‘The Flash’ Season Premiere: It’s the Flashiest One Yet

Ken Tucker
·Critic-at-Large, Yahoo Entertainment

Right now, I’m liking everything Flash-related. Tuesday night’s third-season premiere of The Flash is a superfun episode that presents viewers with a TV version of the 2011 “Flashpoint” storyline launched by DC Comics. And speaking of the comics, I’m really enjoying the current print version of The Flash, which features a plot completely different from the TV show’s, written by Joshua Williamson and featuring excellent kinetic art by Carmine Di Giandomenico. You should be reading it.

Meanwhile, the TV Flash continues to be the most satisfying of all the broadcast network adaptations of comic-book superheroes. Unlike Arrow, it never feels weighed down by its own mythology; unlike Gotham, its humor is light and airy, not ploddingly self-aware. The third season finds Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen living in another timeline, in which his mother and father are alive, and Central City has a yellow-costumed speedster, Kid Flash (Keiynan Lonsdale).

In the so-called Flashpoint universe, there’s an amusing new version of Cisco (Carlos Valdes), who’s become the richest man in Central City thanks to having created and sold a few hugely successful apps. As always with this show, the serious stuff — provided with fine menace in the season premiere by Matt Letscher’s Eobard Thawne — is handled with both visual razzle-dazzle and high emotional stakes. (Now if only the show could figure out how to make its female characters more interesting; both Iris [Candice Patton] and Caitlin [Danielle Panabaker] are little more than figures for Barry to bounce his emotions off.)

What both the TV and comic-book versions explore is the responsibility the hero feels for possessing a superpower. But unlike so much comic-book pop culture that has risen in the wake of Frank Miller’s bleak, gritty Dark Knight Returns (1986), The Flash continues to seek out the bright side of this dilemma, accepting responsibility as an avenue for optimism, for hope, for transformation.

Related: ‘The Flash’: Your Flashpoint Primer

This is what propelled the best episodes of The Flash in previous seasons, and what looks to be its organizing motivation for the new season. It’s what keeps me rooted to my sofa while Barry Allen runs for his life.

The Flash airs Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET on the CW.