My name is Barry Allen and I'm the fastest man alive: THE FLASH tv show

Funny, I just started watching Masters fo Sex at the time the season started and the Casanova doctor from that is Jay Garrick in this.

Is Jay Garrick the son of a WWII era hero, or is there more of the old costume than the hat anyway? That is to say the helmet is part of teh Golden Age Flash costume isn't it? I've not really followed DC so not totally up with who's in what team but I do remember seeing a Flash in that costume as one of the Justice League or Justice Society of Americas and I think they were from a parallel world though I'm not sure if they were then present day or sometime in the future. May have been late 70s or sometime in the 80s when I came across what ever comic that was in. & the whole structure of what fist where may have changed massively since then.
Is it DC that has double figures of significant parallel Earths? Each one of which has some tie to the present day of whichever teh main Earth is?

Jay Garrick is the Golden Age Flash, and is therefore in JSA. This puts him on Earth 2, since the Silver Age and in a different way in the Johnsiverse.

DC currently has 52 universes (and look, there are 52 wormholes in Flash...) which is several hundred less than Marvel ("our universe is 616, for example).

Yeah, thought he seemed a bit young to be active during WWII but apparently there were reasons for that.

This week's episode had a 10-second look at Gorilla City on Earth-2. Gorilla City! THere is nothing so silly that this show is above it, and it's great.

haha I gotta catch up with this

(So is this the thread for discussing Legends of Tomorrow?)

gave up after 3 episodes. only really enjoy cpt cold and sarah.

the bar fight in the pilot is p cool

how so?

i've only seen the first couple of episodes so far - they're okay but it's not quite the thrill-powered adventure i was hoping for. captain cold and heatwave's scenery-chewing partnership is my favourite element. kinda bugs me that the white canary's costume is really more of a dirty beige though!

This show is turning into Fringe Jr.

the crossover episode with supergirl was pretty fun!

I thought it was kind of a wasted opportunity... The episode focused too much on the ongoing Supergirl subplots and her villains, so Barry didn't have much to do in it. I wish they'd just straight adapted one of the famous Flash/Superman races from the comics, as the promo poster suggested... Now all we got was a slight nod towards those stories at the end of the episode.

And that wasn't meant to be a diss towards the Supergirl, IMO it's the best of the new DC shows on telly. It's just that I expected the crossover to be more equal towards both characters and their shows, maybe with a team-up between villains from each one too.

Also, on the Legends of Tomorrow tip, I think the quality of that series has improved notably during the last few episodes, as they've managed to do some interesting and unexpected character development for most of the protagonists. It's still not as good as Flash or Supergirl, but at least it isn't Arrow-level corny anymore.

yeah, legends definitely started shakily but it's getting better all the time

i'm not massively enthused by supergirl overall but melissa benoist is really good

wow, a lot going on in that last episode. not sure how they're going to write themselves out of the corner those last few minutes painted them into...

also GODDAMIT BARRY STOP TRYING TO FUCK YR SISTER

perhaps you have not seen his sister

also I totally love this show, and I'm glad supergirl is moving over to CW. the crossover was pretty weak but I imagine this makes it more likely that we'll have more. and maybe barry's screwing with the past is going to have ramifactions across Earths. I dunno.

SPOILERzzz

finding a way to get john wesley shipp to play the flash again was pretty clever - i totally didn't see the jay garrick reveal coming. he looks great in the costume!

it'd be good to have him around a bit more - it was super-weird that the first thing barry's dad did after getting out of prison was fuck off to live in a woodland cabin instead of, y'know, hanging out with the son he was away from for so long.

this season was a bit more uneven than the first one but i still liked it quite a bit and i genuinely have no idea where they're going next. hopefully the showrunners do!

I didn't even realize that aboug john wesley shipp until just now, having never watched that one season series. that's pretty cool; I like how this generation of DC series has brought back actors from the past (dean cain on supergirl, etc)

amanda pays and mark hamill were both in the 90s show too - playing the same characters they do in the new show!

I liked most of the season 2, but IMO the finale had too many deus ex machina type of situations, so it felt kinda rushed and definitely as good as the season 1 finale. First you had Zoom's doomsday machine, which had barely even been hinted at before this episode (the only clue was Cisco's vague visions in the pentultimate ep); how did this guy, who we know is violent psychopath who's spent most of his life in solitary confinement, even possess the scientific genius to build the machine? All his previous plans had been fairly simple and brutal (I'll kidnap someone and force the Flash to give me his speed! I'll bring all the metahumans from Earth-2 to tear shit down on Earth-1!), so this kinda superscience solution was totally out of character.

Then there was the whole time remnant thing which, sure, had been established before, but it doesn't make sense at all if you think about it a bit. So, Barry travels a couple of minutes back in time, so that there's two of him, and one Barry sacrifices himself... But if the one who died was the time traveling Barry, then once the other reaches the point where he has to time travel to create the copy, there'd be no Barry left. And if the one who died was the non-time travelling version, then the time-travelling version should disappear, because he couldn't exist anymore, just like Eobard Thawne disappared in the season 1 finale. So in any case, the end result should be that Barry died.

And the time wraiths were pretty much a deus ex machina too... Okay, they'd been established before, but the fact they were specifically after Zoom, and the reason for that, were only mentioned like 15 minutes before they took him. So it felt a bit anticlimactic.

finding a way to get john wesley shipp to play the flash again was pretty clever - i totally didn't see the jay garrick reveal coming.

I don't want to to sound condescending, but I thought the reveal was very easy to guess. We knew that the guy in the iron mask was a superhuman (since he was in one of those special cells), and obviously the writers wouldn't have given him the mask if he wasn't some familiar face, so that the unmasking would be a big twist. Throughout the season, most of the candidates who he could be were ruled out one by one, because we saw them while he was still in the cell: he couldn't be the Earth-2 version of Joe, Cisco, or Barry, nor the Earth-1 version of Hunter Zolomon. So the only real candidates left were alternate versions of Wally and Henry Allen, and when a Henry mentioned his mom's maiden name was Garrick a couple of eps before the finale, it was pretty obvious who the masked man would turn out to be.

And after it was revealed Zoom wasn't really Jay Garrick, it was reasonable to assume they'de eventually introduce the actual Jay, so it wasn't hard to guess the masked man was Jay, who was also his universe's version of Henry.

the crossover episode with supergirl was pretty fun!

― a lad of balls (bizarro gazzara), Friday, April 8, 2016 1:03 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally missed this and there is no mention of it in the Flash as far as I can see so had to look it up when I saw mentionon this thread.
It's in episode 18 of Supergirl an episode called World's Finest if anybody else has missed it.

& since it is him guesting in her show I guess it does make sense taht they continue purely with plots from her story rather tahn introducing the baggage from his.

There was a very brief scene in one Flash episode to indicate where the crossover was supposed to have taken place, but if you hadn't seen the Supergirl ep, you wouldn't have noticed it.

The crossover itself was okay, but also a kind of a missed opportunity. They were juggling too many balls (mostly relating to Supes' own ongoing plot) for one episode, so it didn't feel as epic as it should've... But Supergirl will move to the same network as Flash and Arrow and LoT next autumn, so there'll be more crossovers coming up.

Next season they've promised to do mega-crossover between all four DC shows! I guess Crisis on Infinite Earths is not too far in the horizon. (They already homaged Flash's sacrifice in it in the season 2 finale.)

We're catching up on Legends of Tomorrow pretty much from the beginning, and it's been pretty fun so far. I said something offhand about how I thought the dude playing Vandal Savage was really good, and my gf was like ehhh he kinda oversells it, and I said yeah but he's supposed to be like borderline bestial because in his comics incarnation he's an immortal Neanderthal, and she gives me a look like 'oh, come the fuck on'. And I'm like, 'really? that's where you draw the line?' and I remind her what show she's watching.

wentworth miller and dominic purcell's utterly shameless hamming as captain cold and heatwave is my favourite thing about that show

Sadly the last couple of episodes of LoT were a disappointment, after the series had picked up some steam after the meh beginning. There where way many too many plot twists where they basically introduced new rules for time travel while ignoring the previously established ones. The worst example is the way they defeat Savage...
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(MILDISH SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON 1 FINALE!)
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...because it makes no sense within general rules of fictional time travel, nor within the rules they'd established for this series, plus if you think about it logically, even after the heroes' "victory", there should be at least one version of Savage still at large. So basically they achieved jackshit!

I decided long ago that the only way I can enjoy any story about time travel is to ignore the rules established within the story regarding time travel because I can be assured that those rules will get chucked under a bus at some point. Time travel and internally-consistent storytelling are like oil and water, apparently.

Primer is super consistent on its time-travel rules. But also sort of boring.

I've been meaning to rewatch Primer to see if I'm able to revise my initial reaction of "uh...wat?"

Primer was mindnumbingly boring

Agreed on Primer's boringness... Everyone should watch the Spanish movie Timecrimes, it has the same basic idea as Primer, but done in a much more entertaining and visually arresting way.

But I disagree that time travel movies/shows have to be internally inconsistent... IMO the best movies in the subgenre, like Back to the Future or Timecrimes, are the ones where there consistent rules from time travel are established, and the drama comes exactly from how the characters manage to solve their problems without breaking those rules (they may bend them in creative ways, but the rules still remain).

IMO it's a sign of lazy writers if they can't be arsed to stick to the rules rather than coming up with new ones whenever they feel like it. I can sorta understand this in long-running shows like Dr. Who, because after years or decades it's understandable they want to come up with fresh ways to use their gimmick... But LoT was only one short season, and the rules were still changed maybe three or four times during that, it was just stupid!

I can never understand people who are so insistent on "rules" in genre stuff.

you hate it when a long poem tells a story.

so i'm currently way behind on season three but i just saw that upcoming episode will feature a trip to gorilla city (with keith david!) and i am 100% back on-board:

When Jesse Quick (guest star Violett Beane) informs the team that her father (Tom Cavanagh) has been abducted, Barry (Grant Gustin), Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker), Cisco (Carlos Valdes) and Julian (Tom Felton) voyage to Earth-2 on a rescue mission to save Harry from Gorilla City. As they trek through the forest, Barry and the team are immediately captured and brought to Grodd (voiced by David Sobolov). Grodd tells them he needs their help to stop Solovar (voiced by Keith David), the leader of Gorilla City, as Solovar wants to invade Earth-1.

this show is dopey but I'll watch that

yeah i'll ride the dumb-train to gorilla city no question

Earth-2 is usually a good time

unexpectedly i've been enjoying supergirl the most out of these shows recently - melissa benoist is really great at being upbeat and positive without being grating and the subplot about her sister realising she was gay was sensitively handled

i do kinda admire legends of tomorrow's second-season commitment to doing as much ridiculous time-travel shit as possible tho

Yeah, Supergirl is currently the best of these shows, especially because most of the cast is pretty good, and because they haven't yet fallen to the stupid overt melodrama a lot of these shows suffer from. Even the coming-out story was handled in a nicely low-key manner (well, low-key for a flashy superhero show), they could've milked a lot more drama out of it, but thankfully they didn't.

Flash is still okay, but it suffers from the same flaw what all these DC shows have in common, i.e. most of the time the characters are written like idiots, or like mopey teenagers. But unlike in Supergirl, only a couple of the actors (Grant Gustin and Tom Cavanagh) are really able to overcome the crappy writing, so whenever you have "dramatic" scenes involving other characters, it's cringe-inducing.

The newest Flash season is also kinda meh because they're yet again repeating the same arc as in the previous two seasons: a mysterious evil speedster appears, he's way faster and more powerful than Barry, Barry needs to up his game to defeat him. I wish they'd use a non-speedster main villain for change! Well, at least this time (unlike in the previous two seasons) they're not hinting Savitar is (gasp!) someone familiar to the heroes behind his mask... Though they did repeat that trope with his minion.

Legends of Tomorrow is kinda entertaining in its over-the-topness, but I do hate the fact that the rules of time travel change every week. Like, in one episode they hesitate to free a couple of slaves in 19th century USA, because that might cause a butterfly effect that would alter their timeline, but in the episode that preceded that they killed the Shogun of Japan ten years before he was due to die in real life, and no one even raised the issue whether that would have any consequences!

I do think stories revolving around time travel need at least some sort of consistency in what the rules of it are, because it's hard to feel anything is at stake when the rules change every episode to what's most convenient for that particular plot. The drama that comes from the heroes trying to avoid breaking the timeline/causing a paradox doesn't really work when there's no way of knowing what they can and can't do this week.

took me a while to get into this, because the first two eps felt like total cheese factor. After two episodes though, it turned out to be an entertaining thrill ride. about to wrap S1

It took me nearly a whole season to realize that Julian is Draco Malfoy

is there a DC TV universe thread or is this it?

Started watching Supergirl with my daughter and it is surprisingly great, even my wife likes it. Def the best superhero TV show (and a vast improvement over the DC films)

this is it iirc

supergirl is a lot of fun. melissa benoist is really great at playing wholesome positivity without being cloying

yeah, she is a v good lead, and I appreciate how it splits the difference pretty capably between soap opera mechanics, CSI cop show, and superhero action silliness

also, as i think I mentioned upthread, it features probably the most touching and sensitive portrayal of someone coming to terms with their sexuality i've ever seen on tv. it's got a real heart to it

supergirl and the flash are dev my favorite 2 superhero tv series, yes; and yes, they are better than the DC films by a fair margin.