[ Stop reading here if you have not seen the show but plan to. ]

I had seen a few episodes of Arrow and thought it was decent enough. Just the fact that the show made me like Oliver was a feat in itself, considering how shrill and annoying he was in the comics (in recent years, DC Comics has gone not just from having him be an alternative viewpoint to other heroes, but now proudly boasts of him as the “left-wing crusader”).

So when I heard a spinoff was coming out starring the Flash, I had to check it out. The promotional shots of the costume looked awful. The first couple episodes were very shaky. But around the third episode it started to, uh, find its footing. It’s fun, inventive, and only mildly bogged down by CW Network teenage soap opera nonsense. They’ve even taken some near-execrable plot points from the comics and made them work.

And true to the comics, the show has a firm moral center. It’s a little wobbly in places, but even then not overly so, and Barry Allen is clearly a good guy who wants to do right.

A central point of the story arc is time travel. Unlike most stories based on such, Flash seems to be starting from a point where history has already been changed. Perhaps more than once. It’s a credit to the creative team that the plot is complex, yet still accessible to a mainstream audience.

But you wanna know “Does it look Awesome?” Let’s look.

An episode of the one-season 1990 Flash series went to town and had a sort of reversed clone of Flash with all his powers, and got the two into a high speed fight –

… yeah. Although the bullet-catching bit was nice. The series did manage to pull off some good super-speed scenes now and again, but by and large, they just didn’t have the means to portray someone like Flash on screen too well.

Compare and contrast. High-speed combat –

Not quite FX on the level of Man Of Steel or Avengers, but they don’t have a movie-level budget, and they make the most of what they’ve got.

And I don’t hate the costume anymore. Not super fond of it, but I don’t hate it.

I am very much looking forward to the season finale tomorrow night, and hope the showrunners can pull it off.

Fun bonus!