The Flash: The Complete Fourth Season (Blu-ray Review)
This fall, everyone’s favorite DC speedster will return for his fifth lap of his television marathon on the CW. While its been dubbed the “Arrow-verse”, The Flash has been the most popular series of all the DC shows (And the whole network) since its debut season in 2014. He and his team at Star Labs have brought forth and introduced some of the more complex concepts in the whole of the show universe, like meta-humans, time travel and multiverses that have allowed to open up the network to exploring crazier beings and concepts giving us Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl and at the same time, allowing Arrow to find new villains and supernatural challenges. You can relive or catch up on the fourth season with this Blu-ray set when it arrives August 28th!
Season 
In Season Four, the mission of Barry Allen, aka The Flash, is once more to protect Central City from metahuman threats. First, he’ll have to escape the Speed Force. With Barry trapped, the job of protecting Central City falls to his family – Detective Joe West; his fiancée, Iris West; and Wally West/Kid Flash – and the team at S.T.A.R. Labs – Dr. Caitlin Snow/Killer Frost, Cisco Ramon/Vibe and brilliant scientist Harrison Wells. When a powerful villain threatens to level the city if The Flash doesn’t appear, Cisco risks everything to break Barry out of the Speed Force. But this is only the first move of a life-or-death chess game with Clifford DeVoe aka The Thinker, a mastermind who’s always ten steps ahead of Barry, no matter how fast he’s running. Shocking surprises come fast and furious in all 23 action-packed adventures featuring The Fastest Man Alive.
Season 4 of The Flash brought the same expectations that had come for the previous season; can we have an overarching villain for the season that isn’t a speedster? Well, in the fourth season they finally went beyond Barry having to outrun his nemesis, and instead would have to…out-think him. The Thinker aka Clifford DeVoe became Barry’s first big bad not sprint, but he wasn’t even able to walk. A man obsessed with revenge on Alan for him not being given a profitable meta-gift from the original blast like others, he went out to rob others of their powers (And lives) in the process. His power was of the strongest, but his body was not.
Through DeVoe’s plan, the season introduced us to a lot of new meta humans and some very entertaining guest stars. Sugar Lyn Beard had a fun turn and Derek Mears was able to bring his usual physical menace to some more comic book-level proportions. With a lot of these metas, it was great to meet them, and some were utterly dishearterning to see them go. Of course the mainstay of them all was the addition of Ralph Dirby, the Elongated man. Barry Allan goes to prison for a while in this season and its up to him to be Central City’s protector during that time. He’s more an embodiment of that first season feel.
That first season feel is definitely something that the fourth season is trying to return to. After we get Barry’s return from the Speed Force all handled and him more level-headed, things go back to being the more charming show we started with. The characters are all having much more fun with each other, and it returns to a more lighthearted and wholesome approach. The Flash once again isn’t afraid to turn to comedy for its missions. And once again, this manages to return some of that emotional impact it originally had.
Now, the Flash’s fourth season has entered an area we were all asking for and brought back some aspects we were missing from the show for a bit of the past two seasons, but its not perfect. The show does kind of drag a bit in its final quarter, and some of the metas that DeVoe is after and possesses that they DO focus more on don’t really work well (The country singer) as others that come and go too fast. Overall, A LOT does transpire over this season to where revisiting I had forgot were things that happened during THIS season. But, for now, this is The Flash, and even if at times during this season it did drag or felt lesser than before, I was still loving the characters and the adventure, so I’m happy. And once again, I can’t wait for the next season to start and see where in the heck we are running to this time!
Episodes
The Flash Reborn
Mixed Signals
Luck Be A Lady
Elongated Journey Into Night
Girls Night Out
When Harry Met Harry…
Therefore I Am
Crisis on Earth-X: Part 3
Don’t Run
The Trial of the Flash
The Elongated Knight Rises
Honey, I Shrunk Team Flash
True Colors
Subject 9
Enter Flashtime
Run, Iris, Run
Null and Annoyed
Lose Yourself
Fury Rogue
Therefore She Is
Harry and the Harrisons
Think Fast
We Are The Flash
Video
Encoding: MPEG-4 AVC
Resolution: 1080p
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Layers: BD-50
Clarity/Detail: The Flash continues to have a nice, sharp, crisp and colorful looking image with good details and strong looks on the effects. As always, this is a nice uptick from the broadcast presentation, with a much bolder, confident image feature some more relaxed depth and texturing. There are no real complaints here, as its a top quality image of a modern television show on the standard Blu-ray format.
Depth: Movements appear as a cross between natural and cinematic. No blur, unless you count the quickness of the Flash. A lot of the slowed down action/speed sequences look very 3D as there is good spacing and looseness between characters, objects, effects and environments
Black Levels: Blacks are inky and well saturated. They help with furthering the definition of characters, objects and environments. No detail that wasn’t intended to be was hidden and there was no crushing witnessed.
Color Reproduction: Colors are bold, and a bit more vivid and poppy at times. Reds look very nice in this transfer, as well as yellows. One of the more open and colorful palettes of the Arrow’verse, but then again, Arrow is the only real grimdark one (With Black Lightning right behind).
Flesh Tones: Skin tones primarily take on a natural look. Some episodes can vary on that (some dark alleyways take yellow tinge), but for the most part that’s what we have. Facial detail is very high, making clear well rounded visions of cuts, scrapes, freckles, dimples, make-up pores and stubble.
Noise/Artifacts: Clean
Audio
Audio Format(s): English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, Spanish (Castillian) 2.0 Dolby Digital, Portuguese 2.0 Dolby Digital
Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish (Castillian), Dutch, Korean, Spanish (Latino), Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
Dynamics: The Flash’s 5.1 mix continues to be pretty top notch in bringing this show to life. It features a lot of effects and big CGI action moments that grab from some great layering and depth. Its all put together with a nice healthy balance that juggles vocals, effects and the score with a tireless and seamless effort. This is a nice jump from the television broadcast.
Height: N/A
Low Frequency Extension: Engine hums, Flash’s bursting speed, guns, big ice blasters and action crashes get a nice thump from your sub woofer in a very good presentation.
Surround Sound Presentation: Rear speakers tend be used for ambiance, but don’t count them out to surprise you during some action sequences and environments that are a bit more lively. The very active front three channels present the action and onscreen movements back and forth with great accuracy.
Dialogue Reproduction: Dialogue is crisp, clear and at the ideal placement in terms of volume.
Extras
The Flash: The Complete Fourth Season is a 4-Blu-ray Disc set that comes with an Ultraviolet digital copy of every episode as well as an insert booklet.
Disc 1
Gag Reel (HD, 8:58)
Deleted Scenes – Luck Be a Lady (HD, 2:19), Elongated Journey Into Night (HD, :59), Girls Night Out (HD, :52)
Disc 2
Inside the Crossover: Crisis on Earth-X (HD, 41:59)– A very awesome roundtable discussion of showrunner/producers of each of the series as they talk about this past year’s crossover, what goes on in bringing these worlds together, how they compliment each other and more.
Deleted Scene – Don’t Run (HD, :58)
Disc 3
The Elongated Man (HD, 10:09) – After Season 3 took the show as dark as they wanted to go, a tonal shift was desired and bringing in the Elongated Man was meant to do that. This goes over his comic book origins, fitting him into the show, his purpose in the season and Hartley Sawyer’s portrayal.
Flash Time on Amunet Black with Katee, Eric and Sterling (HD, 13:23) – Katee Sackhoff and Flash storytellers Eric Wallace and Sterling Gates discuss the villain Amunet Black which Sackhoff portrays in the fourth season while watching some of her episodes in a commentary booth style setting.
Deleted Scenes – Subject 9 (HD, 1:41), Null and Annoyed (HD, :31)
Disc 4
The Best of DC TV’s Comic-Con Panels San Diego 2017 (HD, 58:27) – Instead of the usual “just The Flash panel” form SDCC 2017, they’ve mad one grand DC montage panel that even includes Gotham in the mix.
The Fastest Mind Alive: The Thinker (HD, 15:43) – This featurette focuses on the big bad of the season, DeVoe (aka “The Thinker”). It showcases him as a comic character, how he lines up and parallels Barry Alan and exactly how his plan and powers work.
Deleted Scenes – Lose Yourself (HD, :27), We Are the Flash (HD, 2:06)
Summary
The Flash’s fourth seasons deserves accolades for trying something different with the villain and trying to mine more from its first season. Warner Bros Blu-ray release keeps things up to snuff with the audio and video performance and supplies a nice solid array of extras (More brief than previous years though), which do repeat two featurettes from the Arrow set. However, if you’re only getting this one, that doesn’t really matter. Once again, a nice complete pickup to add to your DC collection!
