The Flash is racing to a screen near you on October 7th. If you haven’t been watching Arrow, where Barry Allen/The Flash was first introduced, then here’s a quick primer to get you started. I am only, more or less, covering plot points revolving around Barry Allen so these aren’t complete Arrow episode wrap-ups, though—beware—SPOILERS are lobbed throughout.
Arrow 2.08: “The Scientist”
Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and his team investigate a break-in at Queen Consolidated. A masked thief—superhuman blur on the security cams—makes quick disposal of two guards and steals a centrifuge. Initially it is believed the intruder had help lifting the hefty equipment. Enter affable and ear-to-ear grinning Barry Allen (Grant Gustin), an assistant police forensic investigator from Central City, who fibs by saying his captain has sent him to assist because their department is working on a “case with some similar unexplained elements.” Barry is positive the thief is a lone guy and, later, another security feed supports his claim.
Oliver is suspicious of Barry and asks John Diggle (David Ramsey) to look into Barry’s background. Meanwhile, Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), IT technician for Queen Consolidated, has taken an instant romantic liking to Barry as they work together on identifying the mysterious intruder. Barry, who is aware Felicity has met The Vigilante/The Arrow (but unaware she’s part of his close-knit circle) unnerves her by probing a little too much even suggesting “police reports show that he uses carbon arrows but if he switched to an aluminum carbon composite he would have far better penetration.” Felicity’s wry response, “Maybe he thinks he penetrates just fine.” It’s later revealed that Barry had no official police business and is sent packing. Why did Barry begin to investigate on his own? Turns out a similar ‘speed demon’ killed his mother years ago and his father was incarcerated for her murder. He has been on a mission to clear his old man and find the real killer.
Oliver learns that the Queen Consolidated thief has been shot full of the same strength serum that Dr. Ivo (Dylan Neal) was searching for on the island where Oliver had been stranded for five years and where he developed his skills in being The Vigilante. Oliver tracks the thief down and in a climatic fight is infused with a lethal toxin. Barry, who’d been waiting at the train station to return to Central City, is knocked out with a dart to the neck, then later awakens to find himself brought to where Oliver/The Arrow is dying. Felicity pleads with him, “Will you save my friend.”
Arrow 2.09: “Three Ghosts”
Barry injects rat poison into Oliver Queen, saving his life and who immediately upon regaining consciousness chides Felicity for letting Barry in on his alter ego secret. “I decide who finds out my identity!” He also informs everyone that the person who attacked him has the ability to mass produce the serum. “Never meet your heroes, right?” Felicity tells Barry after witnessing Oliver’s lack of gratitude to the CSI for saving his life. Oliver also begins seeing ghosts of friends and family who have passed away (the episode is loosely based on the well-worn Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol) and Barry admits to Oliver that hallucinations are a side effect of the remedy he administered. Barry, in addition, earnestly suggests that Oliver should rethink the grease paint he wears as The Arrow because it is a poor identity concealer and proposes that he should consider a compressible micro-fabric. Barry also had pulled a fingerprint off Oliver’s neck that Felicity determines belongs to a man named Cyrus Gold.
Barry heads back to Central City because he wants to see the particle accelerator turned on but fails to make it in time for a front row seat. Instead he’s seen walking into his lab across the city where he calls Felicity to let her know if she ever gets tired of waiting around for Oliver Queen he will gladly go out on a date with her. Barry also says he left something for Oliver which turns out to be the mask designed using the compressed micro-fabric that will allow The Arrow to be on the run still firing his arrows with the same agility.
Barry hangs up and studies a bulletin board containing news articles of his mother’s death while a reporter, on television, says the raging electrical storm has caused “a malfunction to the primary coolant system.” Barry witnesses a massive explosion—the particle accelerator gone awry. The chemicals in his lab begin to defy gravity flowing upward and across the room as a swarm of energy envelopes the city and a few seconds later a lightning bolt surges through the skylight hurtling Barry down and backward against a metal shelf. Barry lays unconscious as a luminous glow, highlighting his veins, threads its way up his face. The birth of The Flash.
Epilogue: The episode jumps back to Oliver and his team with Diggle saying, “Even the Arrow deserves a Christmas present.” Oliver opens Barry’s gift to find the mask he had been talking about. Oliver asks how he looks with it on and Felicity responds, “Like a hero.”
Note: Originally, according to Wikipedia, Barry Allen was supposed to be in three episodes for the second season of The Arrow but that was changed and instead Arrow 2.10: “Blast Radius” opens with Felicity, off screen, in Central City visiting with Barry who is in a coma following the particle accelerator explosion. She returns, saying, “He’s still sleeping,” because she prefers that word to coma. Sexual and work tension are obviously in the air between Oliver and Felicity when he carefully states she is needed with them, though on another note, he obviously now respects Barry.
Arrow 2.19: “The Man Under The Hood”
One of the top Arrow adventures has Oliver fighting to regain his company, Thea (Willa Holland) his sister struggling to come to terms with the news her father really wasn’t who she thought, and Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) now fairly certain Oliver is The Arrow and her sister is helping him. Slade (Manu Bennett) attacks Oliver, Diggle, Felicity, and Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) at their hideout and steals the “skeleton key” that unlocks any lab anywhere so he can obtain a bio-transfuser (a contraption that can take blood from one single patient and transfer to multiple patients) looking to spread his Mirakuru-permeated blood to create an army of supervillains.
Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) and Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker), who are close friends of Barry Allen (and will be part of The Flash’s supporting cast), are working at a S.T.A.R. Labs warehouse doing inventory. They are almost killed by Slade looking for the bio-transfuser but they manage to escape bumping into Diggle and Felicity. Felicity knows both of them from her time in Central City when she was at Barry’s hospital bedside and in an awkward exchange Cisco reveals that a woman named Iris is looking after Barry. He describes Iris as Barry’s “something.” After Felicity and Diggle walk away, Felicity murmurs, “That’s just swell. Barry’s in a coma and he’s already moved on.”
Later, Oliver reveals there is a cure for the Mirakuru, and Felicity goes to meet Cisco and Caitlin at S.T.A.R. Labs to have an antidote produced.
Wrap-Up: At first, Grant Gustin may not come across as a leading man material but I believe looks can be deceiving in this case and he has the chops based on his two Arrow performances to succeed and become the definitive Flash for this generation. Hard to gage the Cisco and Caitlin characters on a few pithy scenes but they seemed likable enough. In a nice tip to television Flash history it has been announced that John Wesley Shipp has been cast as Henry Allen, Barry’s father. Shipp starred as The Flash in the 1990 version.
Your thoughts? Are you looking forward to seeing the “Crimson Comet” return to the small screen on a weekly basis? What did you think of his intro on Arrow and Grant Gustin?
David Cranmer is the publisher of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and books and editor of the recent collections The Lizard’s Ardent Uniform and Other Stories and A Rip Through Time: The Dame, the Doctor, and the Device.
I’m looking forward to The Flash. I thought Arrow turned into something really special.
Yeah, I hope The Flash continues the hardboiled vibe of Arrow. If it results in being too kiddish or cute than I’d be disappointed.
Thanks for the recap, David. I’ll give The Flash a look.
Appreciate you stopping by, Mates.
I will probably check it out. I’ve not seen an episode of Arrow, but the extended trailer looks promising. My only reservations, and the reason I never watched Arrow was the ages of the actots. I know the CW aims at the younger crowd, but I like Green Arro and the Flash in their mid to late thirties.
Hey, I’m old.
Cyrus was super strong, not super fast. Barry was investigating any unusually empowered people while searching for the blur that killed his mother. They may have had blurry footage of Cyrus but that was due to the quality of the recording not due to him having an emblurrinating ability (yes it’s a real word) as you implied.
That out of the way, I am looking forward to watching the Flash. Lets just hope he’s better than Oliver at protecting his city, I’d be surprised if anyone still wanted to live in that place come season 3.
@5: I’m old as well, Randy, but I’m not sure I want to see a mid-thirties Flash. Though I agree having teen heroes can be annoying for us old farts. Lets’s say, uh, lates 20’s?
@6: I just played it back and may agree with you on the camera but when he pounds that warehouse door in and the two secuity guards are shooting… maybe its the fast edits but that was above and beyond normal speed. And I do agree on protecting the city but he’s doing a better job than Batman, right?
I grew up on the Barry Allen Flash too, so seriously hoping this works as an over all series. Great article — cheers!
Nice one, David. This is a show I’m very much looking forward to.
@8: Thanks, Andrez.
@9: Fingers crossed they get it right, Heath. So far, it looks sharp.
@7 He’s probably about on par with Batman really, Bale Batman’s simply been at it longer. They both completely fail to save their city from whatever disaster the bad guys plan but do draw the line at letting it be nuked out of existance.
@11 Ha! Good point. Yes, I guess we should be glad it hasn’t been nuked. And whats up with Arkham Asylum? The number of escapes becomes absurd and too funny after awhile.
I’m a Barry Allen kid too and really enjoyed the first series. I liked Shipp well enough, and I see the actress who played Tina McGee is coming back too. That said, and as much as I dig the action scenes in Arrow (especially with Black Canary) I got fed up with the soap opera elements and pretty much dissed this past season. I’ll give it a chance, but it’s gonna need to keep up the action.
@13: Yeah but those soap opera Twilight elements bring in the young people, Richard. The ones advertisers salivate over. So they are bringing Amanda Pays back as well? If so, that is a neat touch.
Having read the DC Archive edition of The Flash this past summer, then watching the Scientist/Three Ghosts episodes, while I liked Gustin’s portrayal, he didn’t strike me as that version of Barry. And he’s certainly not (as many have pointed out elsewhere, Wally West).
Watching these episodes, with ZERO prior interest in the Amell series, I was surprised at how many aspects of the DC universe have been brought into play but mostly at how much Arrow just appears to ape the Nolan/Bat-verse, in which case, this portrait of Barry then struck me as a sort of bumbling Clark Kent (a la Christopher Reeve) version of a meta human.
I’ll watch the first few episodes, and hope it’s different from Arrow; if I wanted hardboiled, I’d be watching unrelenting crap of that sort (e.g. Criminal Minds and Law & Order: SVU). If by kiddish, you meant something like Super Best Friends Forever or the DC Nation claymation shorts by Aardman (and I really enjoy much of Aardman’s feature output), I’m totally there, in agreement.
But “cute” – that is such a generic catchall – what do you mean, exactly. Not be in the same vein as an LOLcat gif? Not in the same way Disney is pushing Baymax as the must-have holiday toy this winter? I’m not sure anyone wants that but there’s no clarity in the comment.
As far as the age of the actors, unfortuantely, the CW tends towards that, much of Berlanti’s work goes, there. Some of the actors they have hired as villains are not teen dopplegangers, which is a big plus; unfortunately, unlike some cast members on CW shows, Gustin still could easily play a teenager.
I’m with #6, Barry wasn’t/isn’t looking for fellow speed-demons – but for superpowered beings; since I haven’t watched the parent series, I’m not sure if it has introduced the metahuman concept (although they clearly exist there, as these episodes point out, in the synthetically/chemically constructed variant). And not to be rude, but especially in the 2.19 synopsis (and I do understand [a] wanting to not spoil, and [b] this is not a recap), the material was not written in a comprehensible manner, especially as I only watched the two shows Grant actually appeared in. If Tor will be racapping this, please keep this in mind. Also, as a general aside, IMHO internet recaps are somewhat unnecessary (they tend to populate the net), especially absent analysis and insight. The re-watches and re-reads here seem to manage that (analysis/insight), something along those lines for The Flash would defintely be appreciated.
@15: I had the same Batman/Arrow vibe watching the show and, for me, it zeroes in on both being beyond wealthy and motivated by a past tragic experience. To try and explain what I mean by cute, it would be those characters (usually supporting characters) that always have to have a silly or snarky quip at hand. I could do with less of that. And when I mentioned wanting something more hardboiled, I’m thinking along the lines of Frank Miller’s Sin City. Gritty with good and bad guys ankle-deep in countless sorrows, bending toward as much realism as possible in a superhero setting. Sorry you found part of my write-up incomprehensible. My intention for this post was to give the essential pieces leading up to The Flash, and by including episode 2.19, even though he didn’t appear in that particular episode, the characters who crop up are important to him in the upcoming series. Perhaps, adding more of the Arrow plot could have made it clearer.
I’m only familiar with the Sin City movie – I’ll probably chase down the Miller graphic novel that Snyder pulled out to pimp out BvsS:DOJ – although no clue if it will be before or after the release of the film. From the Flashpoint comics – including all the cross-overs (which is all I know of post 1950’s Barry) and what I know of Barry’s story, there’s plenty of sorrow, some of the villains also have good back stories in that regard, e.g Mark Mardon and Hartley Rathway, although how that motivates them into either simple crime or super villainy is, at current, unknown to me – but having good motivations for being the bad guy or the good guy, all that I’m down with.
I’d be totally interested, therefore, in some pieces telling me about the Barry Allen they’re going to be exploring in this universe (or more about this universe, especially since I’ll likely only watch any Arrow episode that’s a necessary cross-over with The Flash).
I understand people wanting realism, but whether it’s Barry or Wally (even Jay) – we’re talking origins and abilities beyond the realm of say a realistic fictional crime fighter [Cagney or Lacey, Charlie Chan or even Sherlock Holmes]. My one complaint so far in this regard was why Barry was shown touching/pulling on the chain in the close of Three Ghosts; I didn’t really like the way the superpower transmutation was dipicted – it immediately gave me a fridge logic moment (unlike say the Andrew Garfield transmutation).
Some of the explanations for the early Showcase villains are definitely, frankly goofy (Mr. Alchemy/Mr. Element) and the villain powers/devices origins easily became repetitve, so yes, I wouldn’t mind being spared that. But we already know they are introducing super-powered Rogue elements (Captain Cold and Weather Wizard). I’m more interested in a logical basis for them (say Captain Cold actually steals his freese gun from Star Lab, versus just invents it on his own when his Silver Age background is just plain old ordinary criminal, versus mad scientist/super genius, etc).
As far as cute/snark, I think the teasers (the Arrow/Barry tree, cop with speed gun), show the level of humor aimed for; Berlanti’s other shows, even the more non-teen skewing shows, have tended to feature snarky lines (I’m thinking Eli Stone and Brothers & Sisters especially here).