Grant Gustin’s Flash was better than his ending

Grant Gustin ruined my life. Kind of.

Gustin’s casting as Barry Allen on The CW’s second season Arrow was when the series ceased to be an unusually good superhero soap opera and became the Arrowverse, an often shockingly ambitious small-screen take on the cosmic sprawl of DC comic books, spawning a series of CW shows that, at their best, have few of the most surprising superhero adaptations we’d seen at the time.

This week, Gustin ended his decade-long tenure as Barry Allen/The Flash after nine seasons and 184 episodes as the star of The flash, and several more in the many crossover episodes between his show and the show’s wider universe. The finale, “A New World: Part Four”, coincides with the end of the Arrowverse The flash is the last show in the lineup still standing Arrow‘s 2012 debut.

Honestly, the less said about the finale, the better. It’s a wail of an ending, leaning on tropes that The flash was worn out about four seasons ago: time travel, alternate timelines, evil speedsters, and actors who play so many characters that when one of them dies, it barely registers. The show felt stale ages ago and oddly used to its own stagnation. Yet I still watched, because Gustin still showed up.

It’s hard to overstate how much Gustin’s role as Barry did to expand what the idea of ​​2010s superhero adaptations might look like. The first half of that decade was a transitional phase from the stark and grounded aesthetic of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy – which Arrow chose to emulate – to the still grounded, but cheerfully fun tone of the early MCU.

The flash, however, never hesitated to embrace the bombast and absurdity of the comic book source material, even when it barely had the budget or resources to pull it off. While Arrow resolutely tried to keep himself away from supermen in his urban vigilance, The flash enjoyed it and eagerly threw the comic’s feverish absurdity at the screen. Before the first season was over, The flash would feature psychic gorillas, a nuclear superhero made up of two men in one body, a villain who calls himself the Weather Wizard, and a pair of strangely endearing criminals who had no powers but had a hot gun and a cold gun.

Gustin’s performance as Barry Allen was a big part of why that all landed. On his first appearance in Arrow, Gustin was immediately charmed because, above all, he was a believer. He was a surrogate for the public who could enjoy the comic strips around him, and when the supernatural thunderbolt struck him to force him The flash, it felt like a child being rewarded for a little faith in magic. Barry, like many superheroes, had a tragic backstory, but unlike Stephen Amell’s gritty Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, Barry could smile and do good in the world, without being defined by tragedy.

Image: The CW

The Arrowverse is built on that smile. Gustin’s boyish charm and enthusiasm were the perfect vehicle for the conviction it takes to sell four-color comics, to enjoy their absurdity, and also to take their melodrama seriously. It’s probably because of The flash that fans would jump from spin-off to spin-off, committed so many hours to this rapidly expanding TV universe. That’s why I did it, even though I often doubted my decisions afterwards.

Unfortunately, The flash – went from showrunner to showrunner as cast members filtered in and out – eventually succumbing to the grimness of the times, constantly returning to Barry’s central tragedy, that he lost his mother as a child, until it was almost all that defined him. As the show returned to this beat time and time again, the lights went out on Gustin’s performance and the series was never really able to surround him with characters that Barry was palpably connected to – the last of these likely being former cheerfulness co-star Melissa Benoist’s Supergirl.

In today’s streaming era, television endings are given far more weight than at any time in the medium’s history. Shows that survive cancellation are often allowed to end on their own terms, or at least play out that ending. The flash, it seems, neither. After all that running it just seemed tired. I was too.