Agents of SHIELD Is Doing Time Travel Better Than The Flash
It was certainly unexpected that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would go full-stop into an epic about time travel to the future and a Terminator-style causality loop about the heroes attempting to save Earth from what appears to be a pre-destined destruction by one of their own Agents, Daisy “Quake” Johnson. This is par for the course with S.H.I.E.L.D., however, as the Marvel series uncannily reinvents itself every season and sticks its fingers in the pot of different genres while steadfastly remaining a show about super-spies fighting evil in the MCU. Season 5’s time travel saga is their most ambitious yet, and not only is it paying off with S.H.I.E.L.D. creatively galvanized, it also is putting The Flash‘s previous time travel story to shame as a result.
Once his solo series was launched as a spinoff of Arrow, it didn’t take long for The Flash to discover that his speed affords him the ability to not just cross into parallel universes but break through the time barrier. Time travel was always at the crux of The CW’s series; it was because Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash, traveled back in time and killed Barry Allen’s mother that the Flash was created in the first place. For the first two seasons, the specter of how his mom died and his father Henry Allen was wrongly imprisoned for her murder haunted Barry.
All of this was inevitably leading to what Flash fans had hotly anticipated since the series began: that Barry would eventually travel back in time to save his mother and thus, recreate an alternate reality: Flashpoint. What ended up happening, however, is after two full seasons of build up, “Flashpoint” really dropped the ball.
“Flashpoint” was The Flash‘s season 3 premiere episode and it was The CW’s series adaptation of the 2011 DC Comics event that transitioned its continuity into the re-invented New 52 universe. The Flash couldn’t – and wouldn’t – be so ambitious with its adaptation, but used “Flashpoint” as a way to reorganize some of the recurring characters not just in its series but others within the Arrowverse. More importantly, it dealt head-on with Barry’s lingering guilt about how his mother died and ultimately closed the book on that chapter of Barry’s life so that he could move forward. However, while it certainly had fun moments, it was still very disappointing.
In the revised “Flashpoint” universe, Barry traveled back in time, prevented Thawne from killing his mother, and imprisoned him. The result was a brand new parallel universe where Barry lived for a few months and enjoyed having both his parents in his life. There was still a Flash in Central City, but it wasn’t Barry – it was Wally West, who formed a crime-fighting duo with his sister Iris. However, Barry and Iris weren’t a romantic item in “Flashpoint,” a situation Barry wanted to remedy. Other differences included Cisco Ramon as the billionaire tech genius behind STAR Labs; meanwhile, they didn’t know Caitlin Snow at all. It was an entertaining “What If?” look at how differently The Flash could have turned out.
Soon, Barry, realizing he created Flashpoint out of his own selfishness, had to make the difficult choice to delete this unstable version of the timeline and set things right. He allowed Thawne to kill his mother, after all, hoping that would reset the timeline to how it was. It sort of worked; the timeline was mostly restored but many characters had aspects of their lives irrevocably changed: Cisco’s brother was now dead, Caitlin gained the powers of Killer Frost, and elsewhere in the Arrowverse, John Diggle’s baby daughter became a baby son. Barry inevitably had to do the right thing and come clean that his actions changed the timeline and many of his friends’ lives permanently. The hard feelings lasted for several episodes but eventually, after coming to a head in the Arrowverse’s Invasion! crossover, things went back to the status quo.
“Flashpoint” itself, however, lasted all of one episode. Fans got to spend time in the alternate universe they’d been hoping to see since the series began for a mere hour before The Flash reset itself back to normal. Fans hoping to see some of the wilder aspects of the comic book, like the epic war of Wonder Woman and the Amazons vs. Aquaman and the Atlanteans that destroyed all of Europe, were left disappointed, though to be fair, that was never possible for The Flash to depict, to begin with. The CW series was handicapped by the fact that the Flashpoint story of the comics is earmarked to be the basis of The Flash’s solo feature film set in the DCEU starring Ezra Miller. The TV Flash instead told a different version of the story steeped in the series’ mythology and its characters. Still, “Flashpoint” was unsatisfactorily brief before the series zoomed to hit the reset button. The Flash occasionally continues to dabble in time travel but always speeds to things back to The Way They Always Were (mostly).
One of the many superlatives fans appreciate about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that there is no status quo and the show is constantly soft rebooting itself. The series and its characters are in a constant state of flux and upheaval. From discovering that S.H.I.E.L.D. was HYDRA all along, learning about the existence of Inhumans, new directors placed in charge, journeys to another planet, and even meeting Ghost Rider, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are constantly careening from one crisis to the next and forced to adjust on the fly. There’s no such thing as ‘a normal day’ when you’re a part of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Season 4 saw the series toy with its own history, bringing back popular dead characters like Antoine “Tripp” Triplett and Grant Ward in the virtual reality world of the Framework. While borrowing the concept of The Matrix, this was also S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s version of “Flashpoint”; its own alternate reality “What If?” the-world-is-upside-down tale where HYDRA controlled America, some of the Agents like Melinda May and Leopold Fitz were not only complicit but were part of HYDRA high command, former enemies like Ward were now freedom fighters, and other main characters like Coulson were not part of the fight at all.
The Framework story was a funhouse mirror version of the S.H.I.E.L.D. fans had come to know, and the series spent several surprising and satisfying episodes within the Framework exploring all aspects of this weird, false reality. Then, literally moments after the Framework story and season 4 were over, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were kidnapped and rocketed into the future.
S.H.I.E.L.D. V FLASHPOINT
In “Flashpoint,” though Barry Allen altered time, the scope of the changes were narrowed to how it all affected Barry and his close circle of friends and allies. The rest of the universe in Flashpoint was the same as it ever was; and if it wasn’t, we weren’t in Flashpoint anywhere near long enough to really delve into how different that timeline was from the one we were already familiar with. Still, the fate of the world, much less the Multiverse, was never at stake in “Flashpoint” – there wasn’t even really a villain truly threatening Central City, despite the presence of a new evil speedster called the Rival. (Barry was the true “villain” of the story.) Everything was kept within the confines of the bread-and-butter of the series: the soap-opera drama and pleasing comedy of its main cast of characters. “Flashpoint” was ultimately undone by its curious lack of ambition.
At this point in its run, with no guarantee of a season 6, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is going for broke and telling as colossal a story as its ever told. With nothing left to lose, S.H.I.E.L.D. is emptying the chambers of his considerable firepower and the results now see S.H.I.E.L.D. hailed as the best reviewed Marvel series. Even despite the fact that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is still ostensibly part of the MCU, the series is now flaunting its tertiary, tenuous-at-best connection to the rest of Marvel’s shared universe by going ahead and destroying the world, regardless of what is depicted in the movies. By now, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the master of its own fate and rules its own corner of the Marvel universe.
The Flash could have used some of this same “We’ll do what we want” attitude when it presented “Flashpoint”, which was exactly the kind of story that requires vaulting ambition. Rather, it was hamstrung by its preset limits to remain recognizably the same series it always was. “Flashpoint” only fleetingly disrupted not just its own reliable status quo but that of the rest of the Arrowverse.
The next time The Flash decides to take on a time travel epic, hopefully, the series will make a braver and bolder attempt to break its own mold and do something really special. After all, they now have Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 5 as a role model.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. airs Fridays @ 9 pm on ABC. The Flash airs Tuesdays @ 8 pm on The CW.
No comments