Tuesday 10 April 2018

DC Roundup: The Flash - 'The Trial of The Flash', 'The Elongated Knight Rises' and 'Honey I Shrunk Team Flash'; Legends of Tomorrow - 'Daddy Darhkest', 'Here I Go Again' and 'The Curse of the Earth Totem'; and Supergirl - 'Legion of Super-Heroes'

Barry gets his day in court, and for a major murder trial, it really doesn't feel
like it's more than a day.
Back to the Arrowverse (and Earths west,) as we come back after the mid-season break for The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and, eventually, Supergirl.

'The Trial of The Flash(1)' follows from the midseason cliffhanger, as Barry faces trial for the murder of Clifford De Voe and the series faces the greatest challenge of a super-intelligent villain; the pitfall of simulating super-intelligence by having everyone else be incredibly stupid. Seriously, the trial of Barry Allen is about as fair and convincing as the trial in Paddington 2, but that was supposed to be a crock and featured in a critically lauded children's comedy, whereas The Flash occasionally aspires to aspects of police procedural. The prosecution simultaneously presents Barry as a diabolical mastermind and as a highly-skilled CSI completely incapable of even attempting to cover his tracks(2). Ultimately, that's because this episode is more about Barry refusing to use his superhero alter-ego to derail the trial than it is about the facts of the case, and thus we're just asked to accept that De Voe is capable of setting this whole thing up. It's also about Team Flash accepting his decision and not revealing the secret identity for him, and realising that they can't make right by doing wrong, as when Ralph Dibney of all people has to talk Joe down from planting evidence to clear Barry. It's played as an emotional moment of growth for Dibney, but it's also an important practical withdrawal, because Joe has apparently forgotten that the De Voe house is full of cameras.
 
Fallout. Not our best villain.
Also, the Flash helps to stop Fallout, a hapless metahuman who unknowingly pumps out radiation, and who is lucky enough to be sent off for treatment (because when Barry protests that he never killed anyone, this is rather disingenuous, his run-ins with Earth-2 metas in early Season 2 reaping a particularly bloody harvest.) This is an almost entirely insubstantial B-plot, except that it allows the show to parallel Captain Singh giving a citation for the Flash, alongside the judge sending Barry down for life without parole. 

Come for the life sentence, stay for the hats.
Thus, 'The Elongated Knight Rises' sees Dibney trying to step up as Central City's key hero, and while he does an okay job it's hard to see why no-one is asking 'where the heckins has the Flash got to?' Dibney's first case involves the second Trickster, who is broken out of jail by his mother, formerly known as Prank. She wants them to go straight, but is easily persuaded to drop her medication(3) and start kidnapping people. Trickster's new thing is acid-loaded squirt guns, which prove able to damage Dibney's polymerised cells, leading him to face the question of whether he wants to be a hero if he can be hurt. Meanwhile, Barry is treated to his inaugural shivving - Iron Heights is a traditional, orthodox prison - but saved by prison heavy 'Big Sir', whose life was saved by an emergency appendectomy performed by the late Henry Allen.

I miss Mark Hamill.
Dibney also runs into a girl at CC Jitters who is writing in a strange language. Apparently, this is the language Barry was writing in when he came out of the Speed Force, but my immediate assumption was that she was one of the Observers from Fringe.

Finally, 'Honey I Shrunk Team Flash' sets Team Flash against a meta with shrinking powers, who just happens to become active after (criminally speaking) after years on the QT, right after it turns out that he was responsible for the murder Big Sir was convicted of. Barry urges Team Flash to track him down and get a confession so that Big Sir can go free and travel to China, but the confession is not forthcoming, even after a whole bunch of high jinks involving Cisco and Dibney being shrunk and an attempted cure priming them to explode. With no way to get Big Sir's sentence overturned, Barry speedsters him to China(4) and then returns to his own cell, where he is drugged by the warden and taken to be sold to Amaunet.

That's a bad sign.
This is not a strong set of episodes for The Flash. There are a lot of great moments peppered throughout, but overall they are disappointing. The trial is too fast and hinges too heavily on the presumption that De Voe has not only created a sufficient wealth of evidence to hang - as it were - Barry, but that he can do so without needing to give any additional direction to the prosecution. Thereafter, Dibney is only a so-so fill in for the Flash, and the teams methods for evoking the Killer Frost persona in Caitlin are superficially funny, but in retrospect almost as creepy as the fact that members of the team have been hitting the clubs with Killer Frost while Caitlin has been sleeping.

I'm curious to see how the show prevents Barry's secret identity from becoming public knowledge once, inevitably, he escapes from Amaunet's 'employment', and am wondering if she won't be suffering another non-culpable, Flash-related fatal accidents.

It's that man again.
Legends of Tomorrow has been bringing me rather more joy lately (although The Flash does have a shout-out to one-time god of war, Beebo.) Not that there are many laughs in 'Daddy Darhkest', as John Constantine leads the team to an asylum in Star City, 2017, and a girl named Emily who is possessed by a demon who knows Sara's name. The demon is Mallus, and laughs at Constantine's most substantial wards, and the girl it turns out is Nora Darhk. Mallus throws Constantine, Sara and Leo back in time, where Constantine and Sara get jiggy(5) and Leo gets drugged. With the Waverrider in trouble because - among other things - Ray and Zari are off trying to convince Nora not to go evil in later life, Sara has to willingly channel Mallus in order to mark and reactivate the time travel rune that was used to send them back in time, in order to get home. This means that she potentially opens herself to Mallus in future, and Constantine urges Ray to keep working on a nano-pistol designed to kill the possessed.

Also, Ray goes home to Earth-X.

Okay, not much joy there, but then we have 'Here I Go Again', which is, in the parlance of the show itself, the Groundhog Day episode, as a temporal fluid leak and an explosion on the Waverrider leaves Zari stuck in some sort of time loop. The first few times around, Sara - already narked at Zari for dragging her heels on repairs - has her sedated, but it turns out that Nate is willing to believe, and gives her Groundhog Day as a shorthand to convince him each cycle. She struggles to solve the problem, and as she looks for a mole in the crew she learns a lot about them, such as Ray's work on the nanite gun, Sara's burgeoning relationship with Agent Sharp, and the fact that Mick is writing a halfway decent sci-fi romance.

I have a deep and shameful love of sassy female-voiced computer. And sassy
male-voiced computers, actually, although there are fewer of them.
My favourite thing about this episode is the twist. It does all the standard time loop stuff - the intense struggle, the dossing around cycles - but then, just as the source turns up and the loop gets broken with the countdown still ticking, it turns out that this isn't a time loop. The fluid leak just knocked her into a coma, and Gideon - who is just the scariest voyeuristic caregiver ever - put her into a simulation in order to convince her that she could stay and be a part of the team, which is a nice spin on a classic trope.

Finally, we go all pirate in 'Curse of the Earth Totem', as one of the missing totems is tracked to the Caribbean and the near-legendary Captain Blackbeard. Cue hilarity as Ray and Nate try to be piratical, but ultimately own Amaya the better pirate, and boast her up as their pirate queen in order to blag a ride with actually-a-complete-coward Blackbeard to the island where he buried the 'cursed' totem with his lover, Anne Queen(6), after it turned her into a plant-manipulating hell-ghoul, because the totems are powered by one's own spirit and pirates aren't good people. There are crosses and double-crosses, the Darhks turn up and blag the spirit totem, but Ray shoots Nora with the anti-mage gun, which works a treat.

For it is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate queen.
The team retreat to the Waverrider, but Nate isn't able to leave a woman he knew as a girl to die of horrible internal burny-freezy nanites. He goes back and offers a cure in exchange for the spirit totem, but hangs around too long and gets mage-choked by Nora, surviving only because Damien Darhk suggests a use for him.

Also, Sara and Agent Sharp - I want to say Evelyn? - go on a date, only for Sara to dine and dash when she gets an alert from the team, and Rip Hunter escapes from Time Bureau custody to recruit Wally West, first for a mission of his own and then as a potential new recruit to the Waverrider crew.

"I don't have the best history with people called Brainiac, but we won't
mention that. At all."
Finally, Supergirl reopens two weeks later than the other shows, with 'Legion of Super Heroes'. Reign is pretty much... Reining, with no-one to stop her as Kara is in a coma, her only contact with the outside world being the projected presence of Mon-el and Whatsherface's(7) teammate, Brainiac-5, who is trying to coax her out of an internal projection of her apartment. As the DEO struggles to contain Reign, Mon-el resists the urge to join the fight, since the Legion a) aren't supposed to get involved in past stuff, and b) his team hold the key to curing a terrible future plague in their own DNA, because apparently the twenty-eighth century(8) doesn't do thumb drives, data crystals, notepads, or any other form of information storage more efficient and stable than living DNA.

The twenty-eighth century is kind of dumb(9).

Power rings and cool outfits.
Mon-el and Imra eventually do join the fight, activating the Legion's 'ah, fuck it' protocol, and Kara snaps out of her coma to join the fight after realising that she is keeping herself in the room, partly on account of how much of a beating she took, but also because she's still trying to deny her humanity and be an alien arse-kicking machine, where her civilian persona is still vitally important, and not just in the sense that J'onn has to pretend to be her again after James tells Lena that Kara is home sick.

Anyway, Kara comes to the aid of the outmatched Legion, taking a bit of green vein to stick Reign with an emergency Kryptonite shot held back in case of bad Superman. Reign retreats to what I'm going to call the Temple of Doom, where the hologram of her creator tells her that the world has been seeded with support goons for her, and Johnny Used-to-Worship-Supergirl(10) tells her he can help her, since he sees a Kryptonian object of worship who offers some potential for validation.

(1) For some reason, I was sure it was called 'The Trial of Barry Allen', possibly because Barry Allen was on trial, while everyone still loved the Flash.
(2) Experience shows this to be a fair cop, but mostly because he lacks the intellectual coldness to plan such meticulous deceptions, or even wear a mask when breaking into a mastermind's house.
(3) The Trickster family are a bit of an oddity, continually straddling the border between diabolical supervillainy and genuine mental illness, although rarely as successfully as in the JLU episode 'Flash and Substance'.
(4) With no money, passport, ID, or - so far as anyone can tell - Chinese language.
(5) Points for having Constantine also hit on Leo. They still haven't shown him as actively and definitively bi, but since Leo is in a committed relationship there was only so far they could have gone without creating other problems.
(6) Related to Oliver?
(7) Imra, damnit.
(8) Or whenever they come from.
(9) Fair play, they were trying to hide the information, although sticking it in your genome and escaping through time still feels a little belt and temporal paradox.
(10) Just in case anyone thought it was just female characters whose names I couldn't remember.

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