Blu-ray Review: ‘The Flash: The Complete Second Season’

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the The Flash Blu-ray I reviewed in this post. The opinions I share are my own.

The Flash: The Complete Second Season is hitting Blu-ray just in time to catch up before Season 3 launches in October on The CW and if you missed out when it originally aired – well, you missed out. But thankfully with this release from the good people at Warner Bros Home Entertainment you can get your binge on in Central City before the new season begins.

Season 1 ended with a massive cliffhanger as Team Flash defeated Reverse-Flash at great personal cost to the group and found Central City being sucked into a dimensional rip called a “Singularity” as Barry (Grant Gustin) rushed in head first to save the city. This Singularity is key to Season 2 and serves a purpose, much like the particle accelerator in Season 1, of creating more meta-human threats for The Flash to confront.

The biggest of which is the black speedster known only as Zoom, who is using the Singularity to wage war on this dimension. The great thing about the Singularity in Season 2 is that it opened the door to a major aspect of the DC Comics universe that had fans completely nerding out: The Multiverse. Zoom hails from Earth-2 and Team Flash is from Earth-1 and so on with the potential to run through the hypothetical gamut of a 52 world Multiverse.

The Multiverse allowed characters like Dr. Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh) to return to the cast, as well as allowing characters like Danielle Panabaker’s Caitlin Snow and Carlos Valdes’ Cisco Ramon to get to play evil versions of their characters from Earth-2 – or in funnier terms, Grant Gustin getting to play a nerdier version of Barry Allen from Earth-2. The storytelling in Season 2 became so unchained from restrictions within this Multiverse freedom that it was as close to a fully functioning, expansive live-action comic book universe as fans have ever seen on television.

Unfortunately Season 2 had huge shoes to fill after the near perfect Season 1 and stumbled a bit at times down the road, especially in the latter half of the episodes. Events like the Arrow/Flash crossover that mainly served as a prelude to DC’s Legends of Tomorrow derailed story line momentum and when this season’s twists were mostly all revealed as events ramped up to a big finale, the show seemed to pump the brakes at that awkward time.

But these complaints are only minor nitpicks as The Flash Season 2 was absolutely top-notch, entertaining television that at times even surpassed Season 1 with its action, special effects and plot twists while solidifying itself as easily the best DC Comics show on the air. One aspect the The Flash: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray doesn’t stumble on are the special features which are more stacked than any other recent complete season releases, totaling almost four hours of additional content to run through (heh) while you wait for Season 3.

The extra content is spaced out over all four discs of the set and has so many solid features, it’d require a whole other review to cover them all. I’ll hit on some of my favorites below and then give you a list of the rest that are provided:

Chasing Flash: The Journey of Kevin Smith is a nearly one hour documentary about Kevin Smith’s road to directing The Runaway Dinosaur episode of Season 2. The whole thing plays out like a giant motivational video and Kevin Smith is known for being wordy, but I’ll be darned if this isn’t an endearing story of fandom that makes you want to get off your ass and do something with your life. You can tell the cast truly loved working with Smith and he was having the time of his life and you will too while watching this feature.

The Flash: Visual Effects: Follow The Flash in 360, The Flash: Visual Effects: Earth-2, Cutting Teeth: The Flash vs. King Shark, Into the Breach: Designing Earth-2, and Grodd Lives! are just some of the bonus features that dig into all the incredible design and effects work on the show – but these in particular stood out from the group. The jaw-dropping effects that went into creating King Shark and Grodd alone are mind-boggling, especially when you take into account this is all on a television shows budget.

The Many Faces of Zoom is also an interesting feature that deals with the three men that got to play the villain during Season 2: Teddy Sears as the unmasked Zoom, stuntman Ryan Hadley as the  fully-suited monster, and Candyman himself, Tony Todd, as the voice of Zoom. Whose Helmet Was That? is also a fun, yet short feature digging into one of my favorite character additions in Season 2: Earth-2 Flash Jay Garrick.

No Blu-ray is complete without a Gag Reel and The Flash: The Complete Second Season has an entertaining, yet pretty standard assortment of clips. But the gag reel has an intro that is an extremely fun homage to the original The Flash television series starring John Wesley Shipp that makes this feature a must-see.

Additionally, you’ll find the same Star Crossed Hawks features that were provided on The Arrow: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray along with the two-part Arrow crossover episodes Legends of Today and Legends of Yesterday.

The rest of features listed below are still entertaining as well, but didn’t make as big as impression on me as the ones mentioned above. But just so you can see the full scope of the heaping helpings of special features provided on this Blu-ray, I’ve included a list of the rest of them below:

• Barry and Iris: New Beginnings
• Rogue Gallery: One Cold Father, The Lewis Snart Story
• Heart and Heart: The Story of Firestorm
• The Power of Dr. Light
• Behind the Story: The Chemistry Test of Grant and Emily Screen Test
• The Flash: Visual Effects: A Closer Look
• Christmas in a Flash
• The Flash: Visual Effects: Sticky Situations
• The Flash: Visual Effects: Superheroes and Villains
• The Flash: Visual Effects: Everything Falls Apart

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