The Flash TV - Inhumane prison - asking for a little spoiler

September 7, 2018 10:48 AM

Does the show ever meaningfully address the inhumanity of their jail? I stopped somewhere in season 2 because the good guys should not be running a worse Gitmo. I imagine this has been addressed before, but the search function only brought up episode caps. I really dislike spoilers, but this I would need to know. It's okay if they don't - there's so much Supernatural I haven't got to yet. Thanks!
posted by turkeybrain (7 comments total)

nope :-/
posted by numaner at 4:19 PM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Not meaningfully, no. I think at some point Flash & Co give meta-dampening-tech to Star City law enforcement, or Argus, so eventually there are meta-dampening handcuffs the police can use, and a meta wing of the regular prison, and a special Argus prison for super-powerful villains like King Shark. So, they do clear out the Star Labs creepy little (toilet-less) solitary confinement cells at some point, but, it was more of a 'pass the buck'/'wash our hands of it' thing rather than any serious acknowledgement of how creepy it was to begin with. And they'll still use them whenever the plot necessitates it.
posted by oh yeah! at 8:11 PM on September 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Thanks. Think I'll give the rest of the series a miss.
posted by turkeybrain at 10:37 AM on September 8, 2018

If you want meaningful out of the CW superhero shows, I recommend Black Lightning, they did a terrific job at addressing real-world issues of politics & race, and there is an arrest scene in one episode that is incredibly powerful. And on the other end of the spectrum, Legends of Tomorrow is completely wonderfully bonkers. But Flash tries to have both light comedy characters/sub-plots and big angsty drama, but the two tones don't really mesh well when they try to treat only some things seriously and ignore the things that are just there for making the plot function. And Arrow has a similar problem with trying to pull off a 'gritty/grim-dark' comic book feel but still pretending to be in the real world, so when they do things like try to have an episode addressing gun control it's just, yikes no.
posted by oh yeah! at 11:20 AM on September 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Just want to second oh yeah!'s observations, (with the caveat that Legends S1 is pretty bad, but the writers figure it out in S2/S3 and create something magical).

Apart from the prison thing, The Flash has been such a dour slog lately that I could not recommend it to anyone in good conscience.
posted by mordax at 12:30 PM on September 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Hell, they don't even have a toilet in those prisons.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:14 PM on September 22, 2018

There was a deleted scene in Season 1 that shows Caitlin bringing in a cart of fast food burgers and fries to feed the prisoners, implying that they do this several times a day. Eventually the city's district attorney unofficially learned about the secret prison and the heroes quickly shut it down, attempting to transfer all of the prisoners to an even less ethical but official "black site" prison, but everyone escaped instead.

The characters continued to use their prison for temporary one-off incidents (mostly keeping dangerous metahumans contained for a few hours until they could be transferred to a real, official prison designed to hold them), but they never again use it to just lock away their weekly foes and throw away the keys. Season 4 explores the real, official metahuman prison operated by the state and the ramifications of running it.
posted by Servo5678 at 10:39 AM on September 24, 2018 [1 favorite]