The Flash Is Sprinting Too Quickly to the Finish

The CW show's seventh season is trying to juggle too much and thus unable to build stakes.

The Flash stands as the longest-running series in the Arrowverse, but its seventh season is off to a rocky start.

The show tried to address the emergence of three new forces -- the Sage Force, the Strength Force and the Still Force -- alongside the "rebirth" of the Speed Force, but tried to cram so many plot points into eight episodes that the stakes never really felt that high.

It's understandable that the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced production of the sixth season to shut down with three episodes left to complete, would impact the presentation of the show.

But the storyline material regarding the new forces called for a more in-depth exploration behind the forces and what the characters were all about.

Perhaps that might have been addressed had the show not been forced to use its first three episodes to wrap up the Mirror Master/Eva McCullough storyline.

However, another show, Supergirl, was able to tie up loose ends from its fifth season (which also didn't finish production because of the pandemic) and still find a way to seamlessly flow into another storyline that didn't introduce too many plot points.

Furthermore, Supergirl was able to pull off a solid storyline despite Melissa Benoist, the show's lead, recently having a baby and was thus unavailable for a period of time.

Supergirl did this by focusing on one element (Kara is trapped in the Phantom Zone and her friends must find a way to free her) with one subplot alongside it (Kara finding her father was trapped in the Phantom Zone).

With The Flash, the writers tried to address multiple ideas such as Killer Frost and Cailtin Snow splitting into two, Cisco Ramon debating what he wanted to do with his life outside of STAR Labs, Joe West debating his role with the Central City Police Department, and Allegra Garcia and Chester P. Runk finding their places on Team Flash.

Trying to juggle all those subplots with the main arc about the new forces meant that Flash episodes sprinted to the finish (no pun intended) too often. Not much was allowed time to develop, to build the stakes and allow characters to stand out.

Now we are about to enter the second arc for the seventh season, which has seven episode titles revealed. If the seventh season was going to be limited to 18 total episodes, perhaps the forces arc should have covered 15, which would have allowed more time for the main arc, along with the subplots, to flourish.

We'll see how the second arc comes together, but if too many plot elements get introduced here, it's going to be hard to build the stakes again, and we may find ourselves again sprinting toward a finish.