The Flash: Five Things We Would Have Liked to See From Flashpoint

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the season three premiere of The Flash, titled “Flashpoint.”

While tonight’s episode of The Flash was exciting and compelling, many audience members were likely left feeling a bit cold.

Comic book fans have been so enthusiastically hyping up the possibility of a Flashpoint timeline ever since the series began, that even fans who are there only for TV have picked up on some of those expectations…and while a good stand-alone episode of The Flash, “Flashpoint” didn’t exactly deliver by that standard.

The universe-altering event ended after only one episode, with very little in the way of visible changes to the long-term status quo so far and not that many differences between the pre-Flashpoint world and the world of Flashpoint itself.

We’ll try and divorce this from the contents of our previous write-up speculating about what might have been and what we wanted to see from “Flashpoint,” but it’s worth noting that we were hardly alone, and our readers on social media shared plenty of their own ideas.

So…yeah. People had expectations going in. And not all of them will have been met, even by people who enjoyed the episode itself.

What do we think they could have — or we would have liked them to have — done? Read on…!

A MORE FLESHED-OUT WORLD

One of the biggest thrills of the Flashpoint comics, in addition to a strong central storyline and the sense that something huge was happening in the comic, was the fully-realized world in which they existed.

It’s hard to overstate how much this episode of The Flash felt like just another episode where Barry was on Earth-2 or traveling back to yesterday to help Oliver Queen plan their assault on Vandal Savage. It was well-executed, but it isnt’ what a lot of fans expected.

Even the opportunity to drop a few Flashpoint Easter eggs here and there — the name of the Green Arrow Corporation, say, or mentioning a test pilot or the like — was passed up, leaving us with an episode where the clearest indication that it’s the world of Flashpoint is simply that the villain literally namedrops that storyline.

Ultimately, other than Team Flash themselves, it didn’t feel like there was a significant difference between the “real” world, and the world of Flashpoint. Which made it seem less special than many of us had hoped.

A CAMEO OR TWO

Yes, the whole of the DC Universe wasn’t available to the writers and producers.

…But couldn’t some of it have been?

A token mention of Shade or Cyborg or Deathstroke could have been cool. But what really was just begging to be done was to have Wentworth Miller — a series regular across all of The CW’s super-shows — appear even briefly as Wally West’s uneasy ally Citizen Cold.

Given the nature of Flashpoint and the high expectations for the storyline, the fact that nobody — not even John Diggle, whose story will reportedly be altered by the timeline shift post-Flashpoint — makes an appearance is more than a little head-scratching.

A GREATER SENSE OF URGENCY

In the comics, the choice was clear. The idea that people were literally suffering so that Barry could be happy was evident from the moment it became clear that it was Barry and now Thawne who had changed the timeline. With a world teetering on the brink of oblivion and a number of Barry’s friends and loved ones either dead or compromised beyond repair, the world of Flashpoint was bleak, scary, and something that nobody, no matter how selfish, could believe was worth keeping.

When Barry tells Thawne to go to hell in this episode, and Thawne comes back with “You’re taking both of us there,” it’s hard not to question…how? In what way is the almost-but-not-quite-as-good-as-the-original world of Flashpoint “Hell?”

It’s an understandable problem. As we’ve already pointed out, money and time aren’t unlimited and the comics version of Flashpoint would be a strain on both of those tings even if you just scratched the surface. Still, it seems like there could have been something a little worse than we got that makes it crystal clear that Barry is making the right decision, and not just erring on the side of caution, when he decides that it’s the world of Flashpoint and not Earth-1 that’s expendable in the end.

A DIFFERENT BARRY

They touched on it very, very briefly but what could have been interesting would have been seeing how the people who knew the Barry of Flashpoint responded to his suddenly being replaced by a version of the character who lived an entirely different life.

His parents make a passing reference, and obviously Joe is annoyed by Barry interfering in his career — but did Barry not know anybody else on this Earth? There was nobody there asking what was wrong with him, why he kept forgetting things, etc.? 

It seems like a hole in his backstory, and if it had been addressed even tangentially, it could have opened up some of those characters to make appearances in the future.

A GREATER SCOPE

Look, it feels like we’re beating a dead horse at this point when we say that we understand this was never going to be identical to the comics, and that the scope and scale of the Flashpoint miniseries are basically impossible to reproduce in the context of The CW’s The Flash.

That said, for the aforementioned reasons and more, it just felt like ending Flashpoint after one episode — after two years of speculation about whether it would ever come to TV and what shape it might take if it did — was incredibly underwhelming.

In our review for the season three premiere, we said that the episode came out of the gate strong, but it wasn’t clear whether the rest of the season could keep up that pace. Now you know at least part of why: it’s a great stand-alone episode of TV, but it’s a poor adaptation of the source material and the decision to do away with the Flashpoint timeline so soon seems wasteful.