Grant Gustin’s Flash was better than his ending

polygon.com:

Grant Gustin ruined my life. Kind of.

Gustin’s casting as Barry Allen in the second season of The CW’s Arrow was the moment that series stopped being an uncommonly good superhero soap and became the Arrowverse, an often shockingly ambitious small-screen take on the cosmic sprawl of DC comic books, spawning a stable of CW shows that, at their best, were some of the most surprising superhero adaptations we’d seen at the time.

This week Gustin ended his decade-long tenure as Barry Allen/The Flash after nine seasons and 184 episodes as the star of The Flash, and several more in the many crossover episodes between his show and the show’s wider universe. The finale, “A New World: Part Four,” coincides with the end of the Arrowverse, as The Flash is the last show in the lineup still standing after Arrow’s 2012 debut.

Frankly, the less said about the finale, the better. It’s a whimper of an ending, leaning on tropes that The Flash had worn out about four seasons ago: time travel, alternate timelines, evil speedsters, and actors playing so many characters that when one of them dies it barely even registers. The show felt stale ages ago, and weirdly inured to its own stagnancy. Yet I still watched, because Gustin still showed up.

It’s hard to overstate how much Gustin’s role as Barry did to expand what the idea of superhero adaptations in the 2010s could look like. The first half of that decade was a transitional phase from the grim and grounded aesthetic of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy — which Arrow chose to emulate — to the still grounded, but buoyantly fun tone of the early MCU.

The Flash, however, never hesitated to embrace the bombast and absurdity of its comic book source material, even when it barely had the