Ok, so why don't we have a Flash thread yet? (SPOILERS!)

you pointed it out, thus corrupting my suspension of disbelief.

A fix for all the nitpicks will be invented in the future, and brought back in time by future-Flash.

Now, this latest episode worked just fine. There wasn't a single thing which had me screaming at my TV. It was a good, solid episode, which shows that the writers are starting to gain their feet. If the next episode is better than this one, then I'll start to get excited about there being a new episode, rather than just saying, "I guess I'll watch The Flash."

Really? I'm halfway through, and I've been shouting at least three times:

-- Why are they hiding the existence of metahumans from the police, when this puts everyone at danger?

-- Which kind of makes you wonder if they shouldn't at least consider sharing Barry's abilities with the world as well, considering it could set his Dad free immediately.

-- Why is everyone so ready to accept impossible things happening around them? Boyfriend cop just accepts Barry overtaking him at the speed of insanity, and Iris just reports that bad guy's arm turns into metal as if it were, you know, an interesting thing to look out for?

-- And among scientists, why are they telling each other three times that Mach 1.1 is "faster than the speed of sound"? That's what Mach is calibrated to, after all! Of course more than a Mach is faster than sound!

But the ending was cool, as was everything between Joe and the Prof.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to new Flash as well.

It probably has something to do with the illegal holding facility that they built. (And given that there's no legal facility capable of holding metahumans, there's not much choice.)

If they share Barry's abilities with the world at large, they lose the element of surprise. Right now, nobody really knows anything about him, or what he can do, this gives him an advantage when encountering baddies.

It would also do nothing to get Barry's dad out of the klink. The American incarceration system isn't going to let him go just because some guy in red Dr. Denton's can run really fast. There's ample (and we've even had several threads discussing specific instances) real world examples where someone was undeniably not guilty of a crime they were locked up for, and getting them released was either exceedingly difficult, or, in at least two cases, impossible. Even worse, once they get out, their conviction isn't automatically expunged from their record. They have to fight for years to clear their name, which can make it difficult for them to find a job.

Actually, boyfriend cop gives Barry a look which means he doesn't really buy it, but doesn't think its worth arguing about. I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't become a topic of discussion in a future episode. As for Iris not freaking out over dude's arm turning to metal, she has seen and experienced some rather remarkable things already. Not only has she been on the scene when the Flash was in action, but he seems (at least to her) to have been able to teleport her on to the roof of her building, and then teleport her back to the coffee shop on the first floor. So while she's probably a bit taken aback because she didn't expect that guy to have super powers, the concept of seeing super powers in the real world, wouldn't exactly freak her out.

Because its the Pretty White Kids with Problems Network, so their expectation is that the viewers aren't going to know what a Mach number is. After all, the news divisions of one of the companies that owns the CW is responsible for this little gem:


The fact that the show is as good as it is, is somewhat of a minor miracle.

big ol' tease at the end, eh?

But before that we get the crossover

Finally got around seeing this weeks episode. And all I can is:
Super Sonic Punch Baby! Great episode...

A couple of comments about the latest episode:

1. They need to find a way to change up the formula for the episodes, the pattern's getting a bit too obvious. Especially Barry's weekly crisis of faith moments.

2. It was nice to see the ankle holster moment, because every cop I know has at least two guns on their person when they're on duty, so needless to say, I find the trope of "You've got my service piece, I'm totally unarmed now" to be a bit tiresome.

3. I'm surprised no one, not even Dr. McFakeGimpy, commented on Barry's FTL speed (Barry outran the electricity from Blackout, which puts him going faster than light).

Still, this was the best written episode so far, and I liked the Clock King character. I have a feeling that neither Blackout nor Tony Woodward are really dead.

Tockman was very well played, I agree. I'm mildly put off by the seeming inconsistency in Wells. On the one hand, he pitches Tony into a "kill or be killed" fight with cold calculation, and admits it - on the other hand, he admonishes Sisco "they're people, they have names"

You could just assume he's duplicitous enough to fake the emotional moments I suppose...but I'd rather not think of him as a potential bad guy

Potential? He's definitely a bad guy. How many people has he murdered so far?

But I do think that the oscillations in what he cares about are down not only to duplicity, but also to his perspective being somehow anachronistic for the time he inhabits. I get the impression that some of these people are more or less real to him, depending on whether they are still alive in his "own" time. How much would Caesar's death shake you if you visited 44 BC?

This is more of an Arrow tidbit, but one of Flash's classic rogues turned up at the end of Arrow last week,

Define "electricity". If he's shooting out electrons from his body, they are not going to be moving at the speed of light.

The electromagnetic field will move at the speed of light, but even then it needs a medium to propagate through or else it's no longer "electricity" but rather radio waves.

And if it's moving at 99% the speed of light, how fast is Flash going to have to run to make sure he gets to the doctor before the electricity does? (Then there's the small matter of the sonic boom Flash would create, and what it would do to people in a confined space.)

Try 0.5% to 1.0%.

I don't think lightning bolts are that slow, and you're still dealing with a sonic boom in a confined space.

Same problem as the frozen phaser beam in "wink of an eye".

If you go faster than an energy beam, you're also faster than the light trying to get into your eyeballs, and you go blind.

http://www.komonews.com/weather/faq/4347976.html

That's 2% of the speed of light. So you're right. That's about twice as fast at the max speed I quoted.

Thinking of lightning bolts as moving at the speed of light is very much like thinking of the movement of a shadow as moving at the speed of light, just because its shape is made of light. It's confusing an attribute of the cause with an attribute of the effect.

In a short "hop" like he made in this particular instance, I'd think that there'd be an afterimage in his eyes of everything, so he'd have some idea of what was around him (not that anything would be moving at a speed fast enough for him to worry about under such circumstances). A long run, say halfway round the planet, at nearly relativistic speeds would be problematic, I'd think. Though he could handle part of the problem by making short stops along the way to allow his eyes to fill up with light again.

Regardless, that's several orders of magnitude faster than he ran to do the supersonic punch, I think that it'd have been noticed and commented on. If Mach 1.1 was important enough to talk about, then 224,000 mph, would be really important to note.

Again, the movement of a shadow does not happen at the speed of light. He does not have to outrun the speed of lightning in order to dodge lightning.

Yes, I get that. I've said as much. He has to run in excess of 224,000 MPH, which is vastly faster than the Mach 1.1, which they made such a huge deal about in the previous episode, so one wonders why they didn't say something about him outpacing the lightning.

He does not have to outrun 224k mph to dodge a weapon that travels at 224k mph. That would only be true if he were running away from it in a straight line continuing its own trajectory.

He was trying to rescue Dr. McFakeygimpy from being hit by the bolt, which means he does have to outrace it, if he wants to get there before the doc's a Crispy Critter.

LOVED the crossover ep tonight! So much comic-booky (in a good way) juicy goodness! Playing off Mr. Serious against Mr. Fools-Rush-In was just right. Also, Diggle tripping over Barry's power was fun.

Also, if you've been lusting after Emily Bett Rickards this was your night.

No, I don't think so. I can pull a person from the train tracks to save them from a racing train without having to run as fast as the train.

Sure, when you're beside the track, but when you're standing on the platform a dozen or more feet away from the tracks, you're going to have to move faster than the train if it's also a dozen or so feet from the person you're trying to save. Did you not watch the episode?

Blackout and Flash were standing fairly close together, with the doctor being some 20 or so feet away from them. Blackout does a fake out, so it's not certain at first who he's firing at, then Flash outraces the lightning, grabs the doc (subjecting him to how many gees, I wonder) and plunks him down out of harms way. All before the bolt hit the ground. Face it, Flash had to be hauling ass, and doing well over Mach 1.1 in order to pull that off.

It's interesting; I didn't see it that way, putting less trust in the literal-mindedness of the representation of space in such action scenes. I do see where you're coming from now.

However, since there was no sonic boom, and we know there is a sonic boom when the Flash outruns Mach 1.1, we can only conclude that this lightning travels proportionally slower. There is no reason to assume it is as fast as usual meteorological lightning, after all.

Actually, we can't say there wasn't a sonic boom at all. We see the Flash make his run, Dr McFakeygimpy disappears in a blur, then appear safely away from the target zone and there's a rumbling in the background, with all the characters seeming to react like their ears are ringing. (The stunned expressions on their faces could simply be surprise at seeing the doc seemingly instantaneously teleported to a new spot. Or they could be reacting to being damned close to a sonic boom.

One would think that if Blackout's bolts were significantly slower than standard bolts of lightning, somebody would have mentioned it to Flash, as that'd have given him an edge. Given that the doc seems to have that place pretty well wired up, I'd think that he'd have had the opportunity to find it out before the final battle.