The Flash's mantra is that there will always be more story to tell. That's what the producers told Tom Cavanagh when he asked if they were perhaps moving a little too fast. Why hold back when tomorrow is not guaranteed? Of course, they're getting a second season meaning tomorrow is definitely guaranteed, but they didn't know that when they planned out the season. So, if you want to make Iris West a full-blown reporter why wait around for several full seasons like Smallville did with the Erica Durance Lois Lane? Boom. Iris get a call out of nowhere, and now she's a reporter. Why wait? By comparison, waiting until mid-season to reveal that the man in the yellow suit was actually Dr. Wells was the model of restraint on their part. However, they still have 23 episodes of story to fill, and that means not all storylines will progress at the same rate. While Iris gets an out-of-nowhere career change this episode the rest of the cast is stuck pausing to take a look back at Dr. Wells' history and dealing with a villain whose main purpose will clearly be to segue into the Firestorm portion of the season. As a result, you could ding this episode for being an in-between piece, but it did so while offering plenty of interesting character development moments for Team Flash. Plus, I'm still far from tired of seeing Flash use his superspeed in exciting CGI sequences.
This inevitably covered familiar territory. After all, this is not the first villain seeking to specifically punish Dr. Wells for his crimes related to the particle accelerator (Blackout in "Power Outage) nor is it the first one to have a personal history with him (Clancy Brown's General Eiling in "Plastique"). However, what I found more distracting was the way the villain went from the guy wanting to prevent a disaster with the particle accelerator to someone who views a road full of cars as mere pawns to be sacrificed in a metaphorical chess match. I guess the whole "Dude's a douchebag" backstory is supposed to cover that, and perhaps his efforts to prevent the particle accelerator had nothing to do with concern for human loss and everything to do with safeguarding his professional reputation. Plus, in a classic villain kind of way he could have easily thrown out a, "I knew you'd waste your energy rescuing those people thus opening yourself up to defeat" monologue. I am probably focusing too much on the particle accelerator and not enough on Hartley's obvious hostile, "Who the hell is the new guy? I'm the prized student!" reaction to meeting Cisco in the flashbacks. Honestly, though, I had so much fun watching Barry rescue all those people from the falling cars that questioning Hartley's motives and morality didn't even occur to me until well after I'd finished watching the episode.
I'm not saying any of this to be self-aggrandizing. There are countless other sites that write about Arrow/ Flash even more than me, and many of them have been doing so since before the first season even premiered. Small fish, big pond. I'm simply offering it as context to best explain how annoyed I was when Iris West quite literally got a job as staff reporter at a newspaper because the editor liked The Flash blog she's been writing for less than half a year. Now, obviously The Flash exists in a heightened reality where people in costumes run around committing crimes until the fast guy in the red costume catches them. So, just because I have not personally been or heard of any other Arrow/ Flash blogger getting cold-called like that in the real world does not mean something similar can't happen in the world of the show (after all, in the actual real world Juno 's Diablo Cody turned her blog into a screenwriting career). However, it does mean I am perhaps predisposed to being a bit more critical of this plot development not due to envy but simply because it seems way too easy. Did I miss the point when Iris expressed any kind of ambition about being a journalist? She actually dismissed that potential career in an off-handed remark earlier in the season, and if memory serves she was a pyschology grad student when this all started. Her Flash blog was never about her being a journalist, more about her love for Barry, growing infatuation with The Flash, and dogged devotion to doing something everyone was telling her not to. Now, she's not only suddenly working at a newspaper but she's excited about it and driven to prove to everyone at her new job that she's more than just the girl who writes about The Flash. What? Where the heck did this come from?
Umm, dude, Iris is a reporter in the comics. Pretty much always has been. She's the Lois Lane to Barry Allen's Superman except in the Flash comics time travel comes into play, things get crazy complicated, Iris actually becomes a villain...actually, just forgot all that and stick with her=Lois Lane, he=Superman. Just go with it. This is just how these plots sometimes go on Arrow/ Flash.
Eventually, we were going to see the flashback episode where Cisco first met Caitlin and Dr. Wells just as we were eventually going to see Iris become a modern Lois Lane. Granted, it's a bit odd that they both happened in the same episode, and that the story was more about setting things up for later than paying anything off. However, the storyline inherently placed a huge focus on Tom Cavanagh, to the point that Grant Gustin seemed way more of a spectator than usual. Cavanagh is so deliciously fun to watch in this role, way too good to fall into mere mad scientist territory, that I forgave this episode's faults and simply had a heck of a time taking it all in.
NEXT TIME, BARRY FINALLY TRIES TO MOVE ON FROM IRISTHE NOTES
1. Quick show of hands: Who here has satellite radio in their car? And how likely is it that every single car on that bridge would have it thus allowing Dr. Wells to defeat the Pied Piper?
2. If you missed it, yes, that was the Royal Flush Gang on those motorcycles at the beginning of the episode. They previously showed up as a family previously screwed over by Oliver's father in an early season 1 episode of Arrow, although based on how that episode played out this must be a wildly different version of the gang in Central City. They were likely just thrown in to tie into the chess theme, i.e., the leaders of the gang are the King and Queen.
3. Dr. Well's house seems to be like 90% glass windows and ceilings. Is that really the best place for the guy pretending to be paralyzed to simply walk around and use his super speed for anyone looking in to see? Then again, it's probably so secluded with its own security system that he never has to worry about that.
4. I do wonder if they'll ever reach a point where seeing Joe smile like a schoolchild while watching Barry show off his powers or science-y knowledge will get old, but that day has yet to come.
5. Did you fell cheated that Pied Piper's big secret turned out NOT to be that Dr. Wells is from the future and has a yellow suit and tachyon device?
SECOND OPINION:AVClub - They gave it a B, concluding, " Part of the problem is that much of the episode felt like set-up for things to come. We're about at the season's halfway point now, and "The Sound And The Fury" spent a lot of time planting seeds for future developments, particularly regarding Firestorm and the Reverse-Flash. That's fine and probably necessary, but not as much fun as it could be."
TV.com - They hated it, arguing,"There was plenty to dislike, and it mostly resulted in a cliché pile-up that wasn't even an interesting cliché pile-up. I can deal with an episode combining threadbare narrative devices so long as those devices are stitched together in such a way that the outcome is at least entertaining and spruced up a bit. There was no sprucing up in "The Sound and the Fury"; instead, there were creaky and dull plot movements intended to get us to Hartley saying that he knows how to find and help Ronnie, whether it's true or not."
I'm done with my ramble. Your turn.
