TV Review: The Flash Season 6 Episode 1

The Flash Season 6 Episode 1 “Into the Void”

Director: Gregory Smith

Starring: Grant Gustin, Candice Patton, Danielle Panabaker, Carlos Valdes, Hartley Sawyer, Danielle Nicolet, LaMonica Garrett

Rating: TV-PG

Runtime: 42 minutes

For all the good things about it, The Flash is also one of the most complacent shows on TV.  It’s convinced it’s as good as it was in its exceptional first season, even though it hasn’t been anywhere to close to that good since that season ended, and the creators have often seemed unwilling to make the changes fans and critics recommend.  There is some hope among the fanbase that new showrunner Eric Wallace will be able to bring life back into the show and make the right kind of changes.  Based on the Season 6 premiere it seems as though those hopes have only been partially granted.  There are certainly signs of improvement here, thanks mostly to a higher stakes, more coherent plot, but plenty of the show’s biggest problems are still present.

The biggest sign “Into the Void” gives that Wallace might be making real improvements is the episode’s thematic coherence.  For far too long Flash‘s individual storylines have felt arbitrary and largely irrelevant to one another, linked by nothing other than the fact they happen to the same group of characters.  “Into the Void” is refreshing because its most significant storylines are all connected by the shared theme of death.  The most thoroughly developed arc, of course, is Barry (Grant Gustin) and Iris (Candice Patton) grieving the death of their future daughter Nora in the fifth season finale.  But there’s also Caitlin/Killer Frost’s (Danielle Panabaker) struggle which Ralph Dibny (Hartley Sawyer) realizes is rooted in the latter’s reaction to the death of their father, and the story of Ramsey Rosso (Sendhil Ramamurthy) whose road to becoming the villain Bloodwork seems to be paved by his desire to save himself and others from death by the rare form of cancer that killed his mother.  And, in the episode’s closing moments there’s the Monitor’s (LaMonica Garrett) declaration that in order to save the multiverse from the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Flash must die.

The episode-wide theme is certainly a step in the right direction but Flash’s execution remains mixed.  This is mostly due to the show’s unwillingness to embrace real lasting changes in either status quo or tone.  Patton and especially Gustin do the best they can in depicting Iris and Barry’s grief but in all other areas and with all other characters the show is still its usual quippy, irreverent self.  The fact that Barry is mourning the loss of his child in the same episode that he fights a bunch of black holes while the soundtrack blasts Queen’s “Flash” (an admittedly delightful sequence in spite of how out of place it is) is pretty ridiculous and highlights how the show is still failing to replicate the blend of comedy, superhero action, and serious family drama that made Season 1 so captivating.  While generally interesting, the other major storylines are also victims of some inherent problems.  It would be unfair to criticize Flash just for having its villain start out as an altruistic, if somewhat unstable scientist, given how common a trope that is but the way the Ramsey storyline is set up is especially clumsy.  Given all the crazy things she and the rest of Team Flash have done by experimenting with dark matter, it feels hypocritical for Caitlin to refuse to help Ramsey.  Sure, his capacity for evil is painfully obvious to a viewer but there’s no in-story reason for her not to trust him, especially since he’s apparently an old friend of his.  And maybe it’s just a bad storytelling choice to have one of your heroes refuse to even look into the possibility that they may be able to cure cancer.

Despite this messiness “Into the Void” is one of the stronger installments in a while.  There’s just more interesting stuff happening here than there ever really was in Seasons 4 or 5, even if the show still has considerable work to do to make all the new season’s moving pieces fit together cohesively.  Hopefully, Wallace and the build-up to Crisis can help with that.

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