Dude is fast.
Lay off
superhero fiction. I’m tired of hearing
the bitching. Hollywood is only making movies and TV shows about people with capes
and superpowers. Wah,wah, wah. You
know why? There are two reasons: They make zillions. The second reason is, for
the most part, they are good. They are
just flat-out good now. The right people are making them, writing them,
starring in them. It is as if America had
these characters sitting around for decades and we’ve just recently figured out
a way to bring them to life and not be embarrassed by the results. I, for one, can’t get enough of it.
The
Flash is in its first year on the previously unwatchable (save Arrow) network, the CW. By the end of
the first episode, I knew it would work.
The show accomplished what so many movies in the past fail to do when
you create a superhero world. You create
a fictional town with fictional problems, full of conflicts and villains and
relationships. You create superpowers
and peril and secret identities. You mix
in some inner turmoil. All of this is
negated if you fail to nail down the tone. The tone is everything. The tone is the difference between a haunting
and interesting Batman, and one with Bat-nipples and a car that looks like a giant
dick. The wrong tone takes all the lore and throws it against wall to be
laughed at and ridiculed.
Barry Allen has superpowers, like so
many other famous heroes. But the
character is known for being light-hearted and fun. He is the class clown of the Justice
League. He has abilities that defy
physics but he’s also sort of a goofball.
It maintains a balance of the potential danger of such a power with a likable guy who just wants to help people. The
Flash got the tone just right. Barry
is a sweetie-pie who is also a nerd.
That’s all you have to know.
There is no brooding, no hidden darkness. He’s just a young guy trying
to do the right thing.
When the show began, the idea of
Flash as a time traveler was planted early.
Barry’s mother was killed when mysterious strangers invaded his home
when he was a boy. They could not be
identified because they were moving too fast.
It’s not too difficult to connect the time loop dots. But in the most recent episode “Rogue Time”,
we finally see the Flash take a trip backwards, albeit by accident, and have to
deal with the consequences.
I guess that’s what makes this
episode unique in time travel lore. Most
of the time, when the past is altered to one’s benefit, the character learns a
lesson about reconstructing a timeline. That’s fine. Certain events cannot be
changed without repercussions; every change causes ripples, space-time
continuum, etc. “Rogue Time” was a
little different.
Barry tries to keep a tidal wave,
unleashed by a weather-controlling bad guy, from destroying the city. He
circles the beach at warp speed to create a something that will stop the
something. Because he reaches a certain
speed, he zips back about 24 hours in time.
The Flash is right back at the beginning of the previous week’s
episode. He knows where the bad guy is
and he figures he can stop all this mess from happening before it starts. However, he learns that old time travel chestnut
that time cannot be toyed with; that preventing one disaster may create
another. Barry makes the decision to
alter time to change the city despite the consequences. Of course, it sucks for the Flash.
Instead of following Barry through
his mess, the episode turns to his friend Cisco and what previously would never
have happened if Barry had not changed things.
In fact, unbeknownst to Barry, Cisco was murdered for uncovering
someone’s true identity. The bulk of the
story is now the events that fill the vacuum caused by Barry’s immediate
disposal of the bad guy. Cisco ends up
in trouble, there is a Captain Cold sighting and Barry has to clean up a completely
unrelated mess.
Plus, the actions of the previous
timeline led to love for Barry. Iris,
the woman he pines for, admits to Barry that she loves him. Barry reveals he is the Flash, they kiss, and
then…he tries to tackle a tidal wave. In
the new timeline, the drama never happens, but Barry assumes the feelings are
still there. He is wrong. It is explained to him that emotions are not
predictable; it could have been the events of the previous timeline that led to
Iris professing her love. Now, the
feelings are still locked away.
And you know what? Barry has to deal with that shit. There
is NO resetting of the old timeline. That is what makes this episode kinda
funky. The new timeline is life now. He
threw away the old one. Iris still isn’t into him, Cisco is alive, and Barry
got a really shitty lesson about time travel.
In time travel stories, there is
always that moment characters decide meddling with time isn’t worth it and the
DeLorean is inevitably run over by a train.
The Flash got that lesson, but to Barry, he’s stuck in a kinda crappy
timeline. His friend is alive (no one
knows he was killed), but the love of his life thinks he’s kind of a creep
now. Plus, he has that loneliness of
being the only one who knew what could have been. The worst part is, as far as
speeding fast enough to travel through time, he is absolutely positive this is
only the beginning.
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