After nearly a decade on the air, The Flash has finally ended with its ninth and final season, in which Barry Allen and the rest of Team Flash square off against the final avatar of the Negative Speed Force, Eddie Thawne. As DC prepares to enter a new age of live-action media, The Flash also brings an end to the long-running Arrowverse.
While it would have been reasonable for viewers to hope for a worthwhile conclusion to The Flash's long tenure on television, the show's ninth season was far from the best. Ultimately, the final season of The Flash failed the series—and the Arrowverse—in several major ways.
10 Poor CGI Limits The Flash's Storytelling
The Flash's final season suffered from truly horrendous CGI, a problem that has plagued the Arrowverse series since its inception. The show's budget has never been enough to adequately capture the larger-than-life nature of its comic book counterpart, leaving any computer-generated images to appear quite underwhelming in their final design.
While The Flash has never had a budget comparable to DC's movies, the rise of streaming services and their inflated budgets have led to superhero series that sport genuinely impressive CGI. As a result, The Flash's CGI looks even worse by comparison, making its final few seasons even more unbearable than they already were.
9 The Flash Season 9 Has Given Up On Its Timeline
The Flash has never been a series with a particularly neat timeline. Thanks to storylines involving time travel, alternate realities, and otherworldly dimensions, the show would never make perfect sense. However, while The Flash's early seasons made attempts to justify their sloppy timeline, it is clear by season nine that the showrunners have stopped caring.
In the final season of The Flash, there is little to no attention paid to previously established events. Characters from the future, like XS and Impulse, are allowed to interact with present-day stories with no adverse effects. Furthermore, previous storylines, like the destruction of the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths, are summarily ignored for convenience's sake—much to the chagrin of audiences attempting to keep up with the Arrowverse's increasingly ridiculous plot.
8 The Flash's Final Season Dropped Major Storylines
While the final season of a series is usually expected to tie together loose plot threads, The Flash fails to do so adequately in its last episodes. Instead of wrapping up old plot points, The Flash Season 9 introduces all new ones, leaving several unresolved threads.
One prominent example is the show's handling of Ralph Dibney, the Elongated Man, after the actor made a controversial exit from The Flash. While the show continuously teased Ralph's return, Season 9 completely forgets about his character. Ralph and many other storylines are entirely absent from The Flash's final season.
7 The Flash Season 9 Doesn't Properly End The Arrowverse
After the CW's recent restructuring that saw shows like Batwoman and Legends of Tomorrow canceled, The Flash became the final remaining series in the Arrowverse. As such, The Flash's finale also acts as the end of the Arrowverse, though it fails to bring a satisfying ending to the long-running franchise.
Although The Flash attempts to close the Arrowverse's story properly, its attempts are feeble at best. Oliver Queen's return can only do so much to repair the fact that many Arrowverse plotlines have been utterly ignored or overwritten in recent years. Frankly, the Arrowverse and its characters deserved better than their final, meandering years.
6 The Flash's Final Season Is Missing A Main Antagonist
A major issue with The Flash's latest season is that introducing its main villain takes far too long. The best seasons of the series have built up their respective villains over twenty-three episodes. In contrast, it isn't until the final four episodes of Season 9 that The Flash finally introduces its final villain, Cobalt Blue – and it even takes an additional two episodes to feature his actual villainous turn.
The fault for this misstep largely lands on showrunner Eric Wallace's abysmal "Graphic Novel" approach to arcs on The Flash. Intended to feature self-contained stories confined to a handful of episodes, the Graphic Novel approach instead leaves The Flash feeling disjointed and directionless, especially in its final episodes.
5 The Red Death Arc Didn't Live Up To The Hype
Before the release of The Flash's ninth season, the CW greatly built up the introduction of the Red Death. A combination of Batwoman and the Flash from an alternate timeline, the Red Death served as the main antagonist of the first few episodes of the season, but ultimately fell flat as a villain.
While Red Death had promise as a villain, her arc was rushed throughout a handful of episodes. Ultimately, the villain was defeated far too easily, making her Arrowverse debut extremely disappointing. Had the show spent more time with her character, the Red Death might have been more than yet another forgettable Arrowverse villain.
4 Lazy Writing Makes The Flash's Final Season Disappointing
In its final run, The Flash has one of the laziest Arrowverse finales ever. The show's writing has been going steadily downhill for years, and Season 9 does little to amend this issue. Instead, the final season doubles down on its lazy writing, leaving much to be desired as The Flash ends.
From its rushed storylines to atrocious dialogue, The Flash feels like an empty husk of its former self in its last seasons. Major character moments—like Allegra's debut as a superhero and Khione's growing powers—are glossed over with little care while other characters pad each episode's runtime with meaningless hijinks.
3 The Flash's Final Season Has Boring Action Scenes
A good superhero story requires epic action, which The Flash, unfortunately, cannot provide in its final season. Likely due to its limited budget, The Flash avoids major action scenes as often as it can while delivering dull fight sequences at the end of each episode. While speedster battles were once the highlights of The Flash, even these feel underwhelming in the last episodes.
The Flash's action has evolved in all the worst ways, suffering from adding unnecessary gimmicks like the Flash's speed force lightsaber that add little to the excitement of each battle. This continuing problem is underlined by the fact that Cobalt Blue (the big bad of the entire final season) is not defeated in battle, but instead talked out of his villainy by Barry in the series finale.
2 The Flash's Final Episode Disrespects Major Villains
The Flash's final episode saw the return of several long-absent Arrowverse villains, including the Reverse Flash, Zoom, Savitar, and Godspeed, who teamed up with Cobalt Blue to defeat Team Flash. However, these characters would have been better off had they never returned to the series.
The series finale utterly disrespects each of these iconic villains, as the lesser-powered members of Team Flash easily defeat them one by one. Even the Reverse Flash, who has been built up as the show's big bad since its very first episode, is last seen after being easily knocked out by side character Allegra Garcia—an underwhelming way to write off the show's undisputed best antagonist.
1 The Flash Forgets That Barry Allen Is The Main Character
The Flash suffers from an unforgivable fault in that it forgets who its main character is. Grant Gustin's Barry Allen is the undisputed highlight of the Arrowverse series, yet there are multiple episodes in the show's abbreviated final season where he is almost entirely absent.
The Flash Season 9's inexplicable insistence upon padding its story with filler episodes that barely include its main character frustrates and insults audiences. Instead, The Flash felt it more necessary to explore underwhelming storylines featuring side characters in its final season, leaving Barry's appearances few and far between. Without a main character to weave together plot points, The Flash doomed its final season to a legacy of disappointment.