The Arrowverse’s The Flash cleverly highlights one of the speedster’s weaknesses from the DC comics, and this helps to make the show far better. The show establishes in its second episode that Barry Allen’s extreme speed and rapid metabolism make him hypoglycemic, and occasionally cause him to faint if he overuses his powers. Barry has to consume a copious amount of additional calories to keep his blood sugar stable. Together, these are helpful limitations to Barry Allen, whose powers increase in each season, and needs something to balance out his immense strength and speed.
The Flash, a mainstay in the core DC lineup since 1956, is not always featured with this weakness. Barry’s accelerated metabolism is fundamental to the explanation of how his powers of speed and regenerative healing work. Despite this, some comic book and film versions of The Flash ill-advisedly do away with this weakness or fail to use it as a significant plot point.
The Arrowverse version of The Flash makes an excellent decision by establishing and highlighting his blood sugar issues early on. In the second episode of the first season, Barry faints before he can capture some gunmen who storm a university event. This weakness works for the character, and improves the Flash as a hero, as it prevents Barry from becoming overpowered. Overpowered heroes, such as the potential Avengers team Marvel is setting up for Phase 5 of the MCU, can cause major narrative and tonal issues as their abilities demand increasingly powerful villains to match them and to keep their stories engaging. Weakening Barry in The Flash is a particularly useful narrative device early in the series as it maintains a gradual trajectory for the character’s growth, and prevents him from becoming too proficient too quickly in the first series.
How This Improves The Flash As A Superhero
Overpowered superheroes can create all sorts of narrative issues. Firstly, they can lower the stakes of a conflict to the point of diminishing all sense of suspense. If a character is so powerful that they are never in real danger then audiences are given no reason to care. Writers sometimes give their overpowered heroes, including the Flash, strict moral codes to limit their raw power and prevent them from immediately executing weaker villains, but debates over the Flash killing can become old. Writers also sometimes compensate for overpowered heroes by endangering weaker characters around them, but this can lead to issues with the overuse of the outdated damsel in distress trope. A further problem with overpowered heroes is that stories involving them often have to raise the stakes to world-threatening levels. Having every issue a character has to deal with potentially apocalyptic leaves writers with a serious problem keeping things exciting.
Limiting Barry, who has phenomenal powers in both the comics and the Arrowverse, with a medically inconvenient side effect to his powers mitigates these issues. Indeed, the show continues the positive trend of limiting Barry’s strength in later seasons, having a foundational aspect of the Flash’s powers die in season 6. What is more, Barry’s blood sugar weakness has the potential to humanize him and make him more relatable. This is particularly the case with the extra food that Barry has to eat. Barry’s need to fuel his metabolism helps to humanize him as a hero and bring some comic relief. Barry rapidly eating enormous quantities of food was a recurring gag in the 1990 Warner Bros Flash TV show, and the Flash was even featured in a recent episode of Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? going on a world food tour with notorious gluttons Shaggy and Scooby.
All in all, the 2014 The Flash TV series made an excellent decision by featuring the hypoglycemia weakness in their version of Barry Allen. His clashes with a variety of formidable meta-humans over the course of the show remained suspenseful despite the Flash’s impressive power levels. The show could have been far less exciting if Barry’s immense powers were not cleverly limited in this way.
