The Flash Has Run Its Course - It Needs to End with Season 9

[TMC]

https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/the...-final-season/

At the core of The Flash’s atrophy is one of their best and underutilized characters, the previously mentioned Iris West-Allen. From the get-go, Iris was set up to be a prolific journalist who would eventually end up owning her own media company and collecting at least one Pulitzer on the way there. Four seasons in, Iris had not only not done any of these things, she had quit being a journalist altogether in order to keep Team Flash running while Barry was off getting free therapy in the Speedforce. Candice Patton even said that the show digging deeper into Iris being a journalist was a “lost cause” at a fan convention in 2018. In contrast to Iris’s sidelining, other characters often got to have fully resolved emotional arcs throughout each season, and this in turn made Iris’s presence feel increasingly hollow. Next to Barry, she’s been through the most in the series, but the depth of her trauma is never truly explored. With her emotional journeys effectively abandoned, the promise of her finally getting to be a journalist again near the end of the fourth season was an exciting one, though it ended up being a letdown as well.

Iris’s mistreatment by the writers is tightly intertwined with the more upfront problem of The Flash’s bloated main cast. The last four seasons of the show have featured at least 9 main characters at one time, with the seventh season of the show having a total of 11 (including Danielle Panabaker’s double duty as Caitlin Snow and Killer Frost). Iris’s chances of getting any real emotional development were out the window after Season 5, which was made appallingly clear after every character got a special episode in the front half of Season 6 to process Barry’s impending death except for her, his literal wife. Iris is even snapped at for seemingly not caring about Barry’s death, but that thread goes nowhere, so there was no point in it even happening.

Meanwhile, the newer characters that the show insisted on introducing are allowed to get more emotional development than Iris ever was in her first few seasons, but the execution is often sloppy and sometimes even irritating. The countless retcons of the origin of Killer Frost were never on the priority list of things fans of The Flash wanted to see, yet they are strewn throughout the series, and it’s clear that there was never any care put into them anyway. Killer Frost and Caitlin Snow had the potential to be interesting characters, but their shoddy development being prioritized over that of the show’s female lead is tiresome season after season, and Danielle Panabaker’s cringe-worthy portrayal of the two isn’t able to do either character any favors outside of the script.

The tonal whiplash The Flash gives us season to season isn’t great either. It’s wonderful that so many terrible things have stopped happening to Barry and Iris like they used to in the first few seasons, but the show has become so campy at points that it’s painful. Killer Frost is often used as overcorrection for the darkness of earlier seasons, but a more unfortunate harbinger of this comes in the form of Barry and Iris’s children, Nora (Jessica Parker Kennedy) and Bart (Jordan Fisher). Despite being played by full-grown adults and being established as such within the show, the pair often act as though they are teenagers, not only with their personalities but with their emotional responses to things as well. With the two of them helming the mid-season premiere of Season 8, the show felt more like something that should be airing on Disney Channel rather than The CW. This is no fault of Kennedy or Fisher; they, much like Patton, do very well with the material that they are given, but there is only so much that can be done when that material is mediocre at best.

At the end of the day, it is the structure of each season that makes a show what it is, and the way that showrunner Eric Wallace structures each season just doesn’t work well with the amount of people The Flash has to keep track of. His self-titled “Graphic Novel” structure for each season is interesting, but it also means that major players are put on the backburner for the majority of a story arc that is supposed to be about them. When Iris was trapped with Mirror Master in Season 6, she was barely seen, and the fake version of her that stole her life got more screen time and was able to do the things that fans had begged to see Iris do for years. This season, the first “graphic novel” arc was a five-episode event that brought in some characters from other CW-verse shows, but now we are in “interlude” episodes until the next arc begins.

With the show already overly swollen in the character department, it certainly didn’t need to give us preplanned filler that is outwardly announced. Good filler episodes (or bottle episodes) don’t need to be explained as such, and at worst you finish one and think “Well, that was filler.” Telling the world that you’re writing multiple episodes just to write them makes the season look weaker from an outside perspective, especially because there will be (as cited above) even more interlude episodes after the next major arc this season.