Spoilers The Flash - Season 4
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
I once heard that Clement, who wrote hard SF almost exclusively liked to insert one scientific implausibility into each story as an exercise for the reader.
How do you know he isn't?
One problem with doing legal research for The Flash, of course, is not knowing which state's laws should be followed for a court in Central City. 
I am kinda irked that the actor playing DeVoe shows barely any attempt/ability to mimic the extremely distinctive speaking style and accent of the original. Now, if he is in public then faking an American accent makes sense... But in private when he was trying to comfort his wife who was having trouble with the body change, he should be sounding more like his old accent/style.
I hate when shows do body swaps and the speaking style doesn't change much/at all. Farscape was one of the few shows to do a body swap and the actors/writers really tried to show them with their original voices.
I hate when shows do body swaps and the speaking style doesn't change much/at all. Farscape was one of the few shows to do a body swap and the actors/writers really tried to show them with their original voices.
I don't think it's necessarily a mistake. It would depend upon how much of the host's mind remained after the consciousness transfer.
I think the new actor is doing a pretty fair job matching Sandiland's characterization and speech rhythms, if not his accent.
Oh, that's actually quite common. Stargate SG-1 did a memorable body-swap episode where the main cast members really went to town doing impressions of each other. Then there was the scene in Supergirl this past week where Melissa Benoist played J'onn shapeshifted into Kara and did a fun impression of David Harewood's delivery. (As I said in that show's thread, Benoist getting better at playing Harewood paradoxically means that J'onn is getting worse at playing Kara.) I'd say that not mimicking the voices in body-swap episodes is the exception, not the rule, since the opportunity for the actors to imitate each other is the main attraction of such episodes, probably for the actors as well as for the audience.
The one body-swap episode I can think of where the actors did by far the worst job of playing each other (not counting ones where they just dub the actor's voices onto each other like Gilligan's Island did that one time) was Star Trek: "Turnabout Intruder." William Shatner wasn't imitating Sandra Smith at all, just doing his idea of a generic female, and Smith's performance as Kirk had none of Shatner's distinctive cadence.
Not mind so much as muscle memory, I'd think. The tongue and lips would be accustomed to forming the sounds a certain way. A person's natural accent isn't something they make a conscious effort to produce; it's just something they do unthinkingly, by habit, so it's probably associated with parts of the brain other than those involved with personality and memory. You can consciously choose to adopt a different accent, but normally, you just don't worry about accent and you let it happen on autopilot. So it follows that if one person's mind were transferred into the body of someone with a different accent, they might speak in the new host's accent unless they made a conscious effort to use their original one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FlashTV/co..._allen_while_knowing/?st=JCNH7U0M&sh=476a861f
That was a great read lol
That was a great read lol
I suppose they could have asked Lyla to step in (with Argus' connections) and set-up a closed door classified hearing with just the judge and prosecutor (no jury). She might not haved risked it, though (given the clandestine nature of Argus), and it wouldn't completely eliminate the danger of Barry's identity getting out.
Maybe it's just my mood this week (which was I'm rewatching Battlestar Galactica and almost done with the series) but I found this episode to be a big momentum killer. The trial should have been longer, and meatier. I was looking forward to this storyline, but this show has a tendency to wrap things up in a single episode rather than let it grow organacly. This trial was over almost before it began.
This episode was also a perfect reason I hate midseason cliffhangers. I have enjoyed this season up to now but this episode was kind of dull for a return episode after a few weeks. The only good thing was the scene between Joe and Ralph.
Hopefully it's better next week.
This episode was also a perfect reason I hate midseason cliffhangers. I have enjoyed this season up to now but this episode was kind of dull for a return episode after a few weeks. The only good thing was the scene between Joe and Ralph.
Hopefully it's better next week.
I'm not sure that a South African accent is that ease to mimic.
Then they could've hired another South African actor. They found two in Neil Sandilands and Kim Engelbrecht, so maybe they could've found three.
Anyway, I figure the way body-swap acting is generally done is that the "mind" actor first records the lines in character, and then the "body" actor studies the recording and practices imitating it. Or maybe the "mind" actor acts out the scene in rehearsals with the "body" actor watching, and then they switch places for filming. Although that would be hard in a case like this, where the two actors aren't working for the production at the same time, aside from one week's overlap. I guess Kendrick Sampson probably studied Sandilands' delivery in past episodes, or maybe they got together during that shared episode and compared notes on the character.
It would make sense for Devoe to leave the motor memory portion of the host's brain as-is when transferring from an older semi-functional body into a younger fully functional body. The accent may just be a side-effect of that choice.
Arrow producer Marc Guggenheim is a lawyer and that doesn't stop legal proceedings from being dodgy on that show. Though maybe he's just a bad lawyer and that's why he's a writer now.
He probably makes it as real as a show needs it to be. The needs of Law and Order is different than the Flash.
It's called dramatic license. Writers of fiction are allowed to bend the rules of reality for the sake of the story. Given how fast and loose the Arrowverse plays with physical law, it's no surprise it does the same with criminal law.
This wasn't a matter of fudging with courtroom procedure or legal protocol; it was a breech of common sense. It was a 'two hackers, one keyboard' moment.
99% of the gobbledygook Felicity spouts every week makes first-year GCS-IT students headdesk. But she and Cisco never typed on the same keyboard at the same time.
One doesn't need law experience to question the [lack of] Cecile's defense strategy.
99% of the gobbledygook Felicity spouts every week makes first-year GCS-IT students headdesk. But she and Cisco never typed on the same keyboard at the same time.
One doesn't need law experience to question the [lack of] Cecile's defense strategy.
And it's still nothing compared to how badly this show screws up the laws of physics every time Barry kicks into superspeed, or how badly Legends screws up temporal mechanics and causal logic on a weekly basis. These shows are fun, but they're not trying to be plausible.
but how could you realistically defend Barry without telling that he's the Flash?
Others have suggested maybe a closed door meeting with the judge but you're going to have the prosecution in there as well and things would still have to be documented. Not to mention the questions that would be asked if the charges were suddenly dismissed (some would whisper about corruption and crooked judges).
And lets not forget that Team Flash isn't exactly Kosher went it comes to law and order so they could also end up opening a can of worms there.
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