This is almost a drinking game. Watch any season of “The Flash” and wait for the moment when, as this comic depicts, someone gets huffy and leaves the group. Then someone says, “I’ll go talk to him” and follows that person to a secluded location where the two of them have a one-on-one conversation. Happens several times an episode… every episode.

Sometimes it’s a twist on that idea. Maybe the dialogue or circumstance is a bit different, like, “Can I talk to you?” I believe there was even an, “I’ll go talk to him/ can I talk to you?” double-whammy hand-off in the current season. Whatever the situation, it’s the mechanism by which the writers keep things moving.

Having co-written many video game story modes for fighting games, I can identify. We had to have more than one hero walking around together so there would be dialogue to further the story, but when the opponent showed up we were faced with a dilemma:

It’s a one-on-one fight. What does the extra hero do while the main hero fights?

We would come up with creative ways to keep the other hero busy. That could mean he/she was knocked out, or he’d fight an extra bad guy, or the main hero might say, “You go flick the switch while I fight this guy.”

That was our mechanism for creating a one-on-one fight. In “The Flash”, when they want a one-on-one conversation, someone storms off and someone else says, “I’ll go talk to him.”

To me, what’s wrong is not that they use writing trickery to make things happen, but that it’s so blatantly obvious. They don’t need to announce it. If someone walked away and someone else simply followed them, it wouldn’t call out the fact that a writing trick was being used. The transition from ‘group’ to ‘pair’ would glide seamlessly.

Before writing this post, I checked to see if anyone else had noticed this phenomenon. Turns out someone created a VIDEO showing a bunch of examples. These examples are mostly “Can I talk to you?” situations, but you get the idea.

Anyway, checkout “The Flash” for yourself. Take a swig after each one you notice. You’ll be wasted before the show is half over.

( This comic’s Patreon “Thank You” goes to SAL D! )

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