The Flash - Season 1

[Guy Gardener]

Exploding herself restores health points?

I mean if her dna is map to coalesce after a disintergrative selfblast, that does make sense.

The writers do seem to be kill happy.

I thought that the Plastique on Smallville was a lot prettier, which I only bring up because of how foolish Vibe sounds complimenting the new girl on her appearance so often and jaringly.

Of course the Killer Frost was just as bad, drooling over Iris' eye candy when she should still be crying over Ronnie.

Which cements the long held conclusion: It's only sexist if you're not hot.

Pretty people are allowed to be sexist becuase we forgive pretty people almost everything becuase they're so pretty.

(In real life we hardly ever met people pretty enough for these protocols to be activated.)

 

[DEWLine]

If she survived (or revived after) the near-drowning, she might have swum to the riverbank.

 

[Guy Gardener]

If all of her found it difficult to glom together, maybe a few equally "real" copies of her regenerated from the debris?

Would that make her shorter or thinner?

 

[DigificWriter]

I got the distinct feeling that Bette was a one-off character designed to be a catalyzer for Barry. If there was a chance of her surviving, I feel like the writers would've hinted at it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I do agree with you, she does seem dead.

She seemed dead as soon as Barry took his mask off.

However...

Amanda Waller and the Suicide Squad are already in play and she has history with Firestorm and she romantically linked to Captain Atom who was name dropped in this episode by his arch nemesis Wade Eiling.

I just realized how pairing her off with Vibe is hilarious since if he does get vibro powers, she'll be selfdetonating all the time.

It would be a crime to leave her dead when she interlocks well with a lot of characters already in the game.

Oh, remember Doctor Who when they turned Jamie's face into a jigsaw puzzle that they put back together wrong so that a different actor could sub into the part while the regular guy had a broken leg?

Of course you do.

What every time she self detonates they recast the part with another very attractive actress?

And she keeps blowing her self up (and reconstituting) in the hopes that some how she'll recover her original visage.

If Simon Stagg is dead for good, then Plastique is probably dead too.

Seriously, is someone feeding the Mist while all this is happening?

Or has Wells hired a prison support staff that we don't know about?

 

[Icemizer]

With Grodds escape, Wells uses Trained and enhanced Gibbons to maintain the prison.

 

[davejames]

Cisco's reaction to his suit getting destroyed was easily my favorite part of the episode.

I also thought it was a cool touch that Barry actually had the team crunching the numbers and trying to determine the specific speed required to run up a building or run on water before he did it.

I was kinda hoping the General would have gotten a more impressive demonstration of Barry's powers though, instead of only seeing him from the back. It seemed like the episode was really building up to a moment like that, but we didn't really see it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

If he runs too fast up the side of a building he'll enter orbit.

fast enough to "stick", not so fast that he runs out of building.

Not sure why they needed Math to work out how to run on water, since there isn't any issue with running too fast on water is there?

If Wells is from the future, he may have learnt those figures at school and merely remembered them rather than calculated them very fast, not that there's any dispute that Wells is a genius.

 

[Christopher]

Cisco's reaction to his suit getting destroyed was easily my favorite part of the episode.

Unfortunately, they went and ruined it by having him react to Bette's appearance in a very juvenile and borderline-creepy way.

And the way they portrayed Bette's powers made no sense to me. If she can't touch anything without blowing it up, how does she get dressed? How does she eat or drink anything? They should've explained that.

Anyway, I find it ironic that Bette Sans Souci was portrayed as such an angsty and careworn figure when her surname literally means "carefree."

I also thought it was a cool touch that Barry actually had the team crunching the numbers and trying to determine the specific speed required to run up a building or run on water before he did it.

Yeah, I was cheering at those parts. Science to the rescue! But I was disappointed when their solution to the building thing was just "Run really fast," with no actual numbers.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Also, has Barry got to the point hat he can "feel" or observe how fast he running to the closest kph?

If not for the sonic boom, it must be difficult to perceive the difference between 700 and 800 mph.

 

[davejames]

He may not be able to narrow it down that much, but I imagine he can still generally tell when he's going over 100, or 300, or 600 mph, and adjust accordingly. Just like you don't always have to look at your speedometer to have a general sense of how fast you're driving.

And for running up the building, I think they just blurted out "really fast" because they just didn't have enough time to make the calculations. Although I DO wonder now just how fast one would have to run to be able to do something like that.

Running on water on the other hand doesn't seem like it would require nearly as much speed, even though the episode made it seem like he needed to go even faster.

 

[Agent Richard07]

The number crunching was a little too show off-y. "Hey look! We're smart and we can do calculations!"

I'm surprised that he didn't go splat when he came back down.

I'll miss Bette. I'm surprised at the people they're killing off after just one episode.

By the way, doesn't Kelly Frye look like Kristen Hager from Being Human?

 

[Christopher]

Although I DO wonder now just how fast one would have to run to be able to do something like that.

Turns out the limiting factor isn't speed, it's traction. Because there's no gravity pulling him against the wall, and since his every step would tend to push him away from the wall, there's no way his feet could really maintain their grip against the wall unless they were capable of some sort of suction or Van Der Waals attraction.

The important question is how much time it would take for gravity to slow him down to a stop. As long as his first few steps accelerate him enough that his upward trajectory will top out at the window washer's height, then he can make it even though he won't have traction against the wall. The problem is that then he'll be falling on the way down. There's no basis at all for the handwave about how he needed to maintain his running speed on the way down in order to land safely.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-fast-would-an-object-have-to-be-moving-to.556580/

Running on water on the other hand doesn't seem like it would require nearly as much speed, even though the episode made it seem like he needed to go even faster.

Having trouble finding a definitive source for this, but various sites say you'd need to run at 30 meters/second to run on water. That's about 67 MPH, much slower than the 500-something they claimed here.

 

[davejames]

Yeah I can almost buy sheer speed and momentum being enough to get him all the way up the building, but it's the coming down that's a lot harder to accept. Since, as you said, there's just nothing holding him against the building to begin with.

Unless he can somehow run a certain way that his steps don't push him away from the building as much.

 

[Guy Gardener]

They keep saying that he doesn't have strength, but he does have invulnerability?

Every time his feet hit the pavement, it's probably with a similar amount of force as jumping out of a plane which should powder the bones in his feet.

Of course Mr Allen might be subconsciously manipulating energy fields?

There was a point in Flash comics where some one Flashlike or the Flash was able to share/manipulate/move momentum. So that when he's running 500 mph, he can conserve that accumulated energy at rest and then give it to people or objects who would suddenly be flung away at 500 mph.

(From the Speed Force wiki)

Speed lend/steal - Perhaps his most versatile new power. Because the Speed Force governed all motion, Wally could rob objects of their kinetic energy, motion, or momentum (e.g., bullets in flight or turning a supervillain into a statue) and use the energy to accelerate himself even faster. He could similarly lend speed to inanimate objects or allies, enabling them to temporarily travel nearly as fast as himself. Bart Allen's future self is shown to also have this ability in the Teen Titans Titans Tomorrow story arc.

Barry precris used to talk about an aura that protected him.

But in he TV show, those lightning zaps zapping while he is running is a static electricity forcefield?

 

[Icemizer]

I found Barry asking for speed numbers silly. He is not carrying a speedometer with him and would have no more idea how fast he is running than I do when I run. I also thought the him giving he height he needed to go up in meters to be wrong. Central city is in the U.S. where we dont use the metric system, but well he is a scientist and they do so I guess its ok.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I thought it was silly that the window washing rig hit the ground before the Flash did.

Also, the tsunami looked like it was going to kill people—then it just fizzled out.

The character arc between Barry and Iris is pure formula, basically just to heighten dramatic tension.

This was probably my least favorite episode so far.

 

[sojourner]

Handwavium explanation on how Barry can know approximately how fast he's moving on the show:

There's an accelerometer in the headset that plays a a split second "ping" into the earphone evertime his speed increases by a certain amount, say, 100 mph. Conversely, it plays a different toned "ping" everytime he slows down by a certain amount. All he has to do is count the pings to get a speed reading.

Does that work for anyone?

 

[Mr Light]

GRODD!!! AAAAAH!!!

But how will they do it for reals? Surely they're not going to have a telepathic gorilla!!! A man in an animatronic suit? CGI? Either way, that would be insanely awesome!!!

 

[Brent]

The only problem I have with the show right now is that their answer for dealing with the meta-humans is mostly killing them off. That's an easy out IMO. Too easy. I would like them to figure out what to do with the good ones and bad ones, rather than just killing them off, or trying to contain them in the prison setup.