Marie F.

I'm sick of the romances on this show. They've ruined Frost and Firestorm for me, and heavily damaged Barry and Iris, and irritated the heck out of me with Barry and Patsy. I'm not confident this show can execute a passable romance. I wish they would stop and stick to the action, villains, family, and perhaps write some good season-long, villain-related mysteries for Iris to be involved in. Regarding Killer Frost spoiler, I knew this would happen. Of course, Earth 2 Caitlin is going to be Killer Frost. That's a complete cop-out. They've now ensured that the whole Frost story will be devoid of drama, tension, or buildup because no one cares if a Caitlin we don’t know becomes Killer Frost. Viewers don’t have a history with that Caitlin. That's a big missed opportunity to make Caitlin interesting.

Yay, we finally know what Zoom is up to. I’m glad he’s back and hopefully all that Legends stuff is over. The Trickster was fun, but most enjoyable scene was Cold talking to Iris/ Barry. It could have been longer. And I liked Cold mentioning Iris’s work. Loved everything with the Wests. Wally was only there for a few seconds but he looked so young and vulnerable, I was hoping Iris would run up and hug him or something. I know I wanted to hug him. I think I’m going to enjoy the actor even if I wind up not liking Wally himself someday. I liked Christmas at the Wests’. Glaring absence being Henry Allen. Barry could have made a comment like, “My dad is coming by later but he’s got to take care of some stuff first” or something. I don’t think we necessarily have to see him (or Patty for that matter, Barry could date her in Off-Screenland), but I wish he was there, even if it's in name only. I hope there’s a better reason for his absences coming, though I can’t imagine what it would be. I thought the one scene between Caitlin/Jay at the West house was cute—even though I don’t like Caitlin or the pairing and there’s no heat whatsoever between them. And I’m glad they found something for Jay to do this episode. I just wish Barry got to be super smart like him and Harry, I think having all the people at Star Labs kind of dumbs him down. And that was really impressive from Candice Patton. She’s a very graceful actress and it was nice to see more of her/Iris. I even liked the woman that plays Patyy in the scene where she told the Flash about her dad. Reminded me of her scene when she was talking about him with Joe; in fact, I wish all of her scenes were with Joe and no one else because I still can’t bring myself to care about Patty. I hope she leaves soon.

Caitlin said Jay is gone. She made it sound like he went back to Earth 2. Color me disappointed if he is. They could have done so much with him instead of sticking him in a weak romance with Caitlin. I always hand-waved/imagined him off looking for Earth 1 Jay to explain his weird absences because that’s what I’d be doing if I were visiting from another earth. I don’t know if anyone else is counting, but this makes Caitlin the fourth person/woman to get kidnapped this season. (Patty got kidnapped first, we then found out that Zoom kidnapped Jesse, then Zoom kidnapped Linda, and now Caitlin has her second kidnapping.) Only abduction that doesn’t get an eye-roll is Linda’s because that was relevant and necessary; it would have been anticlimactic if there weren’t consequences for her for messing with Zoom. The rest? No, because there's never any tension. No one knows enough about Patty or Jesse to care or worry that they may be in danger (they're just plot devices) and this show loves Caitlin so she was never in any danger. Boring and unnecessary. I hope they don’t do this with Iris. One of my favorite things about her in season 1 and now in season 2 is that they seemed to make a conscious effort not to damsel her. And when she does get into sticky situations and needs rescuing, they have her somehow contribute to her rescue—punching out the bully, the Clock King, jumping out of the building, shooting Dr. Light. And where is Zoom? Why does he conveniently disappear for entire episodes? He disappears for legends episodes and now for this Grodd episode. What’s he doing?

Does anyone else think it's weird that Harry's metahuman detector watch went off randomly when Zoom was on the roof? Cisco was standing right next to him. Why wasn't it already going off? The last time he used it, I think he flipped it open and did something to it before holding it up to Cisco and Caitlin to see if it went off. In this episode, he was just sitting in a chair when it went off because Zoom was on the roof.

They def knew it was going to happen, but I wonder if they expected it to be like this. I think most people see racial hatred as a bunch of people saying the n-word and calling her other names or outright saying that they don't like her because she's black. That's how most people view that type of hatred. Iris haters can be a lot more subtle than anyone would expect and I think some of them don't even understand why they hate her. Yep, there needs to be someone to say "Hey, let's not make Mama West a druggie and make Wally a crack baby" or "Hey, let's not strong!black!woman! Iris" or "Let's make sure that while Iris is giving Barry support that he is shown doing the same with her."

I think they tried to write her as the typical love interest/romantic object for Barry to daydream about and prize for him to win, but it just fell flat and looked like they weren't trying. At least, in my humble opinion. I don't think they know who she is outside of that relationship. I still have to wonder, though, if they're scared of the criticism from S1 and the heat they're getting now. And you're right, Iris never gets pov. The only time Iris got a little pov (just a little) was when she confronted people for lying to her and the character got hated on for being "angry" "whiny" and "bitchy." I think a lot of the hate she got from some viewers stemmed form her being black, being a woman confronting the men in her life, and not just the way she was written--she's not allowed to defend herself from people who hurt her because if she does she's angry and combative. She can't demand that people respect her or treat her like an equal because then she's whiny. And she can't have a conflicting opinion with a guy because then she's bitchy. I wonder if the writers understand why people react like that and if they know what to do about it because, as mentioned in the post above, they have actually been writing her as likeable, nice, and warm. Yes, it's frustrating to see this. It's always tricky having conversations about race but I understand how exhausting the race-bait-and-switch is. They pull you in with one thing and try to sell you something else--Sleepy Hollow, for instance. Iris is what attracted to me to the show and though I like it, I'm not really interested if they're not going to do her right.

Which is my main problem with her--not that she's blocking the Barry/Iris relationship but this is clearly her only purpose and they didn't even bother to give her her own personality--they just took one aspect of Barry's personality (his awkwardness), magnified it (Barry was never like that with Felicity or Linda or Iris), split it in half, and gave one half to her in lieu of her own personality. I am also bothered by how she and the new legends show eat up some of the screen time of the core characters. Patty has no personality of her own, Iris's personality is underdeveloped and a mystery because they mostly ignore her (though they are clearly trying to integrate her in the past two episodes), and Caitlin gets a new personality whenever Ronnie dies, comes back, goes away, comes back, dies again, Jay comes along, she meets Jax/Hewitt. I'm not interested in Patty, but I wish the actress had more to do because there's clearly something to her. And people always complain about Panabacker's acting, but what is she supposed to do when Caitlin is so inconsistent and plot-driven? None of the guys suffer from this. Also, I hate when disinterest, dislike, or even hate for a female character to is regulated to just shippers being shippers. It's one of the ways that people dismiss legitimate criticisms on Barry/Iris as a couple, or Barry/Caitlin, and now with Patty/Barry. Fact of the matter is, we don't know who any of the women on this show are.

They should have named the show something other than The Flash then or they shouldn't have even brought in an Iris West or a Joe West or people named Thawne or multiple earths or Zoom or Reverse Flash. People expect to see those things on a show based on the comics because they are huge elements of those comics. People who watch this show expect them to have the Tornado Twins (Iris is their mother) and to usher in Bart, her grandson, etc. They wanted to see Grodd because he is a huge character/villain in the comics. I don't get why it's so unreasonable for people to expect that a tv show about a comic series actually take those elements from the comic series. I mean, if you name a movie Hunger Games or Harry Potter and say that it's an adaptation of the book, then why wouldn't people expect the main characters from the book and their relationships to be explored in the movie? Personally, I've lost interest in Barry and Iris and still don't care about Patty. Actually I'm actively starting to resent her because my main problems with her are the fact that 1) she/LOT/and other uninteresting stuff are eating up screen time that I think Iris or other core characters should have, 2) the fact that she's only there to be a love interest, and 3) despite how hard they've tried with her they still haven't given her a personality. This show is terrible with how they write the women and the romances.

Pardon the length of this essay but if I were writing/producing this show, I probably wouldn't want to go anywhere near Iris anymore for fear of upsetting people. Someone is always upset about something w/ her and it’s hard to separate legitimate criticism from the criticisms of 1) biased haters or 2) biased fans. Iris fans are very vocal and her fan base seems huge, but it can get a little sticky when most of the comments about her character often resolve into conversations about her race, relevant though it is much of the time. Maybe that’s where part of the problem lays? The people making this show decided on their own to make the West family black but I do wonder if they’re starting to regret that decision? It has come with a lot of baggage they’re clearly not used to managing. I don't think they understand the Iris hate in S1--because it was an unreasonable, illogical type of hatred they’ve never experienced before. People are uncomfortable dealing w/ race or being anywhere near it if they don’t have to be. I think most of the problems with the character wouldn’t exist if the character were played by someone else. I think she would be easier to write for and to display prominently in promos, for instance. I also don’t think there’d be a Patty. There’s a theory here that Patty only exists to get Barry laid, but why couldn’t Linda do that or a random one-nighter? I think they didn’t just want to show him as being able to pull hot blonde white chicks, but also wanted to show that he’s super into hot blond white chicks, too. I mean, there was the pilot where he kissed Felicity, but his last gf was an Asian woman and he’s in love with a black woman. Allegedly. Maybe they don’t want the fangirls to think he doesn’t find them attractive so they had to shoe-horn this relationship in? Because God forbid! I wonder if they’re starting to resent the character because she’s the source of a huge chunk of the criticism of S 2. There are huge problems with other characters, too, especially the women, but Caitlin and Patty don’t seem to have huge fan bases that speak up on their behalf. Maybe they think the best thing to do is push her aside, leave her there as window dressing, at least for now? When you think about it, they don’t know who any of the women are outside of romantic pairings—Caitlin is plot-driven and gets a personality transplant every few episodes (w/ Ronnie, Jay, Hewitt/Jax storylines being the catalysts) while paper-thin Patty doesn’t even get one personality of her very own. I think/hope that the other part of the issue is the fact that they have way too much to do right now w/ too many characters, trying to launch a new show. A lot of the characters are suffering from this, but it looks funny because she is bearing the brunt of the suffering and it looks like they’re trying to replace her and have in several senses (Patty has assumed her position as LI , taken over Iris's metahuman investigations, and eaten up a lot of screen time especially for a new character, screen time that could be used to show Barry/Iris being friends or Iris/Linda's friendship or something). I really hope she is a huge factor in Wally's story, but wish there was an Iris-centered story. This is my problem with Barry and Iris now. I've lost interest, but maybe that was the reason for isolating Iris from everything and keeping them apart? They want us to forget and kill off interest. I was indifferent to Barry and Patty before, but now they've made me resent the Patty character. I also like Barry a little less but for other reasons.

I didn't watch the whole episode. I checked out of a lot of scenes, but I feel like when we find out who Zoom is, it won’t really make sense, kind of like A on Pretty Little Liars. Like all the little clues you pick up along the way won’t really fit because they’ll just make it who they want to make it in the end. My theory was that Zoom would be Earth 2 Barry who went evil after his Iris died, but I’m assuming he saw Iris when he brought Flash to her job, right? I would have expected a reaction when he saw her. I’m thinking it’s Earth 2 Henry and maybe somehow Earth 1 Henry knows something about it? And it can't be Earth 1 Eddie because Eddie was being sucked up into the portal while Jay and Zoom were fighting on Earth 2, but maybe Earth 2 Eddie? I fear they're probably going to drag this out so long that I lose interest, but Zoom was pretty scary. Did Candice Patton accidentally run over somebody's pet? Seriously, what the heck is going on there? Poor Barry, too, because it looks like he's getting sidelined with his convenient paralysis so that Caitlin and Patsy can get their shine in the next episode. I thought he had super fast healing?

If I recall correctly, Barry lost his speed, too, for a minute and it turned out it was all in his head.

Yep. There are way too many characters on the canvas right now and I think the only few people that are completely necessary at this point are Barry (obviously), Wells, Cisco and I think Caitlin is comfortable too because she's clearly very popular with the people who make the show (writers/producers). And Patty is filling the love interest role on the show and I think that if they like the character, they could keep her (let's hope not) as a recast if the actress leaves.

It concerns me that Iris's mother is apparently gone. I mean, that's been her only story up til now. What are they going to do with her until Wally gets here? When exactly does Wally get here and what will they do with her then? I'm imagining that Wally and Barry's relationship will get more attention than Iris/Wally's. I was shocked that they made Jay a coward and actually had him (and Wells) telling Barry that he was a better Flash than Jay.

I actually lost interest in Wells a long time ago, but was wondering how they planned to incorporate him back into things. They made him interesting, but maybe a little over the top--he talks like Shatner now. Stupid fight between him and Jay--will there be an Earth 1 Jay? And I guess Caitlin isn’t a meta since Wells's watch didn’t go off? And I'm guessing once he saves his daughter, he'll go back to profiting off of metas and be an enemy of Barry's. Okay, I like Linda. And thumbs up to the Iris and Joe scenes; I saw pictures of this episode of her holding a gun and wondered what that was about and thought it would be stupid and contrived. I’m so not interested in Barry/Patty, but I keep waiting for him to tell her about Iris since he’s allegedly in love with her. Same problem I had with him and Linda last season—no woman wants to date a man that’s in love with another woman. Allegedly. At least, tell her up front so that she can decide if she still wants to go there with you. Patty seems excessively agreeable; doubt she’d have a problem with it. Other than that, Barry/Patty makes me sleepy. Also, That was a weird setup for the kiss between Caitlin and Jay. Special thanks to Dr. Light for breaking that up. Cool supervillain.

Let's hope that's the case. I just hope that if she is temporary that they don't have me completely lose interest in Barry/Iris by then. Because I'm starting to wonder if they're still into each other at all--or if they're even friends.