{"id":8155,"date":"2015-12-09T10:38:14","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T15:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/?p=8155"},"modified":"2015-12-09T10:38:14","modified_gmt":"2015-12-09T15:38:14","slug":"the-flash-review-2-9-running-to-stand-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/2015\/12\/09\/the-flash-review-2-9-running-to-stand-still\/","title":{"rendered":"The Flash Review: 2.9: Running to Stand Still"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Trickster returned on last night&#8217;s <em>The Flash<\/em>! Mark Hamill&#8217;s lively villain provided a very welcome sense of fun. Unfortunately, the Trickster also served as a reminder of how lackluster most of this season has been. As I watched him light up the screen, I couldn&#8217;t help wondering why every episode hasn&#8217;t had an entertaining villain. Even within this episode, he was weighed down by the much blander Captain Cold and Weather Wizard. What is season two&#8217;s aversion to fun?<\/p>\n<p>This episode ended up with Joe&#8217;s son Wally West showing up at his door. It is very exciting to have Wally around and I&#8217;m hoping the character will breathe new life into the show when it returns for the second half of the season.<\/p>\n<p>The relationship between Barry and Patty continued on in this episode. It seems like the show has them kiss a lot to make up for a lack of real chemistry. The plot about Patty not opening up to Barry about her past was somewhat interesting, but definitely didn&#8217;t help sell me on the couple.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of relationships, this episode also gave us Jay and Caitlin kissing under the mistletoe. That couple has a little more chemistry, but it also feels like they threw a new love interest at Caitlin in lieu of having her grieve Ronnie properly. Maybe they didn&#8217;t want to be redundant with season one, when she thought Ronnie was dead and clearly wasn&#8217;t ready to move on, but her new relationship still feels rushed.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, it was revealed that Zoom has asked Harry to help him with his plan to steal Barry&#8217;s speed force. In and of itself, this is a fairly simple and by-the-book plotline, but Harry has turned out to be a pretty interesting character and the execution of this could be interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Trickster returned on last night&#8217;s The Flash! Mark Hamill&#8217;s lively villain provided a very welcome sense of fun. Unfortunately, the Trickster also served as a reminder of how lackluster most of this season has been. As I watched him light up the screen, I couldn&#8217;t help wondering why every episode hasn&#8217;t had an entertaining<\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/2015\/12\/09\/the-flash-review-2-9-running-to-stand-still\/\" title=\"Read More\">Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":183,"featured_media":8156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2405,2,176],"tags":[2132],"class_list":{"0":"post-8155","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-comic-book-tv-shows","8":"category-television","9":"category-television-reviews","10":"tag-the-flash"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}