The Flash: The Season 3 Midseason Report Card

THE HEROES

While the world around him expands, Barry Allen sometimes feels like he's stuck on a (cosmic?) treadmill.

The writers on The Flash have done a great job of showing us why we should care about the stories being told with Cisco, Caitlin, and Wally this season. They've given Tom Cavanagh yet another fresh challenge as H.R. Wells and even given recurring guests like Violett Beane's Jesse Quick a chance to flourish and grow.

And, yes, they've done a pretty good job of expanding and clarifying Iris' role in Team Flash, even if we'd like to see her operate independently of the STAR Labs crew a little bit more.

The only person who's really kind of adrift in season 3 is Barry. It looks like they've found what they need to sharpen his focus -- the threat of losing Iris forever -- but the sulking, the self-doubt, and the occasional bouts of grumpy projection are getting a bit stale. Unless they want to make it clear that these habits are a part of who Barry is and not just an obstacle he has to overcome, they ought to be reduced.

THE VILLAINS

Villains of the week on The Flash can be really great or really forgettable. So far this season, it's been about an even mix of the two.

While the action and visual effects feel like they've leveled up this year, we find ourselves struggling to remember very many of the specific opponents Barry has squared off against.

The second half of the season is promising some big moments, some fan-favorite returns, and presumably real closure on the Doctor Alchemy front...but it feels like the writers haven't really had a significant breakthrough in the way they present the week-to-week villains on The Flash since season 1.

Season 1, of course, is one of the best seasons of superhero TV ever made, so it's hard to argue the approach. But one of the recurring things we're finding as we put together this list is the number of things that we can say just are getting a little repetitive.

THE STORY

If this is how they were going to do "Flashpoint," it probably should have happened in season 2.

After building season 1 around the night of his mother's death, Barry returned to that point and saw that it wasn't a good idea to mess with history (with, admittedly, a little help from another version of himself standing there).

Then a year later, more or less out of the blue, they decide to reverse that decision.

That one decision has been talked to death, and it's hard to argue that Barry is "wrong" for wanting what he did, but obviously it feels a little out of joint for the story to unfold the way that it did and there's a degree to which that problem echoes the issue of everything feeling like it hasn't significantly grown or changed since season 1.

Look at Arrow's third season by comparison. Everyone on the show was markedly different than they had been in the first season. On The Flash, many of the characters only seem different because they have powers now.

Anyway, the mystery of Alchemy was satisfying enough, if predictable, and so far Savitar's storyline has been interesting. So it kind of feels like from a flawed starting point, they've managed to bring some really good material to bear.

Could that starting point have felt a little less flawed if "Flashpoint" hadn't felt like a bit of a disappointment against expectations? Probably. But if they wanted to manage expectations they probably should have tackled the story back in season 1 or 2, before The Flash showed that every batsh*t crazy idea in the DC Universe was seemingly on the table.

THE BIG BAD

We've had very little of Savitar so far, so it's difficult to say.

He kind of feels a lot like Zoom so far: last year, Zoom was obsessed with being the fastest, singled out Barry to try and "steal" his speed, and moved so fast he seemed unbeatable.

Certainly in spite of having all those things in common with Zoom, they feel different because Zoom always felt kind of creepy, whereas the size and design of Savitar makes him more daunting.

From a story structure point of view, it would have been nice to now know that Savitar was coming so far in advance. It could have been a pretty great twist to find out several episodes in that Alchemy wasn't really the guy pulling the strings. That said, Alchemy never truly felt overwhelming enough to be a big bad following in the footsteps of a badass like Zoom, so it's possible the writers and producers knew they couldn't keep the secret without jeopardizing the first chunk of the season when audiences turned on a "boring" big bad.

So far, if anything, Savitar kind of suffers from the same problem he had in the comics: he was just so much more powerful than the speedsters around him that it makes their continued survival feel like a necessary plot contrivance, and not something they themselves did right.

THE NUTS & BOLTS

Subtract the writing problems and on a sheer technical level, The Flash has never been better. The recurring cast have grown nicely into their roles, leaving an already-talented ensemble with a deep well of character on which to draw. The guests this year -- John Wesley Shipp, Joey King, Tom Felton, and others -- have been top-tier, too, with the unfortunate exception of a pretty forgettable Mirror Master (although that may be more up to the writing than his performance...or a little of both).

Ditto the visual effects, fight choreography, and the like, which seem to have reached the point where most of the hard stuff has been done once, and so now it's about sharpening and building on it for the future.

THE VERDICT

The Flash, one of the best superhero shows ever on TV, is starting to show its age a little bit and needs something to freshen it up.

Fans will often criticize the over-reliance on speedsters -- both on Team Flash and against them. We won't go there, as that's a convention of the character. Rather, we will say that what's holding the show back the most is the writers' seeming unwillingness to change what works.

Whether it's Barry's personality quirks, the week-to-week, low-stakes villains, or just mining the past for plot points ("Flashpoint"), new faces (H.R. Wells), and more, a show that's about the fastest man alive needs to feel like it's not stuck in the same gear after two years and change.

Grade: B-