“The Flash: The Complete Sixth Season” – Blu-ray Review

Spark some life back into your quarantine downtime with a rewatch of The Flash: The Complete Sixth Season, available on DVD & Blu-ray on August 25, 2020!

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of The Flash: The Complete Sixth Season Blu-ray that I reviewed in this blog post. The opinions I share are my own.

As much as it pains me to admit, The Flash just isn’t what it used to be. Now, this isn’t necessarily a surprise to me, considering the fact that shows tend to dull in quality as they stretch on through the years. The Flash has aired six full seasons since its original premiere back in 2014 and it seems as though the show has exhausted all of its attempts to keep the characters and stories inventive, exciting, and enjoyable to stick around with. In my personal opinion, season 6 of The Flash was just as bad as my own personal least favorite season…. ahem…. season 3. But now I’m worried the upcoming season of the show will be just as bad. 

The first problem that season six had was the fact the show tried to cut the season in half to introduce 2 separate villain arcs. Usually, The Flash has one main antagonist through the whole season episode order, with a handful of filler episodes that focus on low-threat “monster-of-the-week” style villains. I think that the change might have been the show’s way of trying to fight back against the glaring issue of having too many episodes per season. Because yes, trying to maintain one villain’s intimidation factor over a stretch of 21-23 full episodes is difficult and doesn’t work anymore. However, it all boils down to writing. 

Flash’s sixth season is divided into halves with the annual crossover event right in the middle of each half. The first 8 episodes focus on the villain, Bloodwork, played by Sendhil Ramamurthy. Episode 9 is The Flash’s addition to 2019’s ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ crossover. And then episodes 10-19 focus on the villain, Mirror Mistress, played by Efrat Dor.

This idea could have worked, but the show added too much filler. For example, episodes 1-8 introduced Bloodwork as the main threat, but spent most of the time setting up the upcoming crossover event. This completely shoved Bloodwork into the background as an afterthought, killing his purpose for the show, while the main characters spent the majority of their time worrying about the possibility of Barry dying during the Crisis. 

Episodes 10-19 aired “post-crisis”, but had a whole different problem on its own. For starters, Iris gets pulled into a mirror by Eva (the season’s second villain, Mirror Mistress, even though she’s pretending to be a helplessly trapped damsel inside of the mirror world) at the end of episode 10 and remains there for the rest of the season, through the season finale. Meanwhile, the villain (Eva) doesn’t actually get out of the mirror and enact her flimsy plan until episode 17 & 19, respectively. And if you’re wondering as to what Barry is doing about Iris being kidnapped, well, he doesn’t even know that the real Iris is missing until episode 17. So, that led to an entire second half of the season with no real villain and no Iris. 

The fact that the villains of this season don’t really do anything besides stand around and wait is only exacerbated by the fact all of the other characters kind of just do the same thing. The show is supposed to be about The Flash aka Barry Allen, yet Barry can’t really use his powers anymore on account of the speed force getting nuked thanks to the Crisis. As a result, most of Barry’s screen-time involves him talking about how he can’t use his powers, only to then use some of his weakened power, only to get defeated by his opponent. Barry felt like a side character in his own show, which was only intensified by how many new characters have been included in the series. 

This is another problem that I had with the season. There are too many characters!!! The Flash used to focus on just Barry, Caitlin, and Cisco. But now, both Caitlin/Killer Frost and Cisco seem to just wander aimlessly and give emotional speeches to whichever character is feeling down in the dumps for the particular episode. Currently, The Flash does a juggling act as it splits up its individual episodes to focus on the crowded cast of characters. Of course, you have Barry, Iris, Caitlin, and Cisco. But then, you also have new characters like Nash Wells, Allegra, and her evil cousin, Esperanza. There are Ralph and his new love interest, Sue. Then we have Cecile, Joe, and Cisco’s girlfriend, Kamilla. All of them are serious recurring characters that all seemingly need time to solidify themselves as main characters in the show for no reason whatsoever. 

Personally, I think that this season felt very unplanned. It seems as though the writers had some ideas, but didn’t know how to stretch the ideas very far, resulting in tons of filler and unimaginative resolving of storylines. It feels like they spent most of their time planning out the crossover, which turned out pretty good. But as a result, the sixth season of The Flash wound up undercooked.

I’m hoping that the next season will be better, but it worries me that the first 3 episodes of season 7 will actually be the unaired episodes from season 6 that were left unfinished due to the pandemic shutting down filming. I think that this show could squeeze out a good couple of last seasons if only they would return to the basics of what made the series so enjoyable during the first two seasons. 

The Flash: The Complete Sixth Season Special Features:

• Kiss Kiss Breach Breach – Special ‘Noir’ Episode: This featurette includes the original episode, which was released entirely in black & white, as well as an extra version of the episode with commentary from Showrunner/Executive Producer Eric Wallace. This was my personal favorite of the set because it focused on Cisco, a character who I feel isn’t as prominent in the show as he used to be. As well as the fact that the episode is a super cool black & white thrilling murder mystery. It’s so different from all of the other episodes. 
• The Best of DC TV’s Comic-Con Panels San Diego 2019: This featurette includes a highlight reel with special moments from the Arrowverse panels at SDCC 2019. It also includes small moments with individual cast members from Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, Black Lightning, and Batwoman. (51 minutes)
• Gag Reel – Outtakes and Mishaps: This cast really does feel like one big happy family. You can really see their collective chemistry shine, not just on the actual episodes, but behind the scenes in the funny bloopers of the season. (7 minutes)
• Deleted Scenes: This Blu-ray set also includes 11 deleted scenes from various episodes throughout the seasons, all spread throughout 4 discs. (14 minutes)

Blu-ray Bonus Disk Special Features:

• 5-Part Crisis on Infinite Earths Crossover Event: This bonus disc comes with the Blu-ray edition of the season’s release and includes all 5 parts of the crossover event, including episodes only previous aired respectively on Arrow, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and Batwoman. 
• Crisis on Infinite Earths – The Architects Return: The featurette brings back Marv Wolfman and George Perez (the original creators of the Crisis on Infinite Earths 1985 comic book) to talk about the original story’s creation. (12 minutes).
• Crisis Management: This featurette dives into how the Arrowverse team of writers and producers came together to develop the live-action adaptation of the comic story. This was one of my favorite bonus features simply because of how complex it really was to build an entire crossover event and how much effort went into creating big, jaw-dropping moments that would be able to rival the explosive nature of the original comic. (13 minutes)
• Crisis Past and Present – Kevin Conroy, Bat Legend: This featurette is short but sweet. It takes a moment to take about the decision to bring on Kevin Conroy, the original voice actor for Batman in Batman: The Animated Series, onboard to play a live-action version of Bruce during the crossover. (3 minutes)
• Crisis Past and Present – Superman vs. Superman: This featurette includes behind-the-scenes interviews and footage with Brandon Routh and Tyler Hoechlin, both of which portrayed alternate versions of Superman during the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. (4 minutes)
• Character in Crisis – Pariah: This particular featurette dives into the character of Pariah, a character that was extremely important to the Crisis event in the original comics. It explores how the writers took that character and translated him for the Arrowverse adaptation. (4 minutes)
• Characters in Crisis – The Anti-Monitor: This featurette explores the main villain of the Crisis on Infinite Earths story, The Anti-Monitor. This includes Marv Wolfman’s own thinking behind the creation of the character, as well as how that character was translated to television. (5 minutes)

The standard DVD version of The Flash: The Complete Sixth Season is a 4-disc set with 19 full episodes, including Part Three of the Crisis on Infinite Earths 2019 crossover event. It will be marketed for $39.99 SRP ($49.99 in Canada). 

The Blu-ray edition of this season includes 4 discs with all 19 episodes from the season, including an extra fifth bonus disc with all 5 parts of the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event. The bonus disc also includes 6 extra bonus features, as listed above. This will be marketed for $44.98 SRP ($49.99 in Canada). 

Both the standard DVD and special Blu-ray releases will be available for purchase on August 25, 2020. The entire sixth season of The Flash is also currently available to own on digital from digital retailers. 

Are you guys picking up a copy of The Flash season six when it gets released?

Let us know in the comments below! 

Author: Rodney

Rodney has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. Aspiring to one day write television shows and novels, he’s an avid slash-shipper and enthusiast for all things gay. Rodney’s especially a lover of magic, mystery, and superheroes—holding Harry Potter, the X-Men, and Scooby-Doo close as his own personal favorites. But when he’s not fantasizing about how cool it would be to have magic, he’s busy writing fanfiction and re-watching old TV shows.

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