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| Barry gets his day in court, and for a major murder trial, it really doesn't feel like it's more than a day. |
Back to the Arrowverse (and Earths
west,) as we come back after the mid-season break for The Flash, Legends of
Tomorrow and, eventually, Supergirl.
'The Trial of The Flash(1)'
follows from the midseason cliffhanger, as Barry faces trial for the murder of
Clifford De Voe and the series faces the greatest challenge of a super-intelligent
villain; the pitfall of simulating super-intelligence by having everyone else
be incredibly stupid. Seriously, the trial of Barry Allen is about as fair and
convincing as the trial in Paddington 2,
but that was supposed to be a crock and featured in a critically lauded
children's comedy, whereas The Flash
occasionally aspires to aspects of police procedural. The prosecution
simultaneously presents Barry as a diabolical mastermind and as a highly-skilled
CSI completely incapable of even attempting to cover his tracks(2). Ultimately,
that's because this episode is more about Barry refusing to use his superhero
alter-ego to derail the trial than it is about the facts of the case, and thus
we're just asked to accept that De Voe is capable of setting this whole thing
up. It's also about Team Flash accepting his decision and not revealing the
secret identity for him, and realising that they can't make right by doing
wrong, as when Ralph Dibney of all people has to talk Joe down from planting
evidence to clear Barry. It's played as an emotional moment of growth for
Dibney, but it's also an important practical withdrawal, because Joe has
apparently forgotten that the De Voe house is full of cameras.
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| Fallout. Not our best villain. |
Also, the Flash helps to stop
Fallout, a hapless metahuman who unknowingly pumps out radiation, and who is
lucky enough to be sent off for treatment (because when Barry protests that he
never killed anyone, this is rather disingenuous, his run-ins with Earth-2
metas in early Season 2 reaping a particularly bloody harvest.) This is an almost
entirely insubstantial B-plot, except that it allows the show to parallel
Captain Singh giving a citation for the Flash, alongside the judge sending
Barry down for life without parole.
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| Come for the life sentence, stay for the hats. |
Thus, 'The Elongated Knight
Rises' sees Dibney trying to step up as Central City's key hero, and while he
does an okay job it's hard to see why no-one is asking 'where the heckins has
the Flash got to?' Dibney's first case involves the second Trickster, who is broken
out of jail by his mother, formerly known as Prank. She wants them to go
straight, but is easily persuaded to drop her medication(3) and start
kidnapping people. Trickster's new thing is acid-loaded squirt guns, which prove
able to damage Dibney's polymerised cells, leading him to face the question of
whether he wants to be a hero if he can be hurt. Meanwhile, Barry is treated to
his inaugural shivving - Iron Heights is a traditional, orthodox prison - but
saved by prison heavy 'Big Sir', whose life was saved by an emergency appendectomy
performed by the late Henry Allen.
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| I miss Mark Hamill. |
Dibney also runs into a girl at
CC Jitters who is writing in a strange language. Apparently, this is the
language Barry was writing in when he came out of the Speed Force, but my
immediate assumption was that she was one of the Observers from Fringe.
Finally, 'Honey I Shrunk Team
Flash' sets Team Flash against a meta with shrinking powers, who just happens
to become active after (criminally speaking) after years on the QT, right after
it turns out that he was responsible for the murder Big Sir was convicted of.
Barry urges Team Flash to track him down and get a confession so that Big Sir
can go free and travel to China, but the confession is not forthcoming, even
after a whole bunch of high jinks involving Cisco and Dibney being shrunk and
an attempted cure priming them to explode. With no way to get Big Sir's
sentence overturned, Barry speedsters him to China(4) and then returns to his
own cell, where he is drugged by the warden and taken to be sold to Amaunet.
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| That's a bad sign. |
This is not a strong set of
episodes for The Flash. There are a
lot of great moments peppered
throughout, but overall they are disappointing. The trial is too fast and
hinges too heavily on the presumption that De Voe has not only created a
sufficient wealth of evidence to hang - as it were - Barry, but that he can do
so without needing to give any additional direction to the prosecution. Thereafter,
Dibney is only a so-so fill in for the Flash, and the teams methods for evoking
the Killer Frost persona in Caitlin are superficially funny, but in retrospect
almost as creepy as the fact that members of the team have been hitting the clubs
with Killer Frost while Caitlin has been sleeping.
I'm curious to see how the show
prevents Barry's secret identity from becoming public knowledge once,
inevitably, he escapes from Amaunet's 'employment', and am wondering if she
won't be suffering another non-culpable, Flash-related fatal accidents.
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| It's that man again. |
Legends of Tomorrow
has been bringing me rather more joy lately (although The Flash does have a shout-out to one-time god of war, Beebo.) Not
that there are many laughs in 'Daddy Darhkest', as John Constantine leads the
team to an asylum in Star City, 2017, and a girl named Emily who is possessed
by a demon who knows Sara's name. The demon is Mallus, and laughs at
Constantine's most substantial wards, and the girl it turns out is Nora Darhk.
Mallus throws Constantine, Sara and Leo back in time, where Constantine and
Sara get jiggy(5) and Leo gets drugged. With the Waverrider in trouble because - among other things - Ray and Zari
are off trying to convince Nora not to go evil in later life, Sara has to
willingly channel Mallus in order to mark and reactivate the time travel rune
that was used to send them back in time, in order to get home. This means that
she potentially opens herself to Mallus in future, and Constantine urges Ray to
keep working on a nano-pistol designed to kill the possessed.
Also, Ray goes home to Earth-X.
Okay, not much joy there, but
then we have 'Here I Go Again', which is, in the parlance of the show itself,
the Groundhog Day episode, as a
temporal fluid leak and an explosion on the Waverrider
leaves Zari stuck in some sort of time loop. The first few times around, Sara -
already narked at Zari for dragging her heels on repairs - has her sedated, but
it turns out that Nate is willing to believe, and gives her Groundhog Day as a shorthand to convince
him each cycle. She struggles to solve the problem, and as she looks for a mole
in the crew she learns a lot about them, such as Ray's work on the nanite gun,
Sara's burgeoning relationship with Agent Sharp, and the fact that Mick is
writing a halfway decent sci-fi romance.
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| I have a deep and shameful love of sassy female-voiced computer. And sassy male-voiced computers, actually, although there are fewer of them. |
My favourite thing about this
episode is the twist. It does all the standard time loop stuff - the intense
struggle, the dossing around cycles - but then, just as the source turns up and
the loop gets broken with the countdown still ticking, it turns out that this
isn't a time loop. The fluid leak just knocked her into a coma, and Gideon -
who is just the scariest voyeuristic caregiver ever - put her into a simulation
in order to convince her that she could stay and be a part of the team, which
is a nice spin on a classic trope.
Finally, we go all pirate in
'Curse of the Earth Totem', as one of the missing totems is tracked to the
Caribbean and the near-legendary Captain Blackbeard. Cue hilarity as Ray and
Nate try to be piratical, but ultimately own Amaya the better pirate, and boast
her up as their pirate queen in order to blag a ride with actually-a-complete-coward
Blackbeard to the island where he buried the 'cursed' totem with his lover,
Anne Queen(6), after it turned her into a plant-manipulating hell-ghoul,
because the totems are powered by one's own spirit and pirates aren't good
people. There are crosses and double-crosses, the Darhks turn up and blag the spirit
totem, but Ray shoots Nora with the anti-mage gun, which works a treat.
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| For it is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate queen. |
The team retreat to the Waverrider, but Nate isn't able to leave
a woman he knew as a girl to die of horrible internal burny-freezy nanites. He
goes back and offers a cure in exchange for the spirit totem, but hangs around
too long and gets mage-choked by Nora, surviving only because Damien Darhk
suggests a use for him.
Also, Sara and Agent Sharp - I want to say Evelyn? - go on a date, only for Sara to dine and dash when she gets an alert from the team, and Rip Hunter escapes from Time Bureau custody to recruit Wally West, first for a mission of his own and then as a potential new recruit to the Waverrider crew.
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| "I don't have the best history with people called Brainiac, but we won't mention that. At all." |
Finally, Supergirl reopens two weeks later than the other shows, with
'Legion of Super Heroes'. Reign is pretty much... Reining, with no-one to stop
her as Kara is in a coma, her only contact with the outside world being the
projected presence of Mon-el and Whatsherface's(7) teammate, Brainiac-5, who is
trying to coax her out of an internal projection of her apartment. As the DEO
struggles to contain Reign, Mon-el resists the urge to join the fight, since
the Legion a) aren't supposed to get involved in past stuff, and b) his team
hold the key to curing a terrible future plague in their own DNA, because
apparently the twenty-eighth century(8) doesn't do thumb drives, data crystals,
notepads, or any other form of information storage more efficient and stable
than living DNA.
The twenty-eighth century is
kind of dumb(9).
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| Power rings and cool outfits. |
Mon-el and Imra eventually do
join the fight, activating the Legion's 'ah, fuck it' protocol, and Kara snaps
out of her coma to join the fight after realising that she is keeping herself
in the room, partly on account of how much of a beating she took, but also
because she's still trying to deny her humanity and be an alien arse-kicking machine,
where her civilian persona is still vitally important, and not just in the
sense that J'onn has to pretend to be her again after James tells Lena that
Kara is home sick.
Anyway, Kara comes to the aid
of the outmatched Legion, taking a bit of green vein to stick Reign with an
emergency Kryptonite shot held back in case of bad Superman. Reign retreats to what
I'm going to call the Temple of Doom, where the hologram of her creator tells
her that the world has been seeded with support goons for her, and Johnny
Used-to-Worship-Supergirl(10) tells her he can help her, since he sees a
Kryptonian object of worship who offers some potential for validation.
(1) For some reason, I was sure
it was called 'The Trial of Barry Allen', possibly because Barry Allen was on
trial, while everyone still loved the Flash.
(2) Experience shows this to be
a fair cop, but mostly because he lacks the intellectual coldness to plan such
meticulous deceptions, or even wear a mask when breaking into a mastermind's
house.
(3) The Trickster family are a
bit of an oddity, continually straddling the border between diabolical
supervillainy and genuine mental illness, although rarely as successfully as in
the JLU episode 'Flash and
Substance'.
(4) With no money, passport,
ID, or - so far as anyone can tell - Chinese language.
(5) Points for having
Constantine also hit on Leo. They still haven't shown him as actively and
definitively bi, but since Leo is in a committed relationship there was only so
far they could have gone without creating other problems.
(6) Related to Oliver?
(7) Imra, damnit.
(8) Or whenever they come from.
(9) Fair play, they were trying
to hide the information, although sticking it in your genome and escaping through time still feels a
little belt and temporal paradox.
(10) Just in case anyone thought it was just female characters whose names I couldn't remember.
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