay the groundwork for this series.

• One thing I've never liked about DC Comics: their fake city names. Superman lives in Metropolis, Batman lives in Gotham City, Arrow in Starling City and The Flash in Central City. 

This is all well and good until you need to show where one of these fictitious burgs lies on a map. Where's Metropolis? Is it near New York City? IS it New York City? How far does it lie from Gotham?

DC's fake cities always pulled me right out of the story and reminded me that none of this stuff was real. Give me Marvel Comics any day, where their heroes all punched and flew around right in New York City, baby!

• You probably didn't recognize him, but that was the Weather Wizard who battled the Flash in this episode. He looked quite a bit different here than he did in the comic. I guess they thought a guy in a green jumpsuit (with pointed toes) who brandishes a magic wand was too much for today's jaded audience.

• Barry's not very good at keeping a secret identity. By the end of the pilot at least four people know he's really the Flash. So why even bother with the mask?

• There were a crap ton of Easter Eggs and comic book references in the pilot. Here are a just a few:

• The Big Belly Burger diner is a staple of DC Comics, and has also appeared in Arrow.

• STAR Labs is heavily featured in the comics and Arrow as well.

• TV Reporter Linda Park is from the Flash comic. She ended up marring the comic version of Wally West, aka Kid Flash and later THE Flash.

• Jitters, the coffee shop in which Iris works, is from the comics.

• At one point Barry crashes, at super speed, into a laundry truck labeled Gambi Cleaners.

In the comics, a tailor named Paul Gambi created the costumes for most of the Flash's rouges gallery.

• Barry tries out his new abilities at the Ferris Air testing facility. Ferris Air was where Hal Jordan, aka the Green Lantern, worked as a test pilot. 

• The idea of the Flash running really fast around a tornado in order to dissipate it came directly from a 1969 Flash comic.

• Barry's dad is played by John Wesley Shipp, who starred in the 1990 Flash TV series.

• Iris' boyfriend is Detective Eddie Thawne. In the comics, Thawne becomes the Reverse Flash (well, one of them anyway). 

• In the comics, Dr. Caitlin Snow is the civilian identity of Killer Frost, a super villain with icy powers. Also in the comics, Cisco Ramon is the real name of the superhero Vibe, who has vibratory powers.

Whether these two characters will actually become metahumans remains to be seen, but I'd say it's a good bet.

• As Dr. Wells gives Barry a tour of the destroyed STAR Labs, they walk by a broken cage labeled "GRODD." This is a reference to Gorilla Grodd, a super intelligent talking ape who's a longtime enemy of the Flash in the comics. 

Does that mean we'll see Grodd in the series? Can they do a passable talking gorilla on a TV budget? 

• This is some major nitpicking here, but what the heck. When we see Iris at the coffee shop, she's walking around giving refills to various customers, pouring coffee into their cups from a single pitcher. In this day and age of ridiculously complex coffee orders, what are the odds that every one of those customers are drinking the exact same triple venti half-caff no foam lattes?

• At the end of the episode, the disabled Dr. Wells enters a secret chamber, rises from his wheelchair (!) and stares at a newspaper reading "FLASH MISSING. VANISHES IN CRISIS." The paper is dated April 25, 2024. Interesting!

A couple things here. First of all, I'm assuming the "Crisis" in the headline refers to DC Comics' 1985 mini series Crisis On Infinite Earths, a story which tried but failed mightily to unify DC's various and sundry universes (universi?). 

It would be awesome if they did a Crisis storyline in the series, but if they did it would have to be a stripped-down, economy model. There's no way they could do it on TV– they'd need an Avengers-sized budget to do proper justice to a story like that.

Secondly, the idea that there will ever be a newspaper dated 2024 is laughable at best. The newspaper did have kind of a shimmery, transparent look to it, so I guess it's possible it was supposed to be some sort of flexible tablet display or hologram. Still, it struck me as funny. Well, not funny ha-ha, as there's nothing humorous about the death of newspapers, but you know what I mean.

And so there we have The Flash pilot. It did an admirable job of world building and setting up the story lines for the season and it's got me hooked after just one episode. I can't wait to see what happens next week!