1990 The Flash ep 13 & 14

Episode thirteen, where Tina goes evil because of a short circuit and a bad dream, is actively terrible. I mean even by 1990 standards and compared to other episodes. It was super extra rubbish.

If you're going to turn someone evil it's an excuse for them to use power and say repressed things like they'd be too polite to the rest of the time. So the bit with the poison dart because Science was the only vaguely interesting bit. Nothing else she said or did had to do with her regular personality, unless interrupting Barry's date was supposed to be the thing. But that was so cartoonishly awful. And I know this is far more episodic than I'm used to but to do all thwt with no repercussion and all the personal stuff dealt with by ignoring it is both ridiculous and a waste of a plot. I mean she even got a tattoo and then said she'd just remove it in the lab.

The tattoo should be a reminder of things you can't take back and the evil she's capable of if she lets rip. She should have to transform it, like by getting it made colors or added to. There's no point getting a symbol and then just vanishing it.

Supergirl did turning bad much much better.

This one was rubbish.

And also extra creepy : Tina goes bad necause she and Narry are hooked up to a machine and he thinks of his nightmare and she starts acting it out. She goes good again because reconnected to the same machine Barry thinks of her crying and being sorry and saying she's his friend again. Okay, but, did he 'cure' her or did he just reprogram her?

Creepy.



Episode 14 was just an excuse to have Barry be cute with a baby. Tina was more useless with a baby than Barry was, since he was initially competent enough to impress the mom, which is kind of refreshing considering. Aside from proving they'd need lots of training before they should try that again there weren't much else to it. Could have put more work into some angle about the creepy bad guy wanting to breed the perfect heir so he picked a girl he didn't love and tricked her, then when he saw the Flash he wondered if the powers were genetic, but apparently bad guys wanting a super for a breeding program is not a twelve rated plot. Eh, babies are cute, wouldn't mind a plot with Barry having to look after a baby in modern Flash, only he should stay good at it. Also the bit where he calmed all the babies at super soeed shouldn't really work, that would be a bit stressful, so really it should be a time Flash needs to slow down.



... I watch these things solely to pull them apart for bunnies already. Oh well.

Fuck the prime directive

This is a random thing to realise, but I just put two thoughts together to an angle on why I get so very wound up at the idea of maintaining the Masquerade or covering up alien first contact over and over again.

Sounds like a stupidly irrelevant scenario, I know.

But if Masquerade applies then every generation makes first contact new. Every year group would. You'd grow up and learn whatever your culture thinks you need to know, think you have a handle on it, and then boom, here's something nobody ever bothered to mention. And maybe you've got some hasty paradigms ported over from genre fiction, but if all the schemas there to activate are fiction, if your scripts are built for drama from skewed discourses based on unexamined ideologies that are probably only using the parts for allegory anyway, well, you'll be lucky if you have any clues which way to jump. Every generation, every graduating class, gets presented with this problem as if brand new, and they have to reinvent the wheel, every time.

And it reminded me of disability. And just a bit of being queer. But disability presents you with whole new problems, and if you've only got mainstream media to draw on, they look... insurmountable. Appalling. Demons walking, apocalypse has come, end of the world time.

There just aren't that many scripts for it, because almost everything is meant for the currently abled, written by them, meant to make them feel good.

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So I just suddenly felt very strongly about first contact
and all the people who don't make it
because they have to be the reaching out ones
and they don't even know there's anyone
to reach.