When I talked about the so-so- episodes in the first half of the season in my review of a later episode here, this was one of the episodes I was thinking of.
As I noted in my review of "Captain Cold", the 90s Flash was a synergy of CBS and DC attempting to get in on the perceived success of superhero franchises, after the Batman movie made it big in 1989. The superhero franchise, which started with Superman in 1978, crashed and burned in 1983 with Superman III, and the attempts of Supergirl (1984) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) did nothing to reignite interest in Superman. That left the Warner Brother execs in a bit of a bind: clearly superheroes were still in demand, because Batman had done so well. Right. Right?
But Superman hadn't done so well. Executives, being executives, decided to reinvent the wheel yet again. Rather than go with a non-powered superhero, they dug into the DC vaults looking for a hero who was male, super-powered, could be done on a relatively low-TV budget, and yet was a big enough name that comic book fans would recognize him. The problem was you can't really do superhero shows on a low budget. The 60s Batman wasn't serious, and it was still expensive. Those giant sno-cone making machines didn't pay for themselves!
Part of it was that it's... well, early 90s TV. That meant even though apparent comic book fans like developers Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, and story consultants Howard Chaykin and John Francis Moore, had some knowledge of the comics, they had to rely on American TV writers and directors to carry out their vision.
This led to The Flash. You had a Barry Allen that was TV-Hollywood handsome. Granted, most superheroes of that era and before were. But even by those standards, John Wesley Shipp was pretty generically good-looking. While they didn't do a lot with his romantic life early on, there was a constant will they/won't they? going on with his scientific consultant Tina McGee (Amanda Pays) and there was the sorta/kinda comic relief buddy, Julio (Alex Desert).
The choice to try and emulate the Tim Burton style of Batman was either a huge success or a weird failure, depending on your point of view. Central City certainly did look unique, with its weird mix of 90s street murals, 30s Art Deco stylings, and 50s biker gang. But that may have influenced the writers a bit too much: a lot of the plots read like 30s gangster movies, with a few Flash Gordon-style superhero bits like the invisibility belt in "Sight Unseen" or the mind-control device in "Double Vision". Yes, it was updated for the 90s. Sort of. But since the bad guys were depowered, that meant Flash had to be depowered, too. This helped keep the budget down, but it made for a rather wussy Flash. He doesn't sit around and talk while the bad guys bushwhack him. Flash just... doesn't move as fast as you think he should. He falls for the same kind of traps and ambushes Eliot Ness fell for, or Matt Dillon, or Captain Kirk. As we'll see in "Sight Unseen".
Eventually the developers and producers figured out this was kind of boring. With the ratings going down, there's debate about whether the creative team was desperate, or inspired, or finally got their act together, or some mix of all of those and a few more things as well. The production had already brought in the Ghost in "Ghost in the Machine". In a few episodes they would bring in the Trickster, and Captain Cold, and Mirror Master, and their own version of Reverse Flash. But it was too much, too little, too late, and between the expense and the mediocre plotting, and The Flash being put up against NBC Thursday night Cosby Show juggernaut, the show ended after one season.
That brings us to "Sight Unseen", which is admittedly an odd choice for a review. But it rather tidily sums up all of the problems the show had. So let's dive in. Tina is working late at STAR Labs, and her boss Ruth (Deborah May) is prowling around the place. And again, the show's low budget is telling. STAR Labs seems to have Tina and a security guard as the only two employees. Ruth shows up but we'll never see her in future episodes.
An invisible man, Brian Gideon (Christopher Neame) using a personal cloaking device, breaks in and steals two vials of nerve toxin and one vial of antidote. When the token security guard shows up, Gideon kills him by injecting him with some of the toxin. Then Gideon dumps more of it into the STAR Labs AC system. I'm not sure how scientific this all is, but it seems kinda weird. How many vials Gideon has and has used is referred to constantly, but it isn't clearly established.
Tina and Ruth are locked in when the anti toxin alarm goes off, and they're exposed to the toxin. The phones are shut down, but Barry hacks into STAR Labs' communication satellite and reaches them. They check the security footage and discover what happened, and find out the vials belonged to Project Pandora, a government weapons research operation. Dr. Emil Velinski is the head of the project. Flash rushes off to find him, but Gideon finds him first and strangles him in front of a blind news-vendor, Reggie, played by Robert Shayne, who was Inspector Henderson on the 50s Adventures of Superman show. In a decent, but somewhat unlikely, bit Reggie is able to "sense" Gideon. He also recognizes Flash as Barry, since Barry is a regular customer as we've seen in a previous episode, but he doesn't know Barry is wearing a costume.
The government gets involved around this point, in the face of a guy named Quinn (George Dickerson). Quinn is covering up his own involvement in developing an illegal chemical research project, and he's glad to break into STAR Labs with his people even though that will trigger a sterilization process that will kill Tina and Ruth. Tina is still in contact with Barry, and somehow sends him a fax even though the phone lines are down. I don't think the creative team understood how "phone lines" work.
Flash runs off to get Velinski's assistant and brings him to STAR Labs. However, Gideon has stolen a police car and drives there (which seems to defeat the point of being invisible), and kills the assistant. Flash tracks down Gideon to some edge-of-town house and Gideon rants on about how he's going to kill everyone in Central City to expose the government corruption. He was exposed to the toxin as well and is dying of a brain tumor. And this is all very effective: Christopher Neame is a British actor who has been a good bad guy in lots of shows, from the original Doctor Who to MacGyver to Babylon 5.
The main problem with this sequence is that Flash just stands there and talks to the guy. Granted, Gideon has an invisibility belt (he's a biochemist and a physicist). Still, he's in a confined room with a superspeed guy. They treat invisibility as if it's intangibility with no mention of the other problems that come up with TV invisibility. Like... how does Gideon see if his cloaking device bends light around him as they say? If the light can't reach his eyes, he's blind.
Overall, it's a good example of how they had to stymie Flash and ended up undermining him, just so he couldn't capture the bad guy in two seconds flat.
Gideon escapes when Quinn and his people arrive, but he has been making voice logs and conveniently leaves one behind explaining how he plans to dose Central City's water supply with the toxin. Tina dismisses the idea of using sound (why don't they just take Reggie from earlier?) to track Gideon because it would be too noisy on a street corner (although Reggie was on a street corner earlier and could hear Gideon just fine). Instead, she suggests and Barry finds a pair of infra-red contact lenses that the Search & Rescue unit. Which... shouldn't work the way they do. If the belt bends light around the wearer, then it would bend IR light as well. But hey, that's TV invisibility for you. And the S&R unit has contacts? Big budget.
Flash goes to the reservoir but Gideon gets the drop on him despite the contact lenses and injects him with some toxin. And again, how much of the stuff does Gideon have? Flash super-vibrates the toxin out of his system, and has noticed the lights flicker when Gideon uses his belt. He makes what looks like a giant electromagnet out of wires and a pipe, and shorts out Gideon's belt. Which kills him before he can dump the toxin in the water. Although I don't think electromagnets work that way. But hey, I'm not a police scientist.
Plus, when he could run over and punch the guy a few thousand times, why is Flash bothering to make an electromagnet?
Barry works out that something in his blood is the antidote. And... it isn't. It's his superspeed that apparently let him overcome the toxin. But it's near the end of the episode, so go with it. Quinn has his people break into STAR Labs, setting off the sterilization irradiation. Flash speeds Tina and Ruth out just in time, and then injects them with his blood to cure them of the toxin. Barry's boss Garfield (Mike Genovese) has had enough of Quinn's happy crappy and goes over his head to have him removed. Quinn's assistant gets orders to arrest him, and she does so. Quinn has been lusting after the invisibility belt, so Barry claims Flash gave it to him... disassembled. Barry and Tina have one of their will they/won't they moments at the end, and that's all she wrote.
Like I said, "Sight Unseen" is episode 10 in the first and only 22-episode season of The Flash, and pretty well sums up the first half of the season. Goofy science, Tina as the female "lead" being put in danger and otherwise not having much to do, comedy relief cops Bellows and Murphy, and a science-based bad guy who shouldn't give Flash more than two seconds of angst but somehow does anyway. Christopher Neame does what he can with his role, and the supporting cast is okay. Deborah May as Ruth gets a few tender moments with Tina near the end when she talks about what she'll miss when she's dead, and it's a pity they didn't bring her back. George Dickerson is an effective menace as Quinn, even if it's a pretty generic "corrupt government official" role.,
Shipp is likeable enough in a goofy kind of way. Thankfully, they avoid the jokes and sped-up camera "humor" that they stuck the character with and focus more on his desperation to save Tina as well as dealing with a bad guy who is sorta sympathetic. Alex Desert is... mostly harmless and at least brings some skills to the going-ons, helping Barry hack the government communication block with Tina. There's a very small subplot where Julio insists that Tina has to pick the winners in a horse race because it's his family's tradition to have females do it. It's not at all amusing, and it exists just to push the plot along: As a result, Barry calls Tina and discovers that STAR Labs is locked down. But hey, its 90s TV.
Overall, "Sight Unseen" just isn't that great an episode. If you're going to watch the "complete series" on DVD or elsewhere, you could skip the first eleven episodes except the pilot (to learn Barry's origin), and "Ghost in the Machine" because it has a decent villain and a decent secondary superhero.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
Written by Gislef on Dec 16, 2018
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