Dr Hermes Reviews
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THE FLASH

(Oct 3, 2005)

I really wanted to like the show. I made every effort to tape each episode (and since it was constantly pre-empted and rescheduled, that wasn't easy), and I watched it with enthusiasm that soon faded. The series wasn't completely hopeless; there were a few good moments in each episode. But, in general, they did almost everything wrong.

The Flash's gig is that he is a super-hero with the power of enhanced speed that laughs at the principles of physics. Usually, he is shown as being able to run and react at nearly the speed of light. Now, in practice, this would make him close to invincible. To him, a street gang with Uzis would be standing completely still and he could disassemble their guns, tie them all together with duct tape and roll them to the nearest police station inbetween the ticks of a clock. So various lame explanations have to be devised to let villains give him a tussle.

The TV series, which only ran for one season in 1990, did keep our boy's powers down to a more manageable level. He could run fast enough to make a sonic boom, but he couldn't circle the Earth seven times in one second like the comic book version. Early on, too, his metabolism was having trouble adapting to the changes and he would suffer dizzy spells, sudden fatigue and have to eat a half dozen pizzas to refuel. I'm not wild about these groggy moments, as they always happened at a convenient time to let the villain slug him or get away.

One of my main objections was that the Flash just looked wrong. This was a year after the first Tim Burton BATMAN flick, and our speedster was given a rubbery suit with enormous built-in muscles. No, no, no. This is the man who does more running than anyone else in history. Cast a slim, well-toned actor who will look like a sprinter in tight spandex and you've got all you need. This hulk looks like a pro wrestler, Hercules instead of Hermes.

Also (again taking a cue from the Burton movie), the Flash is way too grim, teeth-clenching and sullen, shouting demands at his opponents. It didn't work for me. I'd like to see a hero who enjoys his gift enormously and is having fun racing up the sides of buildings or across a lake. He could be goofing on his enemies, replacing the pistol in the gangster's hand with a dead fish or moving the guy miles away in a blink to disorient him. (There were a few times crooks used some cleverness, such as strewing the street with ball bearings so the Flash took a painful tumble while racing in pursuit.)

On the other hand, the effects were done fairly well for 1990. The running was shown with multiple images and streaks of color behind the Flash. But I thought the show dwelled too long on each sequence so that the dense audience could figure out what was going on ("Hey, he's running in a circle. Looks like he's making a little tornado. Yep, that's it. Lookit the wind pick the crook up.") If this show were done today, I suspect viewers would be much quicker on picking up on the action and the stunts could be real rapid snippets. (Actually, an episode on SMALLVILLE recently featured a teen-age version of the Flash that used much more creativity on the possibilities of super-speed and the modern CGI were impressive enough that I wouldn't mind seeing him get a series of his own. Effects that were extremely expensive to do in 1990 wouldn't be a problem today.)

To be honest, the cast left me unresponsive, too. John Wesley Shipp was a good-looking actor from the soaps, and in a few shirtless scenes, we see he was certainly in great shape. But I didn't find him likeable. I don't know if it was the actor himself or the way he intended the character to play, but this version of Barry Allen just seems smarmy and self-absorbed. Amanda Pays (who played the scientist doing research on this medical marvel) has a devoted following, but she never appealed to me, either. I don't see where she's got anything, other than a nice accent. Alex Desert as Allen's lab partner in the police forensic department seemed like a nice enough guy, but he was mostly there for exposition and to vaguely suspect something odd going on. A comic sidekick, in a subdued way. As long as I'm on a rant, the writing and acting in general were nothing special. just the usual network TV padding and obvious reactions. The best episode featured the Nightshade, an earlier masked hero from the 1950s (who closely resembled DC's Sandman) who tackled a mastermind named the Ghost. To escape capture, the Ghost put himself into cryonic sleep until 1990 (he was planning on waking up in the new millenium but goofed). There was some nice humor in his dismay at not finding moon colonies or personal helicopters in wide use, but he was ecstatic over how advanced television had become ("178 Channels? This is the future"). The team-up of the now middle-aged retired Nightshade and the new speedster hero had some nice dialogue. Jason Bernard as the Nightshade had dignity and presence, and in fact his character returned in a second episode. Usually, our boy fought mundane crooks, assassins, drug dealers... feh. The show picked up a wee bit when more impressive opponents were introduced. I did hate the Bizarro version of the Flash, Pollux. He was a clone grown in a hour from a sample of Barry Allen's blood (no, seriously) and he wore a blue Flash costume and was more than slightly under-developed in the mental capacity. Longtime Flash villains from the comics made appearances in updated, more reasonable-looking guises, The Mirror Master and Captain Cold, for example, and there was mention of 'the Gorilla Grodd" gang. Mark Hamill appeared in two episodes as the Trickster in a garish, way over-the-top costume; he was like a villain from the 1966 BATMAN show and you know, it seemed to be just what the show needed.