The FLASH TV SERIES

[90'sCartoonMan]

Despite being all mouth-goopy, this was actually a really good showing for Barry. Without him, neither Iris nor Cisco could come up with a workable plan (which probably doesn't bode well for them in the future). Then he is able to get inside Ramsay's head to beat him. Sweet!

So Crisis begins and the Monitor has been more present on Arrow than he has on the Flash? That feels odd. I mean, I get that it's the last season of Arrow and they have to explain Lyla, but Flash seems better suited to build him up. Plus Nash is Pariah.

But hey, I loved that somebody remembered my boy H.R.!

Yes, HR is fondly remembered!

Allegra gets her big hero moment. Is she going to join Team Flash and get her own supersuit? Although we have enough of them running around as is.

Yeah, she's better off sticking with Team Citizen. I guess we never saw Barry's reaction to her finding out that he's the Flash?

[Frontier]

So Crisis begins and the Monitor has been more present on Arrow than he has on the Flash? That feels odd. I mean, I get that it's the last season of Arrow and they have to explain Lyla, but Flash seems better suited to build him up. Plus Nash is Pariah.

I guess Flash set up Pariah, Arrow set up Harbinger, and both featured The Monitor to varying degrees to build him up.

Yeah, she's better off sticking with Team Citizen. I guess we never saw Barry's reaction to her finding out that he's the Flash?

At this point I think Barry is too used to people who work with or around Team Flash learning his identity to really care anymore.

[Captain Smith]

Science kvetch - Cisco says his rabbit out of the hat device used photons like they use in cancer radiation. He's supposed to know physics.

Also, folks - shoot and freeze, stop talking. Flash also can't fight his way out of a paper bag. That ending fight with Mommy to the rescue was terrible.

Iris, if you have your evil guy down, empty the gun into his head.

[Osiris-Rex]

Science kvetch - Cisco says his rabbit out of the hat device used photons like they use in cancer radiation. He's supposed to know physics.

Also, folks - shoot and freeze, stop talking. Flash also can't fight his way out of a paper bag. That ending fight with Mommy to the rescue was terrible.

Iris, if you have your evil guy down, empty the gun into his head.

Seems odd they would say it uses photons when the seemed to mean UV radiation. Photons are all kinds of things. Radio wave are photons. X-rays are photons. Light, microwaves, infrared as well as UV are photons.
Lasers are highly collimated beams of photons. Microwave ovens use photons to heat the food.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

Finally got round to watching this in time for Crisis and I think I may be done. The quiet interpersonal stuff and the Crisis build-up were solid but I just can't take any more of these terrible Big Bads. Ramsey was the worst the Flash has had to date. Bad actor (at least here), bad character, bad character logic, bad, bad, bad. He's even worse than the Thinker. And this especially irritates me because I really like this cast and individual episodes can be a lot of fun but their major villains have just gotten worse and worse to the point that I had to fast forward through a good portion of this episode.

[Jcogginsa]

Finally got round to watching this in time for Crisis and I think I may be done. The quiet interpersonal stuff and the Crisis build-up were solid but I just can't take any more of these terrible Big Bads. Ramsey was the worst the Flash has had to date. Bad actor (at least here), bad character, bad character logic, bad, bad, bad. He's even worse than the Thinker. And this especially irritates me because I really like this cast and individual episodes can be a lot of fun but their major villains have just gotten worse and worse to the point that I had to fast forward through a good portion of this episode.

Exacctly what abut him was so bad?

[AnakinFlair]

Finally got round to watching this in time for Crisis and I think I may be done. The quiet interpersonal stuff and the Crisis build-up were solid but I just can't take any more of these terrible Big Bads. Ramsey was the worst the Flash has had to date. Bad actor (at least here), bad character, bad character logic, bad, bad, bad. He's even worse than the Thinker. And this especially irritates me because I really like this cast and individual episodes can be a lot of fun but their major villains have just gotten worse and worse to the point that I had to fast forward through a good portion of this episode.

A couple of things.

First off, Ramsey was only to be the Big Bad for the first half of the season. They actually split the season in 2 this year, and there will be another villain for Flash to fight in the second half.

As for Ramsey himself- I really felt like there should have been another villain to start out with this year, with them building up Ramsey for the back half. The way they did it, his evolution felt rushed, and with them having to build up to Crisis, you could really feel how pointless he was. We all knew that Flash would make it to Crisis, and that he would be normal. So when Ramsey took over the Flash a few episodes ago, there was no tension at all. I thought the actor was good and did well with what he got, but I do agree the character was bad.

Funny thing is, I was going to say that last year's big bad was much better than Thinker and a marked improvement, but then I realized I couldn't remember who the Big Bad was last year (still better than the Thinker)! It took me almost five minutes before I remembered that they faced off against Thawne in the last episode, and that he was in jail, and instead of Meta Dampeners they were cutting off his powers by strapping a dagger to his chest, and that the dagger belonged to Cicada.

[Desmark]

A couple of things.

First off, Ramsey was only to be the Big Bad for the first half of the season. They actually split the season in 2 this year, and there will be another villain for Flash to fight in the second half.

As for Ramsey himself- I really felt like there should have been another villain to start out with this year, with them building up Ramsey for the back half. The way they did it, his evolution felt rushed, and with them having to build up to Crisis, you could really feel how pointless he was. We all knew that Flash would make it to Crisis, and that he would be normal. So when Ramsey took over the Flash a few episodes ago, there was no tension at all. I thought the actor was good and did well with what he got, but I do agree the character was bad.

Funny thing is, I was going to say that last year's big bad was much better than Thinker and a marked improvement, but then I realized I couldn't remember who the Big Bad was last year (still better than the Thinker)! It took me almost five minutes before I remembered that they faced off against Thawne in the last episode, and that he was in jail, and instead of Meta Dampeners they were cutting off his powers by strapping a dagger to his chest, and that the dagger belonged to Cicada.

Cicada was a marked improvement over the thinker duh. Almost any villain would be. I didn't feel that Bloodwork was wasted but that his arc worked in juxtaposition with the crisis arc and was a nice adjacent to the themes of crisis. If they had lengthened his arc then he would have entered the same realms of tediousness that the other reason big bads suffer from.

[David Walton]

Bloodwork was one of the strongest FLASH villains IMO. The actor did a great job, especially in those last two episodes.

[Frontier]

Bloodwork was one of the strongest FLASH villains IMO. The actor did a great job, especially in those last two episodes.

Yeah, I think he was probably one of the better handled villains on the show, especially since they didn't unnaturally drag out his storyline like they have with other Big Bads and actually made his motivation very poignant to the ongoing Crisis plot.

Plus he was suitably creepy and effective, and Sendhil really played the role for all it's worth.

[Anarchist]

I agree, Bloodwork was the best main villain since Zoom.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

Huh, guess I'm in the minority. I don't think any of the main villains have been any good whatsoever since Zoom (which is ironic for a superhero with one of the best rogue's galleries around) so it might just be that Bloodwork was the straw that broke the camel's back. I liked the actor fine in Heroes but I thought he was utterly dreadful here. Stiff and bland in the early episodes, laughably unmenacing in the later ones. I thought they totally bungled the very simple idea of a man who would do anything to prevent himself from dying with weird character motivations and a descent into fairly boring sub-Zombie monster movie cliches.

The character also displayed almost nothing in the way of actual personality and this was once again the case of the writers trying to turn a g-list villain (I've been a Flash fan for decades - who the hell is Bloodwork?) into a major Big Bad for the Flash. Mirror Master, Captain Boomerang and Abra Kadabra are relegated to instantly forgettable one-offs but freakin' Bloodwork is given an 11 episode arc? How does that work? He was also entirely redundant to this first half of the season. The looming threat of Crisis was more than enough to provide an overall arc to this half of the season and every time they cut to him, the momentum was sucked right out of the show.

And this is especially annoying because pretty much everything else has been working this season. Chunk looks to be a super fun addition to the cast; Barry has actually been well written for a change; the looming Crisis gives the series a nice emotional throughline; Frost and Ralph have been used particularly well this season; we've gotten the best Wells since season 2... This is all great stuff that is constantly undermined by the series repeating the same mistake over and over by insisting on having a Big Bad for a season and then using the least likely and least effective candidate possible.

[Frontier]

Huh, guess I'm in the minority. I don't think any of the main villains have been any good whatsoever since Zoom (which is ironic for a superhero with one of the best rogue's galleries around) so it might just be that Bloodwork was the straw that broke the camel's back. I liked the actor fine in Heroes but I thought he was utterly dreadful here. Stiff and bland in the early episodes, laughably unmenacing in the later ones. I thought they totally bungled the very simple idea of a man who would do anything to prevent himself from dying with weird character motivations and a descent into fairly boring sub-Zombie monster movie cliches.

The character also displayed almost nothing in the way of actual personality and this was once again the case of the writers trying to turn a g-list villain (I've been a Flash fan for decades - who the hell is Bloodwork?) into a major Big Bad for the Flash. Mirror Master, Captain Boomerang and Abra Kadabra are relegated to instantly forgettable one-offs but freakin' Bloodwork is given an 11 episode arc? How does that work? He was also entirely redundant to this first half of the season. The looming threat of Crisis was more than enough to provide an overall arc to this half of the season and every time they cut to him, the momentum was sucked right out of the show.

And this is especially annoying because pretty much everything else has been working this season. Chunk looks to be a super fun addition to the cast; Barry has actually been well written for a change; the looming Crisis gives the series a nice emotional throughline; Frost and Ralph have been used particularly well this season; we've gotten the best Wells since season 2... This is all great stuff that is constantly undermined by the series repeating the same mistake over and over by insisting on having a Big Bad for a season and then using the least likely and least effective candidate possible.

I thought the episode where he was trying to sway Barry showed off a lot of personality, as was his turn here. I thought he imbued the character with a lot of charisma and pathos, especially compared to Bloodwork in the comics who, honestly, was a lot more forgettable.

Kadabra was great, I'm disappointed they never did another episode with him. Boomerang was technically never on The Flash (which is a shame). I think they kind of bungled Mirror Master, but it looks like they're going to do their own version of McCulloch that might make up for it.

I thought they did a good job of tying Bloodwork's obsession with avoiding death with Barry dealing with his impending fate in Crisis and how that contrasted the two of them, especially compounded by their shared dead mom issues. Fit an 11 episode arc better then a 22-episode one.

To be honest I think the show's handling of Bloodwork shows it's learned its lesson from how it handled past Big Bads, to where they use them effectively and efficiently before they wear out their welcome.

[juan678]

[tabo61]

Yep, without a doubt Lex Luthor is the smartest person in the whole universe.