The pilot episode of
The Flash appears to quiver with a determination to succeed that's frequently indistinguishable from desperation. As if unaware that superhero tales are the mainstream's money-spinning order of the day, the show's creators kick off with a palpable resolve to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Perhaps that anxiety is nought but the product of some remarkably flat writing, and perhaps that was the result of a diktat or twelve imposed from higher up the production processes' chain of suits. But whatever its cause, the result is a story that's repeatably both timid and banal.
Neither lead actor Grant Gustin's considerable charm nor the sporadic brio of the action sequences can fully compensate for the production's safety-first assumption that the audience is emotionally and imaginatively stunted. Accordingly,
The Flash: Pilot is a show that tells us what to think and feel, and then, with all the deliberateness of a ploddingly patient remedial teacher, tells us all over again. More patronising yet, it swiftly signals up that whatever thoughts and emotions are going to be suggested will be reassuringly stripped of all complexity and intensity. The shock of the new, or even of the convincingly heartfelt, will just have to shock elsewhere. The cast are predictably handsome when not outrageously beautiful, comfortable, uncomplicated, and, through no fault of their own, almost entirely facile. Even those rare moments which stray close to feeling, such as the young Barry Allen's beating in the programme's first five minutes, are kept free of anything that might actually disturb. Has there ever been a pummelling in a small-screen drama marketed at adults that's so utterly denuded of pain and humiliation? It's violence as an exercise in threat-stripped nostalgia, an obvious feint of pathetically faked punches and notably absent sound-effects. Since the previous scene had already joyously declared that Allen is eventually to become the fastest man alive, his younger self's faux-mauling carries no threat at all. All this will soon be over. None of this will truly matter. Desperate not to overly tax our minds or hearts,
The Flash protects the viewer from all uncertainty and despair beyond the passing mystery of Harrison Wells' somewhat suspicious behaviour.
When the fundamentally agreeable Guskin is onscreen, it's impossible not to empathise with
The Flash's boilerplate dilemmas. But in the moments when he's absent, and with the glorious menace of Tom Cavanagh's Reverse Flash as yet hidden from view, the show sits as flat as any run-of-the-mill, pre-Whedon bubble of affectless inconsequentially.
The obviousness of the production's faintheartedness extends to its attempts to project
Pilot as something other than a superhero show. Yet embedding
The Flash in the least challenging traditions of the police procedural only lends
Pilot an unhelpful air of obsolescence. Rather than delivering a sense of comforting 21st century familiarity, it stupefies with its archaic inappropriateness. (By contrast, 1981's
Hill Street Blues makes the pilot's approach look profoundly conservative in both style and substance.) Equally, striving for an old-school Western's approach to the framing of showdowns when Allen and weather-controlling meanie Clyde Mardon clash only amplifies the sense of timourness. Lifting a hint of Sherlock Holmes' eccentricities without the slightest suggestion of inspiration, Barry Allen's superior deductive abilities are supposedly established by having him lie eccentrically on a sidewalk while sniffing a trace of 'fecal matter'. So artless is the appropriation that any sense of Allen as an individual dissolves into this poor impersonation of a pop-culture icon.
These aren't examples of post-modern playfulness so much as a worn-through patchwork of barely warmed-over cliches being idly substituted for craft and imagination. For all the occasional verve of
The Flash's action sequences, and despite the periodic and promising attempts to ground the action in urban mundanity, the overall result is a tame expression of bottom-line fearfulness. Put up with the silliness of the superhero material, we seem to be being assured, and the showrunners of
The Flash will ensure it delivers a reassuring mass of numbingly familiar humdrum. It's a calculation that appears to assume that fans of superheroics will put up with any amount of mediocrity in return for five minutes of costumes-on action and a general lack of scorn for the broadest conventions of the genre. To the makers of
The Flash, the problem seems to be all those other millions of potential viewers, who care little if anything at all for super-people and their super-quarrels, while appearing to want nothing more than nothing much at all from their viewing.
Least appealing of all is the show's script, which, laced with a deadening weight of earnestness and bromide, reduces every actor's role to its melodramatic fundamentals. Characters such as Caitlin Snow, Joe West and Eddie Thawne never rise above the status of the least substantial type, although they do at least offer easily-identifiable stereotypes for the cast to inhabit. But John Wesley Snipp, as The Flash's long-imprisoned father, is called upon to impersonate the human equivalent of a weather-beaten woollen square upon which oldy-worldly homilies have been ham-fistedly sown. The poor man does his best. "I love you son", Snipp declares in the pilot, as if the audience needs emotional truths spelt out as one might the contents of a shopping list for a sadly occluded child. Of course, Guskin is lent a matching declaration of love in return, for there are no hidden depths in
The Flash, where sub-text and text are nearly always one and the same. If there's a tragedy at play in that scene, it's that of two able actors being asked to emote with such little material to rely upon. That love might be displayed rather than declaimed, and that the audience might have the patience to watch such a relationship unfolding, clearly never occurs to the pilot's makers.
Similarly, when the brutally martyred Mrs Allen appears briefly in flashback, she's seen through a haze of techno-Vaseline and obscured by a saint's entirely unsullied virtue. With nothing of the unsettling distance between reality and perfection suggested by a Norman Rockwell painting of a family Christmas dinner, the Allens are so tritely angelic that they inspire only snickering and yawns. Even little Barry is already a moral paragon, perpetually taking punches in defiance of the bullies who prey on his uncool classmates. Where can a character go, when he's already a superhero-in-waiting while in primary school?
Show not tell would surely be a tenet of the Wise Old Owl, and few must be the number of Film Studies courses that would pass a script so determinedly ladened in exposition as
Pilot. When Caitlan Snow's private suffering is revealed, it's reeled out as a flatly literal litany of loss. When Barry Allen encounters the Reverse Flash in his disguise of Harrison Wells, he announces that he's 'always wanted to meet' the elder man. When Iris West meets Allen for the first time after his nine months in a coma, she declares that he's 'awake', as if the blindingly evident observation might underscore her qualities as a journalist. When Joe West and Allen clash over the identity of a mystery super-villain, the ensuing argument spells out twenty years of backstory in painfully literal soap-speak. And so on, and on. Only rarely is action allowed to trump speechifying. When Doctor Snow ineptly greets the freshly-awakened Allen with a request for him to pee into a test-tube, her guilelessness reveals something of her personality. In that moment, we're trusted to pay attention and rewarded with a chuckle too. A rare, passing marker of competency, it suggest the writers lacked only the will to polish their beats into a serviceable drama.
With no little irony, it's the stuff of the superhero genre that, combined with Gustin's
gee-whiz-me charisma, ends up saving the show. Whether it's his wrist-breaking test run in an absurdly bare-limbed experimental get-up or his bafflement at racing cross-country in a second, the mix of modest protagonist with absurdly prodigious abilities beguiles. Chad Rock's given no chance to convince, let alone shine, as the run-of-the-mill psychopath that's the episode's protagonist, and yet, in the very same frames, Gustin's bravery and vulnerability charms as it convinces. It's this performance that stays in the mind after
Pilot's credits close, a portrayal of a superhero that's second only to Christopher Reeves as Superman. In his wake, a small but promising scattering of costumed crimefighter traditions appear all the more convincing and compelling; a newspaper from the future, a mysterious secret hideout, a developing population of superhumans, the red skies of a crisis, the suggestion of a yellow-costumed speedster at the scene of Mrs Allen's murder, and so on. These would be the generic qualities that would ensure the first season's success, while the safety net of all those primetime cliches would prove to have never been necessary in the first place. In a world in which three of the highest grossing movies of all time are superhero films from the past few years, who could ever have imagined differently?
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