An Old Hero Gets the Reboot
The new Sci Fi original series Flash Gordon stars Eric Johnson as the eponymous hero, a jock who literally gets sucked into the galaxy-threatening ambitions of Ming, the iron-fisted ruler of the planet Mongo. The promotional material leading up to the launch of the show had led me to expect something approximating Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: lots of fistfights in anonymous forests, cocky grins and unamused snarls, bared male torsos, and skanky interchangeable brunettes.
Flash, sad to say, delivers on all that in spades, and yet the whole thing adds up to even less than the sum of these recycled parts. Flash falls between the two stools most often associated with space opera: it isn’t committed enough to its own material to draw us in, and it isn’t over the top enough to be campy fun.
A Portal to Mongo
The basic idea is that Flash’s dad, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (played in flashbacks by Bruce Dawson), was thought to have died in a lab fire thirteen years ago. But Flash eventually finds out that was actually sucked into a "rift" created between Earth and Mongo, and now the famously merciless dictator Ming (Life with Derek’s John Ralston, of all people) has begun using the rift to send robotic hunters after a mysterious artifact that Dr. Gordon left behind on Earth, something called an Imex. Meanwhile Dr. Gordon’s old assistant Hans Zarkov (Jody Racicot) has been tracing these uses of the rift, and reporter Dale Arden (Gina Holden), Flash’s old flame, is also on the story.
Flash takes one of the hunters’ portal-openers and goes to Mongo in search of his father, accidentally taking Dale with him; they fall into Ming’s clutches, but are rescued by Aura (Anna van Hooft), who presents herself as one of Ming’s abbots but is in fact his daughter. They return to Earth, only to have Aura reveal she, too, wants to find the Imex, so she can give it to Daddy and so raise her own standing with him. Flash tracks down the Imex himself among his father’s effects (complete with a goofy revelation) and manages to send Aura back through the rift believing he’s destroyed it, but this time a humanoid hunter, Baylin (Karen Cliche, Lexa from Mutant X), is trapped on our side of the rift.
Worlds of Confusion
Many things are left unexplained in the pilot, hopefully for later revelation. Aura helpfully explains that the Imex is a "database" containing all of the knowledge of the known universe (oh, is that all?); but there’s no hint (yet) as to why Lawrence Gordon had it, or why it was left on Earth when Gordon went missing, or even if Gordon used information from it to create the portal he was sucked into.
The plot mechanics and backstory are delivered surprisingly clumsily. The mysteriously vanished father has huge possibilities for heft and motivation: witness Supernatural, which used this device brilliantly to drive its entire first season. Here those possibilities are squandered. If Flash ever finds his dad, it feels like it's going to be, "Oh, dad, there you are. Ready to get out of here? Mom’s making lasagna tonight."
One of the tropes of sci-fi dramas is that the heroes always assure each other they can’t tell anyone -- the heroes need to stay the heroes, after all. The device for keeping mum in Flash is interesting: Zarkov insists that if anyone finds out about this technology, its misuse as a weapon will destabilize matter itself and create a chain-reaction that will destroy everything, so it’s up to the three of them. This sets us up for Flash’s dry line at the end of the pilot, "All we have to do is save the universe."
The awkward plot mechanics are matched by insecure direction: for example, a fight scene between Flash, Dale, and a robot wants to be farcical but the pacing and tone are off, and instead of funny it ends up being laughable.
Bland Acting and Blander Effects
Sometimes clunky plotting and dialog can be saved by strong or fun acting (in fact that’s what saved Hercules) or universe-evoking special effects (as in the later Star Trek series). Not here. With two exceptions, the acting is uniformly flat and unengaging. Gina Holden, as Dale, has no screen presence -- she’s so generic, I kept having to remind myself who she was every time the camera returned to her. Worse, she has no chemistry with the hero; her scenes with Flash felt like they turned the camera on, she said her lines, cut, print, moving on.
The other women (Aura and Flash's mom) are just as weak, while Ming is such a cartoon tyrant that Ralston should have gone for frothing-at-the-mouth, over-the-top camp; his bland, angry-CEO portrayal is a huge missed opportunity. The exceptions are Eric Johnson, who’s appropriately stalwart and pulls the story forward with him whenever he’s in frame, and Jody Racicot, who plays the jumpy Zarkov in a performance that so recalled J.P. Manoux’s similarly skittish "Houston, we have a problem" guy from the Smallville episode "Transference" that I wanted to switch off Flash and watch that instead.
The effects are surprisingly poor: all of the graphics look superimposed, particularly the colossally fake "bumblebee" probe. The reveal on Mongo's big city is a disappointment. And the portal itself? It looks like a big CGI coffee stain. Even the portals on the notoriously cheap Sliders looked better.
The whole thing was such a frustrating waste of potential that by the end I was crying out, "Flash! Aaauugh!"
