Barry Allen - AKA "The Flash", the superhero with superspeed - and his friends are back for another year of villain-fighting adventures in this fifth season of the show.
Their jobs have just become a little more complicated, however, with the arrival of Nora West-Allen, Barry's time-travelling daughter from thirty years in the future. Nora came back in time to meet her father - he disappeared in 2024, while she was still a baby - and is now stuck in her own past.
If that wasn't enough, Team Flash discover that Central City is now threatened by mysterious killer named Cicada, who is systematically hunting down and murdering metahumans. Our heroes are quickly on Cicada's radar, and their first encounter goes very poorly. The new villain can drain metahumans of their powers, courtesy of a strange, lightning shaped dagger.
How do the team stop Cicada? And is the mysterious killer actually the biggest threat to their safety, or is there something even worse on the horizon?
When it began, The Flash was a breath of fun, fresh air against the dour grimness of parent show Arrow. That didn't last, however, and by this fifth season it is frequently every bit as po-faced and miserable as its progenitor. The characters tend to be a bit more free with the quips, and the show continues to have some fun with giving actor Tom Cavanagh a new version of the same character each year. This time he is Sherloque Wells, the version of himself from Earth-221. But overall there's definitely a strong shift to grim and glum, with lots of time spent on characters lying to or shouting at each other and being miserable about things. Frankly, it's a bit wearisome.
Then there's the villain(s). I like that Cicada is not a super-speedster. And in principle the "big twist" they take with the character could be interesting. But I don't think they come off very well. Far better, I think, to have pulled the change-up earlier in the season, rather than with only a relatively small number of episodes to go. This would have allowed the post-twist version of the villain more time to become established and would also have created better resonance with the Barry-and-Nora family drama plotlines.
A bigger issue than either of these, though, is that Barry Allen may be the fastest man alive, but he frequently also seems to be the dumbest. He's continually outmanoeuvred and (temporarily) defeated by people who he should by rights be able to beat in a literal nanosecond. And sure, I get that you want your villain of the week to seem like a credible threat for at least part of the episode, but maybe don't continually doing it by the lazy mechanism of having your hero repeatedly make the same fundamental mistakes.
Ironically for a show about a man with super-speed, The Flash feels like it has run out of momentum.
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