The Trial of The Flash

This may have been the worst police investigation/trial depiction in the history of television. The plot holes are so wide a high school debate student could take them apart. No real forensics employed. No time of death to correspond with the stabbing of an already dead body. No wheelchair. No sign of a struggle. Blood on the handle of a knife Marlize/new Cliif could not have possessed, besides that fact that dead bodies don't bleed out with no heart pumping to make such a mess. Police showing up just as Barry discovers the body. Who called it in, and why would his supervisor get the call? There are other cops who don't have a conflict of interest. No breakdown of Barry's whereabouts to correspond with the time of death. No exam by the ME to determine if Barry's knife was the one used to stab Clifford post-mortem. No security tape from the entrance to Barry's condo complex. No investigation into who Marlize was kissing. And of course, a ONE DAY capital murder trial? Cecile's performance was ridiculous. You never allow a hostile witness to give a narrative response. When they try to make a speech, you cut them off. There's just so much suspension of disbelief a person can take. Barry stating, "All the evidence? points at me" is not enough. I'd file for appeal based on inadequate counsel then have a real investigation performed. He's supposed to be an experienced forensic analyst for goodness sake.

This is the best FLASH episode till now. I am amazed how this show is going up with time. Hoping more good episodes like this.

This may be the least I have been excited for the CW Arrowverse shows to come back after winter break. Really, none of the 4 shows impressed me this past fall. Supergirl may have ended on a high note, but it's not like I expect it to stay that way. The Flash on the other-hand did have solid episodes to close off the first half of the season, but made the decision to remove Neil Sandilands as The Thinker to make room for a classic Flash comic storyline. While that was a neat surprise I guess, I still feel like it was a weird transition of actors playing Clifford Devoe.

That wasn't as distracting this week though, as the focus was clearly on the trial of Barry Allen. Similarly to Flashpoint, I had mixed feelings about the trial only lasting one episode. Maybe it's because I like courtroom dramas as a place for intriguing cinematic moments, but I was hoping to get a few episodes of the trial. But I guess the answer to those hopes was that it simply wasn't even really close to begin with. As much as Team Flash tried to push the blame of Devoe's body showing up in Barry's apartment towards Devoe's wife, there wasn't a whole lot they could do. Like the best kind of villains, Devoe certainly planned for this very moment, and he was ready at every turn.

Of course, it isn't an episode of The Flash without an unnecessary subplot. This week it was Team Flash taking on a radiation based metahuman. I don't know if this was required by CW or something, but I could not think of a reason to have the team take their focus away from Barry and fight off another meta. Even if you're saying that "crime wouldn't stop if The Flash was off the streets" or that it allowed Barry to have "one final triumph" as The Flash, it still was portrayed poorly and distracted from the plot I thought I cared about.

Then there's the whole "will Barry announce that he's The Flash" side to the episode. While I admit it would be a cool moment, there was not one ounce of me that thought the CW had the guts to do that in season 4 of this young show. I've learned this the hard way by seeing Arrow spend more than half a decade teasing that The Green Arrow's identity will be outed at some point (seriously, how many times will that be a story arc?).

However, at least they had the "guts" to conclude with Barry being sentenced for life and then put him in the same jail cell as his father. If I had to guess, this will last a few episodes before Barry's exonerated. 7.0/10

A crime upon a dead mean, going alone in somebody house, and yet the wheelchair was nobody to be found... How did he get there ? ()Isn't it all so obvious stupid ? Well this was one of the worst episode, the writhing was terrible, epic and stupid, reminding us how not to do a show ... Like the old Spiderman and the stupid truth that took 3 different movies to be told as it could be done in one, as it should have, and it is in the new line up of movies... () Arrow universe, you are lost in your stupidity...

Some people really hate this one, while some really liked. I'm going to have to go somewhere in the middle.

This was a good episode, character-wise. We get to see Barry on trial and both Barry and Joe faced with moral choices on how to proceed.

The unintentional antagonist worked well as a threat, but not someone who'd grab too much attention away from the main plot.

The downside was that the entire trial suffered from Arrowverse logic in that nothing ocurred naturally and simply served as a forced way to get from point A to point B. The silliness of some points was annoying.

Overall I think this averaged out to a good but not great episode.