Goodbye to the Flash, long live the Arrowverse

Grant Gustin destroyed my life. Sort of.

Gustin’s casting as Barry Allen in the second season of The CW’s Arrow was the moment that series stopped being an uncommonly good superhero soap and became the Arrowverse, an often shockingly ambitious small-screen take on the cosmic sprawl of DC comic books, spawning a stable of CW shows that, at their best, were some of the most surprising superhero adaptations we’d seen at the time.

The Flash ended its nine-season run and 184 episodes this week, as Gustin retired from his role as Barry Allen after Gustin’s tenure of ten years as Barry Allen/The Flash. The Flash, and several more in the many crossover episodes between his show and the show’s wider universe. The finale, “A New World: Part Four,” coincides with the end of the Arrowverse, as The FlashIs the final show on the line-up still in place after Arrow’s 2012 debut.

The less you say about the ending, the better. It’s a whimper of an ending, leaning on tropes that The FlashThe show was stale about four years ago. Time travel, alternate timelines, speedsters and actors who play so many different characters, that the death of one character barely registers. It felt like the show was stale for a long time, but it had become accustomed to itself. Gustin was still on the show, so I watched.

Shane Harvey/The CW

It’s hard to overstate how much Gustin’s role as Barry did to expand what the idea of superhero adaptations in the 2010s could look like. The first half of that decade was a transitional phase from the grim and grounded aesthetic of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy — which Arrow chose to emulate — to the still grounded, but buoyantly fun tone of the early MCU.

Flash, Despite its limited budget and resources, however, the film never shied away from the absurdity or bombast of the comic book material. When ArrowThe urban vigilantism of the group stayed away from anything superhuman. The Flash delighted in it, eagerly throwing the comic’s feverish absurdity at the screen. The first season had already ended. The Flash would showcase psychic gorillas, a nuclear superhero comprising two men in one body, a villain who calls himself the Weather Wizard, and a pair of weirdly endearing criminals who didn’t have powers but did have a hot gun and a cold gun, respectively.

Gustin’s performance as Barry Allen was a big part of why all that landed. In his first performance in ArrowGustin was immediately attracted to him because, first and foremost, he believed. The audience was a surrogate for him. He could enjoy the comics around him and, when the supernatural lightning bolt struck to transform him Flash, I felt like a young child being rewarded because he had a small amount of faith in magic. Barry, like many superheroes, had a tragic backstory, but unlike Stephen Amell’s grim Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, Barry could smile and do good in the world, not letting tragedy define him.

The CW

It was that smile which built the Arrowverse. Gustin’s boyish charm and enthusiasm were the perfect vehicle for the conviction you need to sell four-color comic book plots, to delight in their absurdity and also take their melodrama seriously. It’s arguably because of The FlashThe fans would jump around from one spinoff to another, committing themselves How many hours?It’s a world of TV that is rapidly growing. It’s why I did, even if I frequently questioned my decisions afterward.

Unfortunately, The Flash — passed from showrunner to showrunner as cast members filtered in and out — eventually succumbed to the grimness of the times, constantly returning to Barry’s central tragedy, that he lost his mother as a child, until it was almost all that defined him. As the show returned to this beat over and over again, the light went out from Gustin’s performance, and the series was never really able to surround him with characters that Barry palpably connected with — the last of these probably being former Glee co-star Melissa Benoist’s Supergirl.

In the current streaming era, television endings are given far more weight than they have had at any point in the medium’s history. Many shows that are saved from cancellation can end their show on their terms or, at least, they will play the ending. Flashback It appears that they did not. I was tired. The same as you, I felt tired.