Disagree strongly, but YMM, and obviously does, V.
That’s it, in a nutshell. As it hasn’t yet been “officially” established that Flash and Superman/Supergirl exist in the same universe as the CW shows, Flash is the most powerful hero in his universe, as far as we know. If he doesn’t carry the idiot ball at all times, there’s no show.
Are you thinking of Gorilla Grodd?
I’ve long pondered the extreme silliness of The Top as a Flash villain.
He has to throw a special top to the ground to do anything. Okay, Flash spots him just releasing the top from his hand. (Even for this to happen, he has to catch Flash off-guard, which could require quite a lot of preparation.) Flash rushes in, grabs him, and the The Top wakes up in a prison hospital. Flash still has time to pick up the top in midair and neutralize it for the protection of any bystanders.
Did anyone ever notice that Flash could be closing in on a villain in the comics, and they would be conversing?
It’s more obviously a problem with Flash or some other super-fast hero. But how many conversational exchanges could you have while running toward a friend?
That’s pretty much the formula of every sci-fi show, action thriller and superhero comic. There is a line of blatant disbelief they probably shouldn’t cross, like saying the moon is actually a giant egg and birthed a pregnant space whale that laid another moon (that happened in Doctor Who last year), but kids who don’t really care about such things are their target audience anyway.
Or a teleporter, and he runs into one the first season. Or someone who’s not powerful but is clever, like at least two characters, one of whom you’ve mentioned but haven’t seen the episode where you find out how clever he is.
Gotham isnt a super hero show, and Daredevil is just OK (maybe it’s that I never cared for Daredevil) . Flash at least has a sense of humor.
But last year, Green Arrow showed Flash that being fast wasn’t enough. I suppose that it would be enough against unaware street criminals, but not the guys like Reverse Flash, Zoom or Grodd.
Agreed. I thought about that one too, and for me, The Flash is still way better. There’s Heroes: Reborn on too, but it’s turned out to be meh.
Started watching Daredevil. It’s awesome.
Here is my argument regarding the Flash: he still only gets one action per turn.
OK, that’s talking like a video game, but it holds. No matter how fast the Flash is, he still gets to act once per round, then the villain gets to act. Then he can go again. Also, no matter how fast he is, he’s also not especially accurate or precise. His aim is terrible. Also, both in the comics and movies, his ability to think at super-speed is somewhat plot and situation dependent. He can obviously think fast enough to run around at super-speed and dodge things, but he doesn’t actually react at super-speed otherwise.
In short, his power is mostly that he moves fast. That doesn’t mean he’s actually super-strong. He may be able to punch somebody much harder than a regular dude, but not remotely as hard as the hypothetical velocity would make it. Which is good, because while he heals quick, he’d also break every bone in his arm from finger to shoulder hitting somebody that hard.
Things like the super-speed wind-up punch are just that: specific abilities in his toolkit of powers. They don’t work because physics says they do - they work because it’s a specific superpower he has, even if he didn’t know it yet.
This may sound hokey, but it does two things for the plot:
(A) It means there is an actual plot.
(B) Did I mention is means we can have a plot?
Basically, this level of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission. It has about as much to do with the real world as any fo the other super-powers seen. Stuff just works a certain way, because the writers says so. As long as the writers don’t stray too far from that, it’s not a plot hole by any means.
Excellent points!
But that doesn’t explain *why *it works like that, or even *how *it works like that.
Usain bolt is faster than me. If we have to perform a training circuit, Bolt doesn’t have to run up to the speedball, then wait for me, then Bolt gets to hit the ball for 5 seconds, then I get to hit the ball. It doesn’t work like that in the real world. Bolt will get to the ball a full 5 seconds before me. He will have finished his 5 seconds hitting the ball hitting the ball before i even get to the ball.
Bruce Lee is faster than me. If we are sparring, he doesn’t have to swing one punch, then wait for me to parry, then let me swing a punch. In the real world someone that much faster than me will punch me before i have any chance of blocking.
The Flash is like Bolt or Lee, but a thousand times faster. It makes no sense to say that the Flash can run 100m to the ball in 1/2 of a second, and then has to wait a full 15 seconds for me to arrive before he can start hitting the ball. It makes no sense to say that he can move his fist to my face so fast that i don’t even see it move, but he has to stop it an inch before contact to give me time to block it.
Acting once per round is *itself *an idiot ball. Why would the Flash only act once per round? If the Flash can start from 100m away and be standing beside me before my hand even reaches my holster, why does he have to wait for a full 5 seconds for me to re-orient, draw my weapon, aim and fire before he gets to anything else? Why not just hit me with his elbow as he runs past?
But why is it terrible? Any 8 year old can hit someone in the head with a Nerf ball from three feet away. The Flash can run up to within 3 feet of anybody at all and throw a brick at their head. he doesn’t need to be *especially *accurate, he just needs to be as accurate and precise as the average 10 year old kid.
The same goes for punching. the Flash can throw about a thousand normal punches in a second. A normal person can only block a maximum of 10. Even if the Flash is punching blind, he will land a dozen punches on anybody he chooses to fight before they get a chance to hit back. If he isn’t literally blind, then punching someone’s groin a thousand time is going to cripple anybody who isn’t super powered. the same goes for throwing sand into the eyes or a billion other things that the Flash could do to disable any normal person with 100% certainty even is he only makes *contact *once every 100 attempts.
Don’t get me started on what he could do if he actually carried stuff like alum or cayenne pepper.
Except that he does. In the comics he can see someone firing a gun and be able to change into costume, pull 6 people out of the path of the bullet and knock out the gunman. If he can’t react at speed speed he couldn’t respond to a bullet once it has been fired because no normal human can do that.
Yes, but it’s an idiot ball.
The problem is that none of this is explained by the writers or written consistently. They just make the character act stupid and forget powers that he has demonstrated elsewhere without explaining why. Which leaves viewers asking why didn’t do X about 10 times every episode.
For example, the show has demonstrated that he can run at least 2 metres to a person, grab a loaded gun from their from their hands before they can fire, remove their clothes, carry them all away, run down the street, pick up second person and carry that second person back before either person is even aware of it.
But in the very next scene he forgets that he has this ability and allows someone to draw a gun, aim it and fire before he even attemts to move. It’s not that the ability doesn’t work that way for some reason, he just forgets to do it.
Idiot ball.
If his powers work as you suggest, and he can run to person, then he has to stop for “a round” before he can grab an object from them, then the writers need to be consistent and stop showing the powers working exactly the opposite to that.
Creating “a plot” by having a character forget to use an ability that he has used at least 6 times before and that is the obvious ability to use right no is sloppy writing. It’s classic idiot ball.
Super speed requires a certain amount of idiot ball, as, theoretically, a speedster can take out almost any opponent before they could even react. The classic Flash Rogue’s Gallery is filled with normal guys who fought with special guns or hand-held weapons.
What makes Flash sorta ok despite this idiot ball is that later episodes he does act a little less idiotic. There are scenes where he does go on a crime cleanup spree where he grabs criminals before they can even react and they end up in the back of the police car instantly.
On the other hand, that makes all the scenes where he fails to do exactly that even worse, because it demonstrates that he could, but somehow just doesn’t. I remember Barry being mugged at gunpoint, basically laughing it off and disarming the guy; but for some reason, the same thing doesn’t seem to work when it’s a cold gun (that, for all appearances, is actually slower than a flying bullet) pointed at him instead.
Yeah. I know they’ve used him already, but he was shown as getting stronger before they sent him to a nice [del]farm[/del]jungle in [del]the country[/del]Earth-2, so he could come back and not be subject to some ass-pulled techno-blocker.
Or Pied Piper, even, although it’s easier to beat device-based mind control than pure telepathic kind, the TV show somewhat depowered him by just having him use sound weapons IIRC (I only watch intermittently, not a fan).
I’m already looking forward to some Gorilla City episodes. Then we can get Solovar to counter Grodd.
See, the guy with the cold gun (Snart) is a named Boss character. You cannot use mook swatting attacks like superspeed against him. He gets contractual boss immunity against cheese kill attacks like that.
Realistic? No. But so’s a man who can run so fast he can go back in time. Even just taking “as given” he can do these things, the effect on his surrounding environment isn’t modeled remotely realistically by the show.
For that matter, why does the Central City police department even get involved? A case where a disaster creates a bunch of superpowered individuals running wild throughout town sounds kind of like something the Feds would claim jurisdiction. In the show it’s sort of implied that most people don’t “believe” in superpowered individuals, but in later episodes this is false, as practically every resident of the city has now witnesses with their own eyes things like that black hole that ripped it up.
Well, I’m certainly not looking for realism in this show—if I did, I just wouldn’t be watching. And I do enjoy it, in part actually for its hilarious science abuses—which I think it’s got down to an art like no other show (seriously, every second episode they reference some actual and not very well known scientific concept—color-flavor locking in quark matter, anybody?—, only then to follow it up with something utterly laughable, from a scientific point of view, and it’s brilliant).
But what bothers me is the lack of consistency. No matter what fictional universe you create, you write the plot around its constraints—you don’t alter these constraints to suit the plot needs (well, at least not all the time). Because that’s just lazy writing. It’s like in a murder mystery having the audience baffled trying to figure out who it possibly could have been, only to then reveal at the end that it was somebody who’s never even appeared yet, or was briefly mentioned in a half-sentence on page seventeen.
You build audience expectations when introducing abilities and limits of the character, that he has to use these abilities and limitations to escape dangerous situations. That’s what creates tension in a dangerous situation—the audience wonders, given what they know about Flash’s abilities, how he will make it out of there. Just introducing some convenient new ability then disappoints, since had the audience known beforehand that Flash had that ability, the situation would not have been dangerous in the first place.
The same goes the other way around, when Flash is in situations that he should have no trouble with, but then, for some reason, gets saddled with new constraints in order to inject artificial drama. This is frustrating for the audience, since they know that if the Flash were acting as they know he can, then the situation he finds himself in should not be dangerous; hence, the danger feels fake, and fails to engage the viewer. So to me, there needs to be some in-universe reason that Flash can dodge bullets, but not punches, whenever convenient.
Well, at least sometimes they stick to this. There’s another villain with greater speed powers who is also a traitor to Barry. At least one episode, the reason Flash didn’t punch out Snart’s heart with superspeed was because there was a bomb inside someone else. Flash is perpetually hiding his identity from someone.
I guess what makes it entertaining to me is that while some elements are these lame failures for Barry to use his full power, the show has a lot of interesting drama and results that are sometimes surprising. For a standard schlock superhero show, it goes off script surprisingly often and surprises you.
I was an enormous fan of Buffy the Vampire slayer. Buffy has unrealistic elements as well - notably, the “computer” in Buffy is a convenient way for the characters to find out anything and everything needed to advance the plot. Joss Whedon even acknowledges this in a commentary. And yeah, all the vampires and magic and shit. Also unrealistic.
Buffy is another show that would often go “off script”. Characters would say clever things or use language in a clever way (despite supposedly being teenagers who aren’t the brightest example of such). And this made it entertaining, despite the negative elements like the cheap special effects.
Hey you! You stop thinking about Danielle Panabaker that way… 
(J/K. Go right ahead. They’re just Actors & Its Just Acting. She’d probably laugh her ass off if she thought she was making a dent in the collective Cro-Magnon Skull with her performance.)