Culture of Pop

The Flash Review: 2.2: Flash of Two Worlds

In its second week, the second season of The Flash continued to seem like a mixed bag. The season premise that Zoom will send more and more difficult villains to kill Barry until, presumably, appearing himself towards the finale is a solid foundation for a season.

The character of Barry Allen is in a weird place this season. His hostility towards Jay Garrick went beyond distrust into outright cruelty. He also killed a villain without much of a second thought. The fact that we have Arrow as a model gives me some comfort; that show knew how to take a difficult character and shape him into a true hero over a lot of time and a lot of character development. If that’s what they’re doing with Barry, it could be great. But, I worry that Barry is still supposed to read as a nice guy.

Jay proved himself to be a good guy, at least for now. I’m still waiting for him to really pop as a character. He feels more like a walking winking reference than a character in his own right. They played both him saying his name and him putting his iconic hat on as  big moments, but I’m not going to be entertained solely by references to the comics. I want to see what’s interesting about this particular Jay Garrick on this particular show.

I’m also not sure how I feel about Caitlin Snow’s apparent crush on Jay. Both Caitlin and Iris West haven’t been shown grieving as much as I’d like. Barry has spent more time talking about Eddie Thawne and Ronnie Raymond than they have. I’d like to see both of them deal with their respective losses more before being thrown into anything new.

This episode introduced Patty Spivot, a young cop who’s eager to join Joe West’s task force and fight metahumans. She’s off to a strong start as a character, showing how she can pull her weight both on the team and as a character.

The episode ended on another universe where Wells is still respected and running STAR Labs. It wasn’t an entirely terrible tease, but I hope the writers realize they still have a lot of work to do making me care about the main characters of this universe before I start caring about what’s going on in alternate worlds.

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