Review: The Flash Crossover episode of Supergirl

I don't usually review TV shows. That's not my thing but I'm a huge fan of The Flash and have been watching Supergirl and giving it a chance to see if it turns into a good show. I've been looking forward to what they would do with this cross-network cross-over for a while now. The first one to air was the Supergirl episode that had Flash going to her world. What'd I think?

(SPOILERS -- Don't read if you haven't seen it!!!)

I hated it. I hated everything about it.

Barry Allen/The Flash, by himself, showed, by his contrast, how bad the acting and writing and story are in Supergirl. He was so much better than they were that it made their bad acting look even worse. It was painful to watch.

First Scene: Supergirl: Most powerful woman on the planet is introduced to perhaps new viewers having relationship problems and getting dating advice from Ally McBeal. That's like getting dinner party advice from Mary Tyler Moore. If you get that reference you're older than I am. But seriously. "Why can't I get him to like me?" is the driving force behind almost every B story line on Supergirl since the show started. It is a SHIT way to introduce her to new viewers. Pissed off already.

Introduction of The Flash? Annoying. He's a brilliant CSI and computer guy. But, sadly, OOPS! I ran to the wrong universe. OOPS! I ran clear out to North Dakota or some shit. WTH? Really? He oopsed himself into another universe? Ugh.

New Super-villain created: A female: What's the first thing she does? She does her make-up. Then she and the supervillain she frees from the most secure super-prison in the world, how? No clue how she got there, perhaps she used the PLOT DEVICE, the two of them, our heroes, take off, with no plan at Supergirl's insistence they go to fight the two baddies...

Remember super smart CSI hacker? Well, he attacks a villain with a name like LiveWire that uses electricity as a weapon WITH electricity. Charges her up so she can kick some butt. Which she does. So, Supergirl and The Flash are knocked down and what happens next? The most sexually charged scene in the show.

• Does Supergirl use her heat vision to melt a hole in the villain's heart killing her instantly?
• Does Supergirl use her super strength to punch the villain's head off her shoulders?
• Does Supergirl use her ability to fly to whisk the villain off to outerspace and chuck her into the sun? 
• Does Supergirl use... 

You know what? No. She doesn't do ANY of that. She uses her superbreath and gives a super blowjob to the chick obviously showing The Flash what he could have. He immediately responds by showing that he's quite adept at using both hands in a repeated oscillating motion rather than succumb to super blow-job. Then they leave.

What happens next? Well, she admitted to The Flash, that she just met, that not only is she crushed that she can't get a boy to like her, the whole city doesn't like her either and in spite of being super powerful... she just doesn't know what to do and she needs a man to help her and tell her what to do. Fortunately The Flash does just that and she, of course follows his advice because she, in spite of being Supergirl, always does what a man tells her to do.

There's a scene that desperately wants to be the subway scene from Spiderman 2 that makes me cry every time I see it but is, instead, just a shitty scene that is unbelievable and badly acted. Ending with the two super villains who consistently beat the hell out of Supergirl and The Flash being beaten by some men with a hose.

That's right. They turned the hose on them and beat them. I wish to hell I was kidding. I'm not. The solution for the villains that the Fastest Man Alive and The Most Powerful Woman on the Planet couldn't beat was to get them wet.

Ugh. Kill me now.

Bates Motel thoughts

I've been watching Bates Motel on A&E since it started last year and I really love the acting in it. Freddie Highmore is amazing as a younger, high-school aged, Norman Bates and his mother, alive thankfully, played by Vera Farmiga is stunning. The two together are greater than the sum of their parts and seriously are the two best performances I've ever seen. They're seriously perfect together. Freddie Highmore seems to be channeling the original character, Norman Bates and has the walk, mannerisms, everything so spot on it's creepy.

What has me really thinking this season isn't just their amazing performances or their story line (I'm not a super fan of the drug business in the town story line but hey, every show has a B-line and it's never as strong or it'd be the primary story, right?) But it's something A&E has done that I've never seen before.

One of the criticisms I got in my book Jump/Drive was that I had high school aged kids dealing with sex when they weren't adults. I'm not kidding. They talked about it and talked to an adult about it and I got e-mails saying that wasn't appropriate or okay in a YA (Young Adult) book because there are two kinds of people: Adults who are sexual and children who are children all 17 years and 364 days of their childhood and are NOT sexual animals and must not EVER be looked at that way, thought about as thinking about it, or anything else. TV has mostly played along that line really.

Season 2, Episode 9 of Bate's Motel we hear something very different. Norman has a crush on one of his teachers who has mysteriously turned up dead after he was at her house. He doesn't know what happened. He blacked out. It keeps happening that people get hurt when he's blacked out. But that's not the important part. They didn't show him having sex with her. They showed him at the house. In S2E9 the sheriff says something along the lines of "Some of the semen in [dead teacher] was Norman's." My mind was blown.

What Bate's Motel and A&E did was just talk about a minor not only having sex with an adult but leaving "semen" and that's the word they used and I was like, "What the hell?" behind. That's not something a child would do but he IS a child. The hard sharp line between adulthood and childhood that TV seems so fond of is so very broken here. They did a throwaway line about arresting her for sex with a minor if she weren't already dead or something like that to cover their butts and make sure we the audience knew they didn't condone that sort of behavior. But the part where they discussed it at all, and in that kind of detail was very different from what I've seen before. There were bodily fluids discussed between two different generations of people and one of them is/was still a child. (Yes, I'm intentionally using that word to be provocative because that's the way things are done on TV with this subject a lot of the time. But not this time.)

So, if you've never seen this show find it on DVD, watch it on Netflix, whatever it takes, but watch it. It's some of the best TV out there and you won't regret it.