The Flash, in total contrast, revolves around a costumed hero of unwavering morals: Barry Allen, a CSI forensic assistant working for the local Central City police. Though Barry is mostly a relatable everyman, his backstory is the familiar and sad orphan-making one—his mother died at the hands of a mysterious lightning man, and his father was wrongfully jailed for her murder. A young Barry is taken under the wing of the kindly Detective West (Jesse L. Martin), who raises him as his own alongside his daughter Iris (Candice Patton). Though flashbacks show Barry initially resisted West’s attempts to father him, Barry adjusts to his new life, and his anger toward the city’s police force soon fades. Before long, Barry is analyzing crime scenes for his adoptive father and secretly harboring an ambition to work out in the field.

This superhero origin story is related to, but not a direct consequence of, The Flash’s original family trauma. While the false imprisonment of his father definitely feeds Barry’s righteousness, it’s his physical transformation in a freak accident that sets him on the path to fighting crime. A late-night trip to the police lab unfortunately places him in the path of a major gaffe at the nearby S.T.A.R. Labs, and when a particle accelerator explosion blasts him with a bolt of green lightning, Barry’s knocked out for a full nine months.

Upon waking, he’s imbued with new “metahuman” abilities—like running faster than a speeding bullet and slowing down the world like Neo from The Matrix. It’s the sudden cool factor that awakens his slumbering superhero, which only enhances his strong sense of justice. Suddenly Barry’s doing his job better than ever before, catching the criminals who are eluding his human coworkers and even handing a petty thief who snatched Iris’s laptop over to his rival for her affections, the handsome Det. Eddie Thawne (Rick Cosnett).

The show combines superhero origin story with police procedural, structuring each episode so Barry requires both his superpowers and his CSI acumen to catch Central City’s latest villain. Barry wasn’t the only one enhanced by the particle accelerator’s detonation, which created an influx of murderous metahumans, and a real shortage of good ones. Every episode begins with initial crime-scene analysis to determine what new powers Barry might face, then ends up pitting him against some metahuman foes on various picturesque points of the Central cityscape. Detective West is initially resistant The Flash's efforts even though he knows it’s his adoptive son beneath the mask—but by the second episode, West accepts that some criminals (the kind who can control the weather and clone themselves, for instance) require unorthodox approaches. “For once in your life, do what I tell you to do. Go stop him,” West says to Barry of the cloner, reflecting the show’s wholesome spirit as an exercise in learning to cooperate with wiser figures.