Jim’s Review

This week’s episode of The flash was rough. There’s just no other way to put it. With Iris making a scene during a nice group dinner, she’s actually becoming radically unlikeable.

The team-up between Ray and Felicity and the STAR Labs group made for a couple of fun moments, but ultimately, it felt manufactured. Felicity’s advice to Barry about dealing with Cisco and Caitlyn was a bit obvious. “Trust them” is a little simplistic, and ignores the problem of having trusted Dr. Wells in the first place.

Emily Kinney was completely wasted in the episode. In fact, I’m thinking back on it, and I’m not sure she was ever shown standing up. Her puns were absolutely cringe-worthy, and they never did explain why Barry couldn’t maneuver around her droid-bees.

I’m sorry to say this has been a true stumble in an otherwise very strong season.

Kyle’s Take

The Flash has been stumbling for a while and this week, it couldn’t catch itself before falling flat on its face. At the beginning of the season, we were calling The Flash electric (pun intended), fantastic, and a great inaugural season. Now, we’re calling it a very strong season and I think the villain of the week format contributes the most to its decline.

I’m not as big of a Kinney fan as Jim. I guess I should be a Kinney fan because she’s from Wayne, Nebraska and I should back my fellow cornfed, Great Plains walkers, but she was less wasted as an actor and more cast in a role she had no business portraying. The two characters Kinney’s Queen Bee draws inspiration from are forty-fifty years old. Kenney’s almost thirty but she played a teenager in The Walking Dead because she looks that young. Her Queen Bee in The Flash was supposed to have a PhD and you don’t have a PhD when you’re nineteen unless you’re Sheldon Cooper. What are they supposed to do with her, attach freaking prosthetic crow’s feet? Enough about the villain’s age and the miscast, and let’s get to the actual Queen Bee character. Brie Larvan has the abilities of The Atom villain, The Bug-Eyed Bandit, but she shares a name with HIVE’s leader. If HIVE sounds familiar to Arrow fans, it should. Arrow has name dropped HIVE five times this year (they were the ones who hired Deadshot to kill Diggle’s brother) and this week looked like a golden opportunity to introduce the gang and have a multi-show cross-over, and they blew it. Like so many villains of the week, The Flash flushed her.

Not even an “All Star Team Up” could save this episode. Usually, a superhero team up means a great episode for The Flash or Arrow, but Atom visiting Central City was unmotivated and disrupted Arrow’s timeline. Not to get too into Arrow during a Flash review, but the last time Rickards made an appearance on The Flash as Felicity, she didn’t show up in that week’s Arrow. It’s okay to give the same actors screen time in both shows, during the same week, but the creative team set a precedent with Felicity’s inability to return to Starling City in time for the Arrow’s exploits—heck, she was on a train at the end of the previous crossover episode and still couldn’t make it to Starling on time.

The Wells saga has been marking time for a while and the longer it drags out, the less believable it gets. I believe in Barry’s mistrust of Wells, but The Flash still hasn’t explained how he knows Wells is the Reverse-Flash besides Wells’ slipping up about the speed force. Barry (to Cisco and Caitlin): Here are two flow charts. One is of my mother’s killer and the other one is of Wells. They look somewhat similar, so Wells must be the Reverse-Flash. Okay, Barry. You too, other Barry.

And I don’t know about Jim, but whenever more than half of a table gets upset and simultaneously leaves in the middle of a meal, it’s no longer a nice dinner party. It becomes a tense dinner party. I don’t like how Iris left the table either but with Ray buying out the entire restaurant, making the restaurant empty, you can’t call her freak out much of a scene. My biggest issue with Iris is that everyone’s lying to her but she picks on Eddie. I’m sure her character is channeling her emotions but the writing doesn’t reflect that. She’s oblivious to everyone else lying to her. You’d think she’d know when her father or stepbrother was lying but apparently not.

Verdict:

“All Star Team Up” is the weakest episode of The Flash so far but the next few weeks look promising: Wells might get outed, Grodd makes his official debut, and the Rogues return, hopefully with some other villains in tow.

If you want to know more of our Flash musings, check out our secrets page here.