Thursday, 11 February 2016

The Flash Season 2 Episodes 12-13 review - Fast Lane/Welcome to Earth-2


And it's time to take another look at the events of the Fastest man a... well second... it's time to look at the events of the third fastest man alive in the Flash


Fast Lane

And the award for the most extraneous villain goes to…

Seriously, Tar-pit is a non-entity in this episode, there’s no depth to him, the fight scenes were kinda laughable (I’m just going to stay still and do nothing whilst you have this conversation) his defeat was easy and his CGI was shocking, even for a TV budget. He existed purely as a device to get the actually interesting parts of the plot going.

Fortunately, those interesting plots are interesting enough that I continue to give these episodes above average ratings, and I will do so again with this one. Wally’s street-racing is one of the 2 primary focuses of the episode and it gives Iris a chance to shine as an investigative journalist, something they need to do more often. Her scene with the ringleader was a really nice scene, although I would have preferred it if she was less meek at the end.

It’s not new ground for someone obsessed with a dangerous hobby to get a dangerous reminder of how dangerous it is to the point where they have to consider giving it up but that doesn’t really bother me because it’s well handled. Whilst I’m not keen on the direction they took with Wally West, I’m comfortable with their handling of it to the point where I am letting it pass.

The second major plot focus is the growing relationship between Harrison Wells and Barry and the eventual betrayal of that relationship. They did a really good job in this episode building that and what I kind of like about this version of the character, he’s blunt and open with the truth. He says directly that given the choice between his daughter and the team, he will unreservedly choose his daughter and yeah, I can absolutely see it.

It’s nice to see that Barry delivers the motivational speech this time to everyone else, bringing reference to a couple of past events where people have put their families first and it’s quite nice that I don’t have to slam the ‘hypocrite’ button.

Overall a solid episode but let down by anything to do with Tar-pit essentially

Rating 7.5/10

Welcome to Earth-2

Oh, Flash, why must you be the way you are, so much great stuff came out of this episode with many references for major comic book geeks but man oh man oh man did it come apart thanks to one dramatic setup.

Approximately 1/3 of this episode was unwatchable for me. I could not comprehend the idea of Barry Allen, the Flash stealing someone else’s life. I kinda get him becoming emotionally attached but he’s supposed to be smart, and he didn’t realise how out of control this had become. It truly disgusted me and made me very uncomfortable watching anything that happened. It would’ve been fine if it had been once scene but it was a significant portion of the episode devoted to this which could’ve easily been done another way.

Having said their version of Iris was glorious in her tough no-nonsense attitude and I liked how she was not afraid to take her enemies on, with a gun anyway. Pointless drama off my radar there is some glorious stuff to this episode

We get Ronnie Raymond and Caitlin Snow aka Deathstorm and Killer Frost whose powers are relatively limited and we get Cisco Ramon’s counterpart who is a freaking badass but one who’s a complete idiot if he thinks himself more powerful than Zoom.

But drama is not just afoot on Earth-2 as a new metahuman is attacking the City, wanting a showdown with the Flash and it’s up to Joe, Caitlin and Jay to stop them. And we get some interesting revelations about Velocity-6, which as it happens was responsible for the loss of his powers and not Zoom.

Caitlin then decides to refine the formula, creating Velocity-7 which worked ok, but she’s determined to work on Velocity-8 and whatever it takes to get Jay active again. I love that development.

Zoom’s appearance in this episode was brief but man did he show his stuff killing off 2/3 main bad guys and giving us a pretty spectacular cliffhanger. Man am I torn about this episode

Rating 6/10

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Images used in this review are from The Flash and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.

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