The Flash: The Complete Eighth Season - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

The Flash: The Complete Eighth Season



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



​

Movie
“My Name is Barry Allen, and I’m now ACTUALLY the fastest man alive”.

The Flash was my baby. I was one of the people who was completely enamored with Arrow during the first two seasons, and when the spinoff The Flash was introduced in it’s second season, I was instantly smitten. Season 3 of Arrow was a bit of a nose dive quality wise, but The Flash was in peak form during it’s parallel first season. The show soon overtook Arrow in popularity, and has become the Arrowverse golden child for the last 8 years or so. However, the The CW’s Arrowverse as slowly fallen apart over the last decade. It started out great, but Arrow started going downhill fast after season 4, with too much “shipping” going on, combined with ever expanding the team to the point where everyone was a superhero. The other spinoff shows had moderate success but even they started dive bombing badly by the time Batwoman and it’s epic awfullness pretty much precipitated the fall of the entire Arrowverse. By the end of 2022 the only CW Arrowverse show still standing is going to be one final season of The Flash with every other show in the interconnected universe being canceled or wrapped up in time for some massive changes with DC and The CW (technically Superman & Lois kind of was sort of attached to the Arrowverse, but they have since completely severed all ties with the long standing shared universe to be it’s own thing).

Despite the chaos and problems that Arrow initiated, The Flash managed to stay generally interesting thanks to Grant Gusting truly selling the show as Barry Allen. However, despite Berlanti and crew knowing full well what caused the downfall of the Arrowverse (and Arrow in particular) has double down on the same problems that pretty much tanked the other series, turning The Flash more and more into the same tired old cliches and issues that were the hallmark of doom for Arrow, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow etc. The team has grown out of control where everyone who’s a main character is a meta human at this point, and the silliness of the dialog and interconnected plots have gotten too ridiculous (basically, ever since Savitar, Barry’s villains have gotten more and more ludicrous) and the show that I once LOVED to tune into has become a chore to watch. Season 7 was the absolute lowest the show had gone and was in fear of completely going off the rails, but somehow season 8 actually manages to pull ahead ever so slightly (even though that’s no great feat considering the 2/5 rating I gave the previous season) with some interesting tricks, while still being a giant hurtling ball of chaos moving faster and faster towards self deletion at a speed that even the scarlet speedster couldn’t overtake.

Season 8 tries to change the pace by reintroducing an entire rogues gallery of old Arrowverse characters. In the first 5 episodes we find out that 10 years in the future Barry is going to cause a gigantic problem that destroys the earth, and Desparo (Tony Curran), a being of immense powers, has to travel back in time to stop it. Lo and behold, it turns out that the main culprit behind it all ends up being The Reverse Flash (or at least one of the time variations that are left of Eobard Thawne) and it’s up to Team Flash to try and fix things.

This season also insets a new iteration of Eobard Thawne, a Thawne who doesn’t know who he is, or have the sociopathic tendencies of his other iterations. Unfortunately he is creating a machine along with a coworker that ends up introducing the negative speed force into her, becoming Negative Flash, only for Barry and the rest of them to figure out that there are much more malevolent forces in the background using the negative speed force to cause a worldwide cataclysm so that they can take over.

The season is a gigantic mess, but one that is kept on partial life support thanks to the constant influx of old Arrowverse heroes and villains, and of course Tom Cavanaugh hamming it up to level 11 as The Reverse Flash (of course just one of the iterations of him). The entire final last quart of the show goes into full epic meltdown mode with the Negative speed force denizens teaming up with Reverse Flash in order to defeat Barry, and once more, Barry proving that he’s faster and better than them all.




Rating:

Rated TV-14




Video:

I'm doing my broken record thing here, but the show is very much a stable clone of the seasons that came before it, although this time I had one major niggle that brougth it down half a mark. The series is bright and shiny with Barry's new comic accuarte costume literally popping off the screen. Central City can get a bit dark and gloomy at times (in S.T.A.R. labs for example, or at a nigth battle), but overall it's filled with all the detail levels you could ever want. The CGI is of course still wonky, but there's a lot more practical effects being utilized, even though they're lower budgte (such as the suits) and look even cheesier than previous seasons. Black levels are generally solid, but here is where my complaint comes in. Banding is pretty obvious and crops up WAY more often than I'd wish it did. Not super horrible, but more noticeable than I've seen in a while even though the series is still spread across 4 BD-50s.






Audio:

Over the years the crew at Warner Brothers have created stellar sound mixes for the show, and it shows that they are still paying attention at the mixing board. This season is no different, with an excellent 5.1 DTS-HD MA track that rocks you to your core during the action and softens back into the background for the core dialog scenes. it's fairly typical like the video is, but that doesn't mean the audio is any less impressive. Great bass response during battles and slow motion shots, and overall great surround activity with lots of commotion during the clone battles. Thumbs up all around






Extras:

• Deleted Scenes
• Gag Reel
• Featurette: The DC Heroes: Path to Glory
• Featurette: The Flash: Standing the Test of Time

Final Score: ​

This breaks my heart, but I’m watching the very series that loved just fall apart in front of my eyes. This and Arrow were text book cases of shows that were stretched out WAY past their sell by date and are struggling to come up with bigger villains, more annoying ways for Iris to us off, and generally follow the same careening downward path that the other shows suffered over the years, with near identical reasons too. The Blu-ray itself is quite good though, with the 4 disc set looking and sounding great, with the typical cookie cutter Arrowverse extras that are pretty much on every one of these shows. For the fans.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Grant Gustin, Candice Patton, Danielle Panabaker
Created by: Andrew Kreisberg, Greg Berlanti, Geoff Johns
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 AVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Warner Brothers
Rated: TV-14
Runtime: 844 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: October 18th, 2022

Recommendation: For the Fans

 

[Epoxy1]

Like you, I loved the first couple of seasons of the show but midway through season 4, my wife and I completely gave up and never felt like we were giving anything up. Like you state, getting through an episode was a chore and time is too precious to waste on crap like this.