The Flash: Five things to improve in season 5 moving forward

The Flash Teams Up with Amunet Black in New Episode Promo. Photo by Nazil Moktari.

4. Fewer, more active, lasting Meta-humans

One of the problems that last season had was the meta–humans on the show were pretty much expendable. It turned from a more common trope found in hero-type serialized drama, i.e. ‘Villain of the week’ episodes and suddenly became ‘Meta of the week’ episodes during the height of the latter half of the previous season due to the nature of that season’s antagonist.

The characters were not written quite well, especially Janet Petty/Null (Bethany Brown), who had the ability to manipulate gravity; neither did they provide much interest aside from the likes of Ralph Dibny/Elongated Man (Hartley Sawyer), Becky Sharpe (Sugar Lyn Beard), Kilg%re (Dominic Burgess) and Black Bison (Chelsea Kurtz). I will tackle Dibny and Amunet Black (Katee Sackhoff) soon after.

Compared to previous seasons, the meta-humans of Central City outside the speedsters were a lot more intriguing, even before Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) and her transformation into Killer Frost. I discussed the problems with some of the most recent empowered individuals with friends and colleagues and it is not the abilities, as fantastical as they are, it is really the engagement of the characters. I picked through some of the holes of some of the debates I have had and found it is the character rather than all of the external stuff tethered with the meta. The production and technical aspects I will leave for another day.

Some good examples were Tarpit (Marco Grazzini) and Magneta (Joey King) from season 2 and season 3 respectively. Before the particle accelerator accident, Joseph ‘Joey’ Monteleone was a criminal, who had been double-crossed by an inmate he bunked with at a juvenile detention center. Joey was coerced into a meeting at a construction site where he became the monstrous namesake, who only wanted to punish those involved in the set-up over the pain he felt while submerged in the tar.

Back to Dibny and Amunet Black, while Dibny had a really crafted arc that saw him become a dirty Private Investigator to a helpful sidekick of The Flash and his team. Black, while Sackhoff’s grasp of a posh British accent can be brought to question, her portrayal of the eccentric, well – spoken and ruthless dealer is much to be desired, the character provided the wit, mystery and nonsensical aspects of the show. These are some of the parts the writing team and the producers did well, which brings me to my next point of the debate: utilize the metas, who worked best.

Season 5, according to interviews from the 2018 SDCC, no doubt will include a lot more of the metas (hopefully by a reasonable amount) due to our next Big Bad having a vendetta against metas. So, more likely to be taken out, but a better way to handle this rather than discarded minor characters, who work candid toward a MacGuffin plot-device would be to ‘save’ the herd and leave them open for a recurring role later down the line.