No sooner had the companions of John Constantine received some much needed fleshing-out last week, than we got an episode that sees John on a solo adventure with an oddly brief hand-wave about Zed and Chas being on holiday or something.
There is nothing inherently wrong with doing a solo one-off episode, except that it falls into the obvious trap that a solo one-off would tend to imply, namely that it devises a terrific concept and then finds itself without the necessary time or space to give that idea its full due.
Specifically, this episode sees Constantine help yet another old occultist chum from his younger days - and since to my recollection we have yet seen neither footage nor photograph of his whole former entourage together, the show can keep on doing this more or less indefinitely - to fight a mad doctor in a magical mindspace in which the power of the consciousness determines the nature of reality.
This is a terrific idea, packed with not only exciting story and visual potential, but with tremendous thematic resonance if the show were only to start digging for it. Unfortunately, the time constraints inherent in an hour-long show do not accommodate the possibility of making good on all of this potential, and so even the grand climax less resembles a Dark City-style reshaping of the world than one good CGI shot and an array of underwhelming greenscreen effects.
In short, the key phrase of the day is unrealized potential. A very interesting idea is left without the necessary room to breathe, and the result is an intriguing but ultimately middling episode of the series. The teaser for next week's episode seems to imply the return of the main season arc along with the side characters the show has been slowly developing over its run, so that will be worth returning for at any rate. Until then, we are left with this noble failure of an episode, and at the very least I would much rather see an installment that fails due to an surplus of ambition rather than one kneecapped by a dearth of it.
After an intriguing but somewhat underwhelming episode last week, the latest episode of Arrow tells a much larger and more compelling story, marred only by one nagging flaw that I will come to later.
The best stuff first. The overarching plot with Brick as the new villain had threatened to become like the Slade Wilson mega-arc last season, in which the villain takes an unreasonably and - ultimately - self-defeatingly long time to bring any of his plans to full fruition. Happily, in line with the aggressive persona of this new villain, his take-over-the-slums scheme is refreshingly straightforward, simple, and fast. He kidnaps three city officials and holds the area to ransom, essentially declaring his own fiefdom over The Glades district of the city. Done.
And in point of fact, he wins! With Oliver still gone, the city is left with his entourage to sort everything out in his absence, and their struggle to do so feels very real, very dangerous, and very suspenseful. As it turns out, struggle is much more engaging and relatable when not constantly interrupted by huskily whispered platitudes from a joyless mentor.
But we are by no means free of Oliver in the interim, and this is the nagging problem with the episode that I so crudely hinted at above. Not only are we intermittently assailed by more interminable flashbacks, which have always been the most bloody-mindedly tedious part of the show after the previously on... segments, but we also get a handful of scenes of Oliver recuperating in the present day. These scenes serve the dual purpose of bringing the story to a grinding halt every time they appear and reminding us of similar scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, another superhero tale that took an ill-advised break from building up tension to watch the hero recover from severe injuries sustained in the line of duty.
I am, however, being far too cruel. Midnight City is a very compelling episode that moves the season arc forward but still manages to tell an engaging story of its own in the meantime, which is as succinct a definition of a good TV episode as I can be bothered to think of. There is also a small but satisfying final twist that sets up more intrigue for the future, so well done there as well. It will be interesting to see if the next episode will be able to sustain this high.
As previously mentioned, the character of The Flash has one of the best-remembered rogues galleries in comics, and one of the most prominent of those villains is Pied Piper, perhaps best remembered for coming out as gay in issue #53 of The Flash in 1991. It was an ahead-of-its-time move, and one that has made the character stand out even in the crowded field of Flash rogues ever since.
And now that we finally see the first appearance of the character on The Flash TV show, that element is nicely handled, neither glossed over nor allowed to define the character on its own. Rather, this version of the character - civilian name Hartley Rathaway - is given an Asbergers-ish, even Sherlockian quality. True to that idea, he seems to know more about everyone in the room than anyone in the room, and is just as deliberately abrasive as that might imply. Additionally, of course, his smugly-withheld knowledge of various character secrets allows the writers of the show to hint at mysteries yet to be unraveled for the viewers.
Unlike last week, this episode tries to be hyper-cerebral almost to a fault, with the dense jargon about sound waves being more than likely to confuse some viewers, particularly as the climax nears. Also unlike last week, this episode moves the season arc forward considerably, as the great cipher of the series, Dr. Harrison Wells, has a great many of his secrets stripped away with even more hinted to come. Of course, the greatest secret surrounding that character - his identity - remains a very deliberate mystery. I will discuss that briefly in a spoiler section at the end of the review.
Before that, we have just enough time for a few observations. First, the episode opens with Barry foiling a robbery by the Royal Flush Gang from the comics, although the card-face motorcycle helmets they wear are really the only aspect of their outfits that really identify them as such. Second, the subplot with Iris getting a job at a major newspaper may pay off later in the season, but in this episode it feels remarkably vestigial, really only serving to make the life-and-death elements seem markedly less urgent. Third and finally, the alternating cooperation and antagonism between the folks back at Star Labs keeps things interesting throughout the episode, and gives me to hope that their on-off resentment of Dr. Wells will force him to show his hand sooner rather than later.
In summary, this is an excellent episode of The Flash, both as fun and as full of vaguely obtuse intrigue as that would imply.
Spoiler-ish final notes--
The episode actually does some very clever things with Dr. Wells. The writers know that the biggest question with the character is his true identity, and so they drop multiple - and contradictory - hints as to the answer. This is why we have Barry sliding into what is almost a Wells impression during a conversation with Iris, seemingly lending credence to the theory that Wells is actually a future timeline version of Barry himself. Then we have Wells having to replenish his connection to the Speed Force - nice little comics shout-out there, incidentally - which suggests he might be someone else entirely. Then we have him addressing his house computer as Gideon, which some have interpreted as a reference to the DC Comics New Gods. This is all deliberate wrong-footing on varying scales of cleverness, and as such gives us no real hints. But boy is it fun to fruitlessly speculate! Until next week, friends!
