Quick Thoughts on Episode 1 of CW’s ‘The Flash’

The pilot for CW’s fall superhero drama ‘The Flash’ was leaked this week, thankfully, so I can get this episode out of the way now instead of it being another show amongst the many, many shows I’ll sample come fall.

Quick thoughts:

-Casting nailed it for the lead, Grant Gustin makes The Flash/Barry Allen a fun, likeable, and appealing character for those less familiar with the comic book world. The tone of the show, and by extension, the lead, is worlds apart from the CW’s other DC comicbook show, Arrow, which took a “darker, grittier” feel, and undid that darker tone with the most hackneyed, idiotic inane, insipid dialogue this side of Transformers. I can’t say the dialogue is much better in The Flash (it is, but only marginally), which makes sense seeing as how the creator of this show is Greg Berlanti, also a writer/creator/producer/developer/craft services for Arrow as well as The Tomorrow People, the 2011 Green Lantern movie, the shit stain that was 1-season-blunder “No Ordinary Family,” and the utter bullocky cock fart “Political Animals.”
Still, The Flash has a lighter, more fun tone and they do succeed more often than not at making a more fun show.
There are no obvious stinkers amongst the cast, the chemistry between lead Gustin and friend/unrequited love interest Candice Patton as Iris West is good. It does indeed feel as if they’ve known each other for years and have developed a warm relationship over the years.

-The episode sometimes got a little too origin stories for me, I mean, it makes sense for the especially uninitiated, but, I don’t really care how he got his powers, just move on and do stuff

–[SPOILER SPOILER] I may have negative feelings towards Arrow, but I still got a bit giddy with the Green Arrow cameo [END SPOILER]

-“I don’t think the lightning struck you, I think the lightning CHOOSE you” groan

-The CGI effects for the tornado was pretty neat and worked well at not looking excessively CGI

-Okay so they flip the car over going at 50+ mph and Flash makes it out with little more than a cut above his eyebrow despite his NOT wearing a seatbelt?!?! Okay, I know he has fast healing, but even fucking Wolverine can’t heal that fast. Like, he’d be half-healed at most after that. No broken bones?! Like…he doesn’t even have a firm grasp on his powers yet. C’MON!

-Also, seeing as how his muscles regenerate so fast, I’d really like it if they had him eating a lot/often, his body would need a constant intake of nutrients to perform the bodily upkeep. Little details like that will really make it pop for me

-Conflicted feelings about the ending, I hate how it just HAS to tease something more, something that will just be horribly drawn out and just be a tease for the audience. Still, that they don’t seem to be setting up wheelchair guy to be an out and out villain is good at least.

-Who the fuck builds a particle accelerator in the middle of an urban area? First of all, that shit is LONG. Fermilab’s is 4 miles, the Large Hadron Collider’s circumference is 17 mile. It’s not some dinky shit in a building. Second, these are all built on farm land a) for safety b) because urban areas have lots of wires and subways and shit underground that would make building the accelerator impossible. DETAILS MOTHERFUCKERS, DO YOU SPEAK IT

-Why would you just stand there without your mask on after beating weather guy. Run motherfucker run.

-It had my attention for the first half of the episode but afterwards I just grew too damn bored with the show. I thought it was the end of the show about 3x during the course of the episode only to be sorely disappointed. I’ll watch another episode, I like it better than Arrow at the same point in its run (granted that may be because the hype for that show built it up too much). Fuck, this may very well end up being a ‘watch-half-the-season-but-should’ve-dumped-it-after-the-third-episode’ situation.

Overall, I enjoyed/tolerated/didn’t hate about 35% of the episode and was bored/annoyed/aggravated by 65% of it.

The Flash Pilot:

6.0-6.5/10 with particular regard towards lead Grant Gustin. I kind of hate the phrase but he does geek chique well, straddling the line between being semi/sorta-believably geeky/intelligent and but able to be affable when needed. The show semi-convincingly portrays him as an intelligent-ish character without falling into the pitfall of feeling the need to turn him into one of those Brilliant-with-Aspberger’s Sheldon Cooper-types. He’s likable, the cast isn’t bad, but I don’t know if a story-of-the-week show filled with questionable dialogue at best will cut it for me.