Everyone Ignores the Gorilla In the Room
I was one of the few people who actually loved Marcus To's previous fill-in art on this series, so I wasn't hugely bothered by the fill-in work in this issue, though it is annoying that it comes in the middle of an arc. It's also usually an annoyance when an issue has multiple artists in a single issue, but if I take this one by itself the way the art duties are divided up in such a way that it actually kind of makes sense. The only problem is that there's a few scenes with To's art that have very confusing panel layouts.
I've been one of the harsher critics of this series, but last issue made a tremendous turnaround.... only to have this issue flip-flop right back. This one's a bit of a mess. So Grodd is de-powered, and yes, they had to take care of Barry, but they all just let him wander off!? Turbine couldn't hold him in wind or something? THEY HAVE GRODD WEAK AND THEY JUST COMPLETELY FORGET ABOUT IT. They don't even make a conscious decision to let him go, he just wanders off in a daze. HOW ARE ALL OF THE CHARACTERS SO DAMN STUPID? That's a huge hole in this issue, everything could've been resolved here, but no. They just drop the ball on that. And then we see more of Daniel who I still fail to care about.
And then the only other thing that really happens is Barry seeing versions of the future. So... he has future sight? Before I thought he was calculating probabilities and figuring out the future based on his surroundings and rapid procession of data; but now it seems like he just has future sight. It just seems to be a different approach. Plus, it was super pretty, but really hard to interpret. Manapul went a little overboard with the experimental layouts and it didn't quite work in terms of coherence, though it did in terms of artistic quality.
In Conclusion: 2/5
After seemingly finally reaching the quality this series was unjustly praised for, this issue turns it right back around and makes a mess of things. We got a few scenes that did nothing more than remind us of the status quo, and EVERYONE completely ignored the potential to end this story the easy way. And then half the issue was just DEVOURED by overly drawn out future visions that just weren't well structured.
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