After this year, Arrowverse fans might start to feel a sense of dread when one of these shows reaches its fourth season. Arrow really hit a wall in Season 4, which easily ranks as the series' worst to date (despite all Season 6 did to try to "beat" it). The same phenomenon struck again with The Flash in its fourth season. The series plummeted in quality, with many of the changes aimed at fixing the problems of Season 3 instead making matters worse. At this point, fans can only hope that the Flash will continue to follow Arrow's example by turning things around in Season 5.

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14 DC Characters Who Need to Join the Arrowverse 15 IMAGES

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From the start of this season, it's clear the writers were intent on moving away from the conventions established in the first three years. Criticisms that the series had grown too dark and brooding during the Zoom and Savitar era were taken to heart, resulting in a revamped tone that redoubled its emphasis on lighthearted comedy and banter. And after three years in a row driven by Team Flash's feud with an evil speedster, the series finally shook things up by focusing on a completely different sort of villain. Both of those changes sounded like just the shot in the arm the series needed, but neither worked as intended.The problems began immediately in the premiere, "The Flash Reborn." With Barry (Grant Gustin) having doomed himself to a lifetime of Speed Force imprisonment in the Season 3 finale, it fell on Wally (Keiynan Lonsdale), Iris (Candice Patton) and the rest of Team Flash to fill that void. I know I wasn't alone in being excited at the prospect of Wally taking the lead for a while, nor was I the only one supremely disappointed in just how brief his tenure turned out to be. Within the first 15 minutes of the premiere, Barry was already back and the seeds were being sown for a completely new conflict.The Flash made a lot of mistakes in its fourth season, but perhaps its biggest was wasting so much potential when it came to Wally and Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker). Comic readers know that Barry's death paved the way for Wally to take up the mantle for the better part of two decades, becoming the definitive Flash in the eyes of many fans. It was never realistic to expect this series to shelve Barry for years, but at least a handful of Wally-centric episodes would have been appreciated. Instead, the character was sidelined almost immediately and quickly booted off the show entirely. The silver lining here is that Legends of Tomorrow has thankfully been making better use of the character.Caitlin at least received more attention in Season 4. But given where Season 3 left her, fleeing her home at STAR Labs in order to battle the villain within, it was more than a little strange to see her abruptly return to the fold. Even stranger was the fact that Killer Frost was treated as more a source of comic relief than a legitimate threat. The cutesy dynamic between Caitlin and her alter ego is not where I expected the series to go in the wake of Season 3.That speaks to a larger problem with Season 4 in terms of the ongoing struggle to balance humor and drama. There's no question that the series needed to lighten up. The moroseness of Season 3 and the Savitar conflict had become too overbearing. But Season 4 tended to veer too far in the opposite direction. The series became shallow and too often lacking in substance. Rarely did it recapture Season 1's winning blend of humor and character drama.The decision to sideline Wally proved all the more perplexing given how much emphasis Season 4 placed on Team Flash's newest recruit, Ralph Dibny (Hartley Sawyer). Why the show needed to replace Wally with Ralph was never properly established. That's not to say Ralph's presence on the series didn't result in some strong storylines. Sawyer's energetic and charming portrayal of the character helped. Ralph's general evolution from self-absorbed private eye to selfless superhero was solid, if repetitive and overlong at times. Several key Ralph moments from late in the season also stand out as some of the high points in Season 4. Still, Ralph never felt like a truly natural and organic addition to the series, and he as much as any other character was responsible for the chronic inability to balance humor and drama.The series did at least see some benefits from its new villain in Season 4. Clifford DeVoe (Neil Sandilands) quickly established himself as a very different breed of Flash rogue, one who used strategy and smarts to outwit the fastest man alive. Together with his wife/partner-in-crime Marlize (Kim Engelbrecht), DeVoe made for a stately and often compelling foil to Team Flash. He was also a character who, unlike Zoom or Savitar, showed depth and pathos from an early stage. Some of the best moments of the season focused on DeVoe's troubled background and his relationship with Marlize. Often, the series suffered when Sandilands remained out of the picture for too long (a big problem in the middle third of the season).But as memorable as the DeVoes themselves were, the actual overarching narrative for Season 4 frequently came up short. DeVoe's master plan didn't really measure up to DeVoe as a character. The season was generally dominated by the "bus meta" storyline, with DeVoe and team Flash racing against each other to track down a new batch of metahumans. That resulted in a great many bland "villain of the week" scenarios and little forward momentum. Nor did the climax to the season resonate in the way previous seasons managed. The drawn-out structure and weak payoff suggest that The Flash may do well to borrow a page from the Agents of SHIELD playbook and focus on delivering several smaller storylines per season rather than one season-long arc. This one clearly didn't have enough meat on its bones.

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DeVoe's master plan to rid the world of all human intelligence isn't the only area where Season 4 failed to capitalize on its various plot threads. Chief among these is the mystery of what exactly happened to Barry while he was trapped in the Speed Force and what it means for the future of the Arrowverse. The way things wrapped up with the long-awaited debut of Nora Allen makes it seem as though those threads are being saved for Season 5 instead. That's probably only going to make Season 4 seem worse in hindsight if the whole thing winds up being a giant detour before the true fallout of Season 3 is finally explored.There's also Iris' halfhearted character arc. I appreciate the attempts to make her a more assertive and active player this season, especially given how so much of Season 3 was driven by the fight to prevent her from being murdered. But too often she seemed like a secondary priority. Even her decision to rededicate herself to her journalism career amounted to very little.Then there's Barry's brief stint as an Iron Heights inmate. Certain elements of that storyline worked well, including that particularly haunting shot of Barry accepting his new life in the same cell where his father was once wrongfully imprisoned. I also enjoyed the brief storyline involving the character Big Sir (Bill Goldberg). Barry's prison stint made it seem as though the series was shifting in a darker direction again, but it ended as abruptly as it began, with Barry's freedom restored and barely a wrinkle to the show's overall status quo.The one character who generally seemed to fare well in Season 4 was Harry (Tom Cavanagh). Initially, I was a little dubious at the prospect of The Flash bringing back an earlier version of Harrison Wells rather than continuing the trope of introducing a new one every year. But Season 4 proved how much growing Harry had left to do as a person. He learned empathy and how to live without his massive intellect as a crutch. That culminated in a strong farewell that was easily the highlight of the otherwise underwhelming season finale.