The Flash Plot Holes and Arrow's Story Problems in 2016

The Flash plot holes, explained

The Flash and Arrow were once the two sturdiest shows on The CW's superhero line-up, and in the winter of 2016 both of them were wobbling. The Flash plot holes of season 2 and the story choices on Arrow season 4 share one root problem: scenes built to move the plot forward that ignore what the characters already know and can do.

This is not a call to burn either show down. They are mindless fun in the best sense, they ask little of a viewer, and some of their people are drawn well. Felicity Smoak and the Diggle family give Arrow its warmth, and the bond between Joe West and Barry Allen is the best thing The Flash has. Comic book television also gets a lot of credit for suspending disbelief. Arrow earned its audience as a grounded, gritty show, but it still stars a man in a hood with a bow, and nobody should demand documentary realism from it.

Serialized television makes this problem sharper than a film does. A film asks a viewer to accept one set of rules for two hours. A weekly series asks the viewer to remember them across twenty-odd episodes, and fans do. When Felicity opens a door in one episode and a different door stays locked in the next, the audience notices, because the audience has been paying attention for months.

The trouble starts when a story choice goes past the fantastical and lands somewhere plainly illogical. Two episodes that aired a day apart in late January 2016 are the clearest example: The Flash on Tuesday, January 26, and Arrow on Wednesday, January 27, both on The CW. Back to back, they make a useful pair, because they fail in opposite directions. One show has characters who are too slow to notice what is in front of them. The other has characters who are too quick to solve anything the plot sets in their way.

The Flash: a vault with no cameras

The Flash's second season built its plot around Zoom, a speedster who is faster than Barry and who keeps winning. In "Potential Energy," which aired on January 19, 2016, the metahuman called Turtle dies. Turtle's power was the ability to slow down the people around him, which is the exact opposite of Barry's gift and the missing piece Team Flash had been looking for. Earth-2's Harrison Wells, who cares more about saving his own daughter than about stopping Zoom, kills him by tampering with his brain. The research ends, and Zoom gets a bigger edge.

The idea behind the scene is a good one. Wells's motive is sympathetic, since he is a father trying to get his daughter back, and a hidden saboteur inside the team is a fine source of tension. The execution is what fails.

What makes the scene hard to swallow is how easy it is. S.T.A.R. Labs keeps a high-tech vault designed to hold metahumans, and the show had made a joke earlier in the season about how much the team had beefed up security. Yet nobody on the team suspects a thing, and the place appears to have no cameras that could have recorded a visitor walking in unannounced. Some of the smartest people in the fictional world behave as though they cannot imagine a security log.

The next week's "The Reverse-Flash Returns," which aired on January 26, 2016, adds a smaller irritation: Patty Spivot, who had joined Joe's metahuman task force, learns that Barry is the Flash, and when he refuses to admit it, she leaves Central City. A character with real investigative skill ends up being used to deliver one plot beat and then goes.

Arrow: a hacker who can do anything

Arrow has the opposite disease. In "A.W.O.L.," which aired on January 27, 2016, Team Arrow is too smart for its own story. Felicity has come home from the hospital after becoming paraplegic, and the episode is about her place on the team as much as about the break-in. The show still leans on Felicity to do everything for the group, including taking control of construction equipment remotely. She is a brilliant hacker and nobody doubts it, but the episode asks her to be a master of every system except the one it needs her to fail at.

The central puzzle is the break-in at A.R.G.U.S. Felicity can get into the agency's secure facility and open doors and files at will. The villains, meanwhile, had to steal a dead agent's eyeball to get through. If A.R.G.U.S. is that easy for Felicity to enter, a viewer is entitled to ask why she never opened Amanda Waller's files on Shadowspire earlier. And if she can do that, why has she not used the same skill to learn everything about Damien Darhk, the leader of H.I.V.E. and the season's villain?

The writing also forgets what the team has just been told. Andy Diggle warns the crew that the rail guns are a diversion for something bigger and more dangerous. Oliver and his allies protect the rail guns anyway, because they know better, and that decision leads to Waller's death. Waller's death is the weight the episode puts on that decision, and she is one of the most useful characters the Arrow universe ever had. Losing her to a preventable lapse feels cheaper than losing her to an enemy's success.

A story can have its heroes make mistakes, but this one has them disregard direct advice for the sake of tension, and the audience can see the machinery.

Plot holes in The Flash and Arrow at a glance

Verdict: good characters, bad plotting

The ultimatum scene deserves a final note. Shadowspire's leader gives both Amanda Waller and Lyla Michaels 20 minutes to decide, but he does not give them the chance to hand over the access codes to Rubicon. That is almost worse than the old cliché of a villain explaining his plan in full before he leaves the hero alone.

Fixes would have been cheap. A single camera in the S.T.A.R. Labs vault would have given Team Flash a lead and cost the plot nothing. A line about A.R.G.U.S. running on a closed network would have explained why Felicity cannot simply hack in from home. A scene in which Oliver weighs Andy Diggle's warning and decides to risk it would have turned a lapse into a choice.

The thing to keep in mind is that both episodes still work as entertainment. Felicity wrestling with her inner demons is one of Arrow's best sequences, and The Flash's cast is as likable as ever. The enjoyment is just smaller than it should be, and at times it is hard to believe these are the same shows that were so good only a year earlier.

For viewers deciding what to watch, the practical advice is simple. If the draw is the characters, both shows still deliver. If the draw is a plot that holds when you pull on it, the Flash plot holes and the Arrow lapses of season 4 will test your patience, and Arrow is the one that asks for more forgiveness.

The question neither show answers is whether a superhero series can afford to lean on a smart team that keeps behaving as if it isn't.

Neither lapse sinks a season on its own, and both shows were in the middle of their runs when these episodes aired. The pattern is what stays with a viewer, because every new shortcut makes the previous ones harder to forget.

Sources

• The Flash (2014 TV series), Wikipedia — season 2 cast, crew and episode list
• Arrow season 4, Wikipedia — season 4 cast, crew and episode list