Alas, you only really needed to watch the last two minutes of it to catch the crossover part, and I might actually be rounding up there. This season’s much hyped “Invasion!” crossover between all of the DC superhero shows on The CW got started last night on Supergirl. The DCTV crossover revs up in earnest (sorry Supergirl!) in “Invasion!” but Flashpoint still threatens to rear its ugly head. Instead, the execution has been tepid, the results disheartening, and ultimately it’s been a huge waste of time travel.By Nick Tylwalk 4 years ago Follow Tweet In a recent interview, executive producer Andrew Kreisberg said of an upcoming problem the characters will face, “It’s so big, we’re actually considering changing the saga sell from talking about Flashpoint to talking about that, because that’s really what’s driving the episodes for the rest of the season, actually.”įlashpoint could have been an exciting experiment for The Flash if they had thought things through and committed to such a massive change to the timeline. Aside from making convoluted villains, ruining characters, and creating conflicts that can be solved in a single episode, what good was Flashpoint?Įven the showrunners seem eager to move on from their ill-conceived twist. But hey, he realized he screwed things up too by time traveling so hooray for compassion through similar experiences.
And while his sadness is completely understandable, it’s the wrong direction for that character. We have Barry constantly apologizing to everyone, and now Cisco, the show’s comic relief, has been turned into a mopey mess. So what has Flashpoint really accomplished? If anything, it’s made the show worse. And what does it all lead to? For the third season in a row, the Big Bad appears to be someone who is faster than the Flash. No one would have batted an eye if Barry got a new CSI partner ( Tom Felton being one of the few positive additions to this season) and then a new baddie appeared on the scene to give people powers, because that’s essentially exactly what happened. Instead of Alchemy awakening powers that were present in Flashpoint, he could just have the power to turn people into meta-humans. Even new elements that have been introduced could have been done without Flashpoint. Caitlin Snow’s Killer Frost side? Conquered in one episode. The strained relationship between Joe and Iris? Gone in one episode. When Barry makes it back to the original timeline and things have changed, we see that Flashpoint hasn’t had as much of an impact as originally stated. As it stands, her death is painful, but in a completely generalized way (especially since like Barry, we’ve seen it happen over and over again). They attempted a shortcut by forcing Barry to be responsible for his mother’s death, but that moment would have had much more impact if we had spent more than 15 minutes of seeing Barry’s relationship with his mom. They needed to show Barry getting attached to Flashpoint and then make it a big decision when he decided to give it up. The logic seems to be, “Let’s keep viewers interested, but let’s not do anything too off-putting.” I understand it’s a tricky balance to maintain, but if they were going to attempt something as bold as Flashpoint, then they needed to follow through in a big way.
It’s a change without the courage of its convictions.įlashpoint hasn’t amounted to a shake-up as much as slightly rearranging things on a shelf. Because of that, we don’t get to see him forging a relationship with his parents, or trying to keep his Flash powers under wraps, or anything else to display a completely disrupted story.
Rather than letting Barry deepen his new relationships and show more of his life in the alternate timeline, the series decided to start three months into Flashpoint. The initial problem was only spending one episode in Flashpoint. While I understand the desire to shake things up and keep the character relationships interesting, Flashpoint has flopped from its very first episode. The execution of Flashpoint has been a failure.