Well viewers, looks like the streets have just got that little bit safer.
If you live in a fictitious city that is, not far from another fictitious city of course, one with lax planning regulations that allows particle accelerators to set up on picturesque riverbanks, smack bang in the middle of packed urban landscapes, which are in turn chock-full of genetically-malleable people all blissfully unaware super-heroism or super-villainy could soon be their lot in life.
You know, same-old, same-old; happens all the time right?
If you’re a person in the DC Comics universe then yes it does, over and over and over again.
Freak accident happens under the watch of people with scientific vision and overweening ambition if the best of intentions, innocent guy with emotionally-tortured backstory (pretty much always a guy it seems; women must have tougher DNA it seems) is caught in the resulting meltdown/accident/catastrophic mishap, wonders what the hell has happened to him (note: you cannot visit a doctor of any kind) and then sets to with his Janome sewing machine and whips up a sparkling, figure-hugging outfit, the better to fashionably fight crime with.
It’s a story as old as, well not time, more like the mid-twentieth century when many of these superheroes began popping up out of the woodwork/destroyed lab/freak act of nature aftermath, and you might think has been pretty much done to death.
On paper at least that’s probably true.
Thanks though to some very talented writers, and gifted actors, the stories are transcending their been-there, done-that, got-the-masked-lycra-outfit trappings and offering some interesting commentaries on what it must be like to find an often powerless life transformed.
Will you step up nobly and use your unexpected gifts nobly? Will you misuse them? And what of the still mere mortal friends and family around you? Do you tell them or keep quiet? Would they handle it well?
Shows like Arrow, which manages a brief crossover with The Flash in the pilot episode, and Gotham have shown it is possible to put a fresh new spin on these oft-told and much-loved tales, and now we have The Flash, the story of Barry Allen (Grant Gustin), a mild-mannered, good-looking forensic scientist with the Central City police department who finds himself gifted or cursed (guess which one he decides he is in super quick time) with the ability to move at lightning speed after a freak meltdown at Dr. Harrison Wells’ (Tom Cavanagh) S.T.A.R. Labs (the one so beautifully situated on the riverbank) affects him.
He comes, naturally enough, with an agonisingly sad family history – mother murdered by a mysterious man who appeared to surround her with a very Flash-like ball of light before she dies, a father wrongfully convicted but naturally innocent whose only saving grace in life is the unconditional love of his son and a life spend outside the bosom of his immediate family.
Of course not all is lost since he was taken in by the father of his BFF (with who he is secretly in love), Detective Joe West (Jesse L. Martin) and Iris West (Candice Patton) respectively, who raised him as his own and gave him as close a life to normal as he could.
Everyone of course has secrets galore including the people with supposedly only good intentions such as Dr. Harrison Wells and Detective West’s new partner, Eddie Thawne (Rick Cosnett), there are super-villains out there to be tracked down, and grand conspiracies to battle and expose.
So far, so pattern for superhero genesis followed to the letter.
And yet, for all the cliches and well-worn tropes, there is something inherently likeable about this show.
A lot of that comes down to the inherent everyday likeability of Grant Gustin who invests Barry Allen with just the right amount of gee-whiz, gosh-schucks-ness everyday man ordinariness to make him instantly relatable.
He makes the initial confusion about Barry Allen’s new powers seem quite real and traumatising, his transition to avowed crime fighter believable (not easy given the fantastical premise and outworking of said premise) and his decision to devote his life to tracking down the person evilly affected by the explosion of S.T.A.R. Labs and finding the murderer of his mother seem like the most natural decision in the world to make.
And that will be crucial in grounding this show in as much of our reality as is feasible.
The producers of the show have apparently promised that it will “the most faithful DC adapatation yet”, and while I am not familiar enough with the source material to confirm if that is the case, especially on the basis of one episode alone, those more familiar with The Flash seem well-pleased with its transition to the small screen.
The challenge with any of these shows of course is to flesh out the universe of the protagonist well enough that is enough but not too much going on, which could probe a challenge given how much was unleashed in the pilot episode.
Along with Barry’s central backstory, which is given a great deal of understandable prominence in the pilot, a sensible move since he is the anchor of the show and we need to do what is informing his life decisions, we are made privy to Iris’s clandestine relationship with Detective Thawne, Wells’ hidden ability to peer into the future (what is he up to?), and introduced to Wells’ two assistants, Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) and Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker), both of whom apparently have powers of their own (though we don’t see any hint of that in the pilot).
That’s a whole lot going on but provided the show’s producers can make good of it all, and the pilot episode indicates there’s more possibility of that than not, it will flesh out a show that could quite easily simply be another disaffected-by-life young man (although a sweet, loser-ish benign one in this case) off a crusade to seek justice, not just personally but for society as a whole.
And like Gotham, which has gone to a great deal of trouble to construct a robust, gritty narrative worthy of a HBO drama, it could elevate The Flash to an above average show which will accurately reflect the emotional and intellectual heft of the comic book source material.
Certainly, given the sheer multiplicity of not just good shows on television at the moment but shows specifically about superheroes – it cannot be long till they have their own devoted channel surely? – The Flash will need to make sure it is a must-see show and not just a “fun way to fill in an hour” show.
Slight though the pilot felt at times, The Flash offers a genuinely likeable protagonist, and sufficient promise of more muscular storytelling to come that you can believe it will rise above its cliched tropes and make something fresh and original and well worth watching on an ongoing basis.