Flash season 3
Sep. 11th, 2017 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethJust finished watching the first episode.
... Barry is... I do not follow his logic here. Emotion, sure, but...
... sometimes I think he is not bright.
I mean, I get that Wally was hurt, but he wasn't dead? Things seem plenty fixable?
I don't see how he gets from there to out loud asking Eobard Thawne to kill his mother.
Also: this version of Thawne makes most sense if he was never the version that would have become Eo!Wells. Because he's talking like Nora Allen alive is the change. And maybe if you stretch that's because he knows it's a change for Barry, but, Eo!Wells was pretty clear that Nora alive was his baseline and murder was the change he wanted to see in the world.
The glass cage thing I'm just going to ignore. He had a power suppressor somewhere Thawne couldn't seem like the mask. He learned how at some point. Handwave. *sigh*
Not losing memories because not accessing the speed force? Doesn't explain time travellers who never access the speed force. But okay. Make the speed force living and judgey and it could work.
The entire lack of time wraiths is... potentially inconsistent, but sure, we can go with that, Eo!Wells managed after all.
People being some kind of woo woo sort of aware of timeline changes makes no sense. There's been so many, logically, everyone should be weirded out and lonely all the time.
... correction, people being aware of timeline changes makes everything make sense...
Thawne in a glass box knows that any timeline Barry Allen is not the Flash is not his own timeline. And it's likely he's come straightish from STAR labs in season 2 where they made an attempt to turn him into a stable time loop. So what he remembers doesn't match Flashpoint, but all he needs is the Flash for his past to be near enough, he figures. So that makes a kind of sense.
That bit where Barry and Eobard say they hate each other and Thawne says he sometimes wonders which of them is right... yeah, that's the central tragedy if you want to read it that way. Because Thawne gets minimal free will in any of this, if he wants to live, and his world to live. He got cast as the Reverse and has to play it through. And then Barry does shit like this as if he just can. And I can see Thawne's point. But when his job is killing mothers, even he can see Barry's.
I know they killed him really a lot on LoT, but those two still feel like the middle of a story. If Barry is going to take responsibility for his own shit and the laws of time and his role in them, that means understanding his Reverse, just a little better. And still hating him feels... unresolved.
And at some point if they go with some versions of some comics Barry is going to go meet and inspire a young speedster, somehow hopeful enough to try to reach his best self, even knowing his worst. And that makes Barry a hero.
... and Thawne did that by his own standards for quite some time...
I know he's a bad guy, but it doesn't have to be simple, and there's room to be hopeful.
Just not if he really thoroughly doesn't exist now.
Unless Barry decides that was a mistake and sets out to fix it.
... sooooo... you can see which bits of this elseworld I'm invested in.
Everyone else is one of a billion possibilities and they didn't give us enough to see why that and not... nearly anything else. So I'm not into it.
The idea Cisco could be super rich with a single change is neat, but, that change might be setting up on his own instead of with Eo!Wells, or it might be being hard hearted enough to go nowhere near crime fighting. "I heard a story about how, when you were 15, your brother Dante owed a bookie and he couldn't pay back what he owed, so you gave him all the money you earned that summer delivering pizzas to help him." See that's meant to be from both timelines, so that's interesting... and another layer of why Dante is not easy to like. As well as misgendering Cisco both times we saw him. Annoying. Consistent though, he said he felt like a failure compared to Cisco, or something like that, back when they were kidnapped. Owing him money couldn't help that particular feeling.
Iris giving Barry so much as the time of day can only be explained by alternate timeline handwave. Or her actually finding him hot. Or having a thing for awkward puppies.
... if Barry's parents think he's been stalking her for three months then he has been beyond awkward. That's pretty creepy.
As is the whole imbalance of knolwedge they've got even on a good day.
Or will he forget those three first kisses as the timeline solidifies? His day in the speed force suggests not.
Basically the thing where Barry and other time travellers don't approach their own lives like a sci fi obsessed rules lawyer gamer somehow continues to annoy. They never try and finesse anything. And get so surprised when that has consequences.
But we get to see those consequences, so that's an improvement.
... I still find I have much sympathy with the Reverse Flash.
It's like that time travel with Hartley day, where Eo!Wells is sitting there waving his hands to try and shut time travel Barry up, but no, Barry just... charges on through. Fifteen years Thawne kept the secret and avoided time wraiths, and Barry can't last six hours. Lovely.
...the responding to it with murder is not sympathetic, but the level of frustration, ooooh yes.
I guess I liked the episode, at least for the consequences and the Reverse Flash bits
but now it applies the reboot problem
logically to the whole arrowverse:
everything we think we know may or may not be wrong
so
why are we still invested?
Shall see.
... Barry is... I do not follow his logic here. Emotion, sure, but...
... sometimes I think he is not bright.
I mean, I get that Wally was hurt, but he wasn't dead? Things seem plenty fixable?
I don't see how he gets from there to out loud asking Eobard Thawne to kill his mother.
Also: this version of Thawne makes most sense if he was never the version that would have become Eo!Wells. Because he's talking like Nora Allen alive is the change. And maybe if you stretch that's because he knows it's a change for Barry, but, Eo!Wells was pretty clear that Nora alive was his baseline and murder was the change he wanted to see in the world.
The glass cage thing I'm just going to ignore. He had a power suppressor somewhere Thawne couldn't seem like the mask. He learned how at some point. Handwave. *sigh*
Not losing memories because not accessing the speed force? Doesn't explain time travellers who never access the speed force. But okay. Make the speed force living and judgey and it could work.
The entire lack of time wraiths is... potentially inconsistent, but sure, we can go with that, Eo!Wells managed after all.
People being some kind of woo woo sort of aware of timeline changes makes no sense. There's been so many, logically, everyone should be weirded out and lonely all the time.
... correction, people being aware of timeline changes makes everything make sense...
Thawne in a glass box knows that any timeline Barry Allen is not the Flash is not his own timeline. And it's likely he's come straightish from STAR labs in season 2 where they made an attempt to turn him into a stable time loop. So what he remembers doesn't match Flashpoint, but all he needs is the Flash for his past to be near enough, he figures. So that makes a kind of sense.
That bit where Barry and Eobard say they hate each other and Thawne says he sometimes wonders which of them is right... yeah, that's the central tragedy if you want to read it that way. Because Thawne gets minimal free will in any of this, if he wants to live, and his world to live. He got cast as the Reverse and has to play it through. And then Barry does shit like this as if he just can. And I can see Thawne's point. But when his job is killing mothers, even he can see Barry's.
I know they killed him really a lot on LoT, but those two still feel like the middle of a story. If Barry is going to take responsibility for his own shit and the laws of time and his role in them, that means understanding his Reverse, just a little better. And still hating him feels... unresolved.
And at some point if they go with some versions of some comics Barry is going to go meet and inspire a young speedster, somehow hopeful enough to try to reach his best self, even knowing his worst. And that makes Barry a hero.
... and Thawne did that by his own standards for quite some time...
I know he's a bad guy, but it doesn't have to be simple, and there's room to be hopeful.
Just not if he really thoroughly doesn't exist now.
Unless Barry decides that was a mistake and sets out to fix it.
... sooooo... you can see which bits of this elseworld I'm invested in.
Everyone else is one of a billion possibilities and they didn't give us enough to see why that and not... nearly anything else. So I'm not into it.
The idea Cisco could be super rich with a single change is neat, but, that change might be setting up on his own instead of with Eo!Wells, or it might be being hard hearted enough to go nowhere near crime fighting. "I heard a story about how, when you were 15, your brother Dante owed a bookie and he couldn't pay back what he owed, so you gave him all the money you earned that summer delivering pizzas to help him." See that's meant to be from both timelines, so that's interesting... and another layer of why Dante is not easy to like. As well as misgendering Cisco both times we saw him. Annoying. Consistent though, he said he felt like a failure compared to Cisco, or something like that, back when they were kidnapped. Owing him money couldn't help that particular feeling.
Iris giving Barry so much as the time of day can only be explained by alternate timeline handwave. Or her actually finding him hot. Or having a thing for awkward puppies.
... if Barry's parents think he's been stalking her for three months then he has been beyond awkward. That's pretty creepy.
As is the whole imbalance of knolwedge they've got even on a good day.
Or will he forget those three first kisses as the timeline solidifies? His day in the speed force suggests not.
Basically the thing where Barry and other time travellers don't approach their own lives like a sci fi obsessed rules lawyer gamer somehow continues to annoy. They never try and finesse anything. And get so surprised when that has consequences.
But we get to see those consequences, so that's an improvement.
... I still find I have much sympathy with the Reverse Flash.
It's like that time travel with Hartley day, where Eo!Wells is sitting there waving his hands to try and shut time travel Barry up, but no, Barry just... charges on through. Fifteen years Thawne kept the secret and avoided time wraiths, and Barry can't last six hours. Lovely.
...the responding to it with murder is not sympathetic, but the level of frustration, ooooh yes.
I guess I liked the episode, at least for the consequences and the Reverse Flash bits
but now it applies the reboot problem
logically to the whole arrowverse:
everything we think we know may or may not be wrong
so
why are we still invested?
Shall see.