Well… that was an interesting two-hour pilot slashed to the 45-minute synopsis version. I am whelmed, as a friend used to say, but I’ll give it a few eps to develop some (heh, heh) legs.
The extended cameo by John Wesley Shipp is a really nice touch. Maybe I’m just a sucker for cheap insider sentimentality.
Is the murderer of Barry’s mom Professor Zoom?
I was more of a Marvel guy back in the day, so excuse a dumb question…
Were Professor Zoom & Reverse Flash one-in-the-same?
I haven’t bought a comic book since 1974, so bear with me.
I liked it. I usually can barely tolerate what CW does to superhero tv shows, but this one seemed to be avoiding their worst clichés (“Let’s just say…,” “Trust me…,” people brushing off telling someone something important instead of just talking about it already, etc.).
It kinda bugs me that Allen sees the bad guy going for a gun and in the subjective six or seven minutes he has to think up a response and act on it, his Plan A is to crash the car.
In the comics, yes. Here, probably - it matches well enough.
Professor Zoom is the first of three Reverse Flashes - the second was simply named Zoom (and was one of Wally’s enemies), the third was introduced into the comics probably about 6 months ago, and was Iris’s brother (not Wally’s dad). (Given the difference in Iris’s father in this universe, that RF would not fit, here. Joe West is a bit annoying, but he’s not the abusive fuck that William West is.)
I took a look at the cast list, to see if the scientist was anyone we knew from the comics… Turns out he’s about the only one who’s not. Going to be interesting to see how Killer Frost and Vibe shake out. Sorry. Had to.
I saw the five minute trailer, and I have to say it looked an awful lot like the Tobey McGuire Spiderman.
So what’s the deal with the supposedly crippled professor who apparently has a hotline to 10 years in the future? Is this comic book canon? And what is a “reverse Flash”?
I saw the five minute trailer, and I have to say it looked an awful lot like the Tobey McGuire Spiderman except with running.
Yes and no…He’s not, so far as we know, anybody we’ve seen before, but time travel is extremely common in Flash’s stories, and this is far from an unusual application of it. The headline he was looking at was a pretty obvious reference to the Crisis on Infinite Earths, where Barry died (after a long detour to the 30th century - like I said, time travel is very common).
[spoiler]As I mentioned up above, the Reverse Flashes are three* separate enemies of the Flashes, each with slightly variant powers. Professor Zoom and Zoom were specifically notable for wearing versions of their respective Flash’s costumes, only with the colour scheme reversed (thus the name) - yellow with red lightning-bolt accents, rather than yellow on red.
I really like The Flash in the comics (possibly my favorite superhero) and I quite liked this premiere episode. The series already promises to be more fun than its predecessor series. Of course, when your rogue’s gallery includes a talking gorilla, you can’t take yourself too seriously.
But wait! There’s more…
I enjoyed it but that scene with the Green Arrow dude didn’t make sense to me. How the hell did he know where to find GA to have a heart to heart on the to of some random building?
Also, is wheelchair dude really cripple? Or can he only walk inside the confines of that secret room?
One can surmise that, this being the 21st century, both Barry and Oliver have some form of communication device.
Also, they showed Barry calling Oliver on Arrow.
Gave it a shot. Badly edited and erratic story line. Way too much angst. Moving on.
Why, that’s pure moonshine, fantasy… witchcraft!
Yes, I’m aware of these newfangled devices called phones.
I was not aware of that last bit though.
Thanks.
Yes, as noted last night’s season premiere of Arrow had a scene of Barry calling Oliver Queen. And Barry knows that Oliver is the Arrow through events that took place in the last season of Arrow.
Not bad. The Flash comics went a little crazy with all the time travel and it looks like there will be more of that in this series. But this show kept the flavor of the Barry Allen Flash from the 60s. I’ll keep watching it for a while to see how it goes.
BTW: When the Flash would use that treadmill in the comic books was he able to take off?
I actually found the pace of the show refreshing. Arrow went way too overboard with backstory making it a barely watchable soap opera.
I hope they keep it moving quickly and stay with the bad guy of the week format for a while, and just leave the last 5 minutes to brood about his dad and many girlfriends.
Once, during the Silver Age, for twenty minutes. Sorry.
But seriously, time travel and super-speed are perhaps the two plot devices most likely to lead to violence to the willing suspension of disbelief. As I have said before, it should not be possible for the Bad Guy to say “Look here comes the Flash” and pull the trigger or press the button on the Magic Death Machine - by the time the image goes from the retina to the brain Flash should have punched his lights out already.
And if you can travel into the past and change things, you can do anything (as we learned in the first Superman movie) and it simply becomes a series of deus ex machina events and do-overs that are very difficult to paper over with mutterings about Tampering with the Time Stream. Not impossible, but difficult.
The writers handled these problems in Superman usually by forgetting that the Supe had super speed except to get to the scene of the crime, and by treating time travel as either an adventure in another world (“The Metropolis of the 30th Century!”) or selectively ignoring the idea that you can’t change the past.
Some superheros can’t be translated out of comic books, ISTM. “Some things man was not meant to know.”
Regards,
Shodan