The Flash: Season 1, Episode 3

The Flash

Episode Title: “Things You Can't Outrun”

Channel: CW

Director: Jesse Warn

Writers: Alison Schapker and Grainne Godfree

Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Runtime: 45min

Rated: TV-PG

Original Air Date: October 21, 2014

This week on The Flash we finally get some background on Caitlin. It's important to the show to establish the secondary characters as people that had lives before Barry showed up doing what he can do. It's clearly going to be important going forward, so I'm glad they got something established now instead of later. As irritating as Cisco's 'comic' relief can be sometimes, it's also good to see that he is suffering from loss and guilt as well, he just handles it in a different way, no need to have too many mopey characters running around.

On the villain front it's a mixed bag. The good news is that they didn't kill the villain this time around, but S.T.A.R. Labs is going to need to increase their employee count if the current plan is expected to go on for very long. The bad news; the audience is subjected to another villain with little in the way of personality or backstory. Really just the bare bones of his history are revealed to the audience, making sure that we know he's a bad guy without telling us much about him. The writers will need to introduce a metahuman or two that aren't psychotic and evil soon, or it's going to seem like the explosion struck a statistically unlikely number of scumbags. The rope-a-dope nature of the showdown at the end was a bit anticlimactic, I was hoping Barry would discover a new way to use his powers. Instead we got, go really fast, get the guy tired and knock him down, a little too much like the solution last week for my taste.

Both Grant Gustin and Jesse L. Martin had emotional scenes at Iron Heights with John Wesley Shipp, and those were well acted. The rest of the cast varied from average to pretty bad. Here the villain let's the viewers down again, he wasn't given much to work with to begin with, but the lines he did have a chance to deliver were stilted and empty feeling. Going forward the show runners need to find someone to embrace one of the villains' roles and go for something iconic.

Conclusion: If it fell off from the previous episodes, it didn't do it by much. What The Flash needs right now is a villain to grab the audience and really deliver. Any other quibbles with the course of the show thus far are easily remedied with a few tweaks that we could see in the coming weeks.

Rating: 7/10