The Flash: All 9 seasons ranked from worst to best

6. The Flash season 8

The Flash season 8 is a strange beast. On one hand, it produced some incredible episodes that genuinely felt like they belonged in the show’s golden years, but the problem lay in the fact that most of them only functioned when taken out of context. The reason being that the season’s central narrative made it hard to buy any of the characters’ behavior, simply because they should have been worried about Iris West-Allen.

Iris’ Time Sickness was one of the few things carried over from the previous season but it quickly became clear that it should have stayed there. No matter what the writers did with it, it never carried the stakes that it should have. It felt like an underdeveloped afterthought in an overstuffed season and that season actually got better whenever it steered clear from that storyline.

It goes without saying that Iris deserved better than that, particularly because her four-episode absence resulted in a streak of solid episodes that never felt quite right because her family was totally fine with the fact that she was trapped in the Still Force.

That aside, there was a lot to love in there, particularly the five-episode “Armageddon” event that opened the season as it introduced Despero, brought back a lot of familiar faces from the Arrowverse and finally gave Barry Allen the comic-accurate gold boots we had all been waiting for.