Even though not all superhero shows are soaring in the ratings, The Flash continues to prove itself a certified hit for The CW, and that goes for critical success as well. How popular is the show? Tuesday night’s episode ranked as the highest of the season so far. There’s sadly no way to tell just how many of the viewers were, like me, driven to slow-chant Zoom’s name every few minutes.
An episode that marked the true return of Tom Cavanagh’s Harrison Wells, “The Darkness and the Light” was watched by around 3.87 million people, with a 1.5 rating earned for the key 18-49 demographic, according to Zap2It. As previously stated, that makes it the most-watched of Season 2’s five aired episodes. Counting the season premiere, which brought in 3.58 million people, a number that wasn’t as high as it could have been. In fact, Episode 5 just about ties the Season 1 finale, which was one of the flat-out coolest episodes of anything I’ve ever seen.
It’s also right up there with some of Season 1’s highest numbers, and we assume the adjusted numbers throughout the week will show a lot more people tuning it after the fact. The Flash has yet to match its series premiere’s live numbers (4.83 million), and this episode was still seen by a million fewer people, but still. That’s not too shabby for an episode that didn’t feature anything particularly amazing and didn’t have any heavily promoted cameos. I would have thought that the return of Firestorm last week would have topped this, but oh well.
The episode definitely had its share of surprises. Spoilers y’all. We learned that Wells was the person who actually created Zoom, and that nobody thinks Barry is good enough to stop him. Except Barry, of course. We also found out that Doctor Light is actually the Earth 2 version of Linda Park. And we discovered that Zoom kidnapped the daughter of Earth 2’s Harrison Wells, who just so happens to be played by Violett Beane, a.k.a. speedster Jesse Quick. That should make for some interesting arcs in the future.
It’s excellent that The Flash is building its audience, as The CW’s upcoming spinoff series Legends of Tomorrow needs to take up as much of its predecessors’ audiences as possible. It would be amazing if the new show managed to gain more viewers than Arrow and Flash combined, but that’s probably a long shot. In any case, we bet the upcoming crossover episodes bring in season highs for both superhero shows.
The Flash airs every Tuesday night on The CW, and next week should give us a much better idea of what Zoom is all about.
