Thursday 6 October 2016

The Flash- Season 1, Episode 3: Things You Can't Outrun

"He saved so many lives that day. And no one will ever know what he did,"

The A plot here is similar to last week's- a villainous metahuman created by the particle accelerator explosion (this one can become gas and looks just like Count Orlok from Nosferatu) is killing people in revenge and Barry stops him. This is, presumably, the format of the show. But there's a lot of character stuff going on, and arc stuff being seeded, beyond that.

But the episode starts with Barry and Iris at a zombie movie, and the first thing we see is an extra who looks delighted to be on television. But, by means of a "Ward Boulevard" (nice touch) we are immediately brought into the story of the week. We also see Barry and Joe begin their search to price Harry's innocence. And we see further evidence that Dr Wells is not a nice man and has both an agenda for Barry and a mysterious past- or perhaps future. So far these early episodes are masterfully constructed, so pregnant with storyline possibilities.

But we also get a flashback to the explosion nine months us ago and the tragic, heroic death of Caitlin's fiancé. This packs a heavy emotional punch and acts as serious development for Caitlin as a character. This episode is superb, but I'm a little concerned about this extra-judicial prison at STAR labs. Still, I suppose that as the state here is shown to practise judicial killing by the barbaric means of the electric chair it can claim no moral legitimacy; certainly the judge who sentenced Count Orlok to this death deserves no sympathy as, by her own twisted logic, she deserved to die.

This will be the last blog post on this excellent series for a bit as I'll be turning to Arrow until I catch up. But this is yet another superb forty-three minutes of television.

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