Really bad.
Spoilers, obvi.
Let's talk about why Season 1 was good. I can't really say "great" because it did have some problems; in a couple of the early episodes the climax went like this:
Barry: How fast do I have to run in order to [run up a building/run on water]?
Someone at STAR Labs: This fast.
BARRY runs THIS FAST.
But once the show hit its stride, it was awesome. Aside from spending waaaaaaaaaaay too much time on Firestorm, that is. (I like how even Honest Trailers has to admit that Caitlin wouldn't shut up about Ronnie in Season 1.) The reason it was awesome, mainly, was Tom Cavanagh as Eobard Thawne as Harrison Wells. Cavanagh's performance in Season 1 should be required watching for anyone who ever wants to play a villain for anything, but especially whoever's cast to replace Jesse Eisenberg, Adam Driver, and Christoph Waltz... wait, what do you mean those imbeciles aren't being recast? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD?*
*Sidebar: Casper Crump on Legends of Tomorrow is basically aping the Christoph Waltz School of Comic-Book Villainy, which actually works in this case because he's playing, you know, a comic-book villain.
Anyway... an explanation may be in order here. The villain of Season 1 of The Flash is the very cleverly-named Reverse-Flash (a.k.a. Eobard Thawne), played by Matt Letscher. Thawne is from the future and went back to the past to murder Barry as a child, but he screwed up and killed Barry's mom instead and lost his powers. He's been stuck in "the present" ever since, trying to get, well, back to the future. However, Letscher appears in something like two episodes of Season 1, whereas Cavanagh appears in, like, all of them. What's up with that? Well, 15 years ago (after he lost his powers and realized he'd need Barry's help to get back home), Thawne murdered a scientist named Harrison Wells (played by Cavanagh) and stole his identity, and his face. So Cavanagh is running around (or rather, sitting around - Thawne!Wells is pretending to be crippled) playing the guy who killed his character. Mind-screw.
And he is brilliant in the role. Affably evil for most of it, yet undeniably creepy when he needs to be. (In a soon-to-be-erased timeline, he murders Cisco while telling him "I truly am sorry about this, but from my perspective, you've been dead for centuries." Chills.)
But, this being a live-action adaptation of a comic book, where villains need to be permanently dispatched rather than captured, Thawne is killed at the end of Season 1. (This is actually inaccurate. Thawne isn't so much killed as he is erased from existence, because mucking about in close proximity to one of your ancestors before said ancestor procreates is likely to do that.)
Problem: Cavanagh's performance is universally praised as the best thing about The Flash. What to do?
Well, conveniently, the Flash comics are what gave us Earth-2 in the first place, so let's do a season about Earth-2, and bring the Earth-2 Wells over, so we can keep Cavanagh around.
Except Cavanagh, being, you know, an actor, understands that Earth-2!Wells is not Earth-1!Thawne-pretending-to-be-Earth-1!Wells, and thus plays the part very differently. So whereas Earth-1!Thawne-pretending-to-be-Earth-1!Wells is affably evil, Earth-2!Wells is basically just a jerk. (A serious high point of the season is 2x17, "Flash Back," where for contrived reasons, Barry has to go back in time to Season 1 and talk to Earth-1!Thawne-as-Wells, and it's just wonderful to have that character back for 40 minutes.)
The villain of Season 2 is the evil speedster of Earth-2, Zoom. And because Season 1 had such a brilliant idea in having the villain pretend to be an ally for half of the season, here Zoom impersonates "Jay Garrick" and ingratiates himself to Team Flash. (Teddy Sears might be a good actor in other things, but here his character is one-dimensional and flagrantly uninteresting.) Who needs originality when you can do the same plotline as last time, just in an alternate universe?
(After, you know, wasting even more time on Firestorm because Legends is coming up and one of the actors playing the Firestorm pair - oopsie! - can't commit to a full season of Legends.)
Well, first of all, Earth-2 of The Flash and Earth-2 of the comics are kinda different things. Earth-2 of The Flash is basically the Star Trek mirror universe. Earth-2!Cisco ("Reverb") might as well have shown up wearing a goatee. Earth-2 of the comics, on the other hand... is complicated.
I am going to bore you with a history lesson now. Skip ahead to the next bold title if this doesn't interest you.
THE DAILY DOSE OF DIRTY DEEDS presents
A BRIEF HISTORY OF DC COMICS, 1938-1986
Okay, so. In June of 1938, Superman appeared on the cover of Action Comics, and everything changed. Numerous superheroes sprung up in his wake, including the Flash (Jay Garrick) and the Black Canary (Dinah Drake). Most of these superheroes eventually saw their sales decline, and their series were canceled, and they were destined to be left on the ash heap of history. Both the Jay Garrick Flash and the Dinah Drake Black Canary saw their titles fold in 1951.
In 1954, in an attempt to forestall government regulation, several comic book publishers including DC decided to regulate themselves. This led to the creation of the Comics Code, a pretty great thing if you were a conservative in the 1950s and a pretty bad thing if you liked what most people today would regard as "good" storytelling. To quote TvTropes, the Code
prohibited (amongst other things) characters questioning public authority figures, characters possessing the slightest moral ambiguity, any suggestion of sexuality up to and including seductive posing, and any display of narcotics in any context whatsoever. Every story now had to have a happy ending (i.e., one in which evil was punished and good was rewarded), which meant multi-part stories with cliffhangers had to be specially approved by the CCA.So Game of Thrones, which draws a surprising amount of influence from comic books,* could not have been published as a comic book in 1955, even if you cut the gratuitous violence, nudity, incest, swearing, and nudity.
*Aside from an entire family of protagonists named after Iron Man, some house sigils are a blue beetle, a black bat on an orange background, and a green archer.
Anyway, the Comics Code basically blew up the Old Way of Doing Things and killed the Golden Age of Comic Books stone dead.
In 1956, DC relaunched The Flash, except he had a new costume, origin story, and identity; he was now Barry Allen instead of Jay Garrick. By the end of the 50s, the DC universe looked so different to what it had looked like at the start of the decade that it might as well have been a parallel universe... and that's precisely what the writers went with. In 1961, Barry ran so fast that he broke some sort of barrier of reality and found himself on Earth-2, an alternate world where Superman fought the Nazis and Jay Garrick was the Flash... in other words, a world where the Golden Age Comics had carried on.
The Dinah Drake Black Canary reappeared in 1963 as an inhabitant of Earth-2 and part of the Justice Society of America (Earth-2's counterpart to the Justice League). Except she'd gotten married during the time she'd been absent from publication, and was now Dinah Lance. And she also had a supersonic scream called the Canary Cry, which she had't had during the Golden Age. Eventually, she crossed over from Earth-2 to Earth-1 permanently. A subsequent retcon would establish (among other fairly ridiculous things that I'm not going into here) that not only had Dinah Drake Lance gotten married, she'd actually retired, and the Dinah Lance we'd been following since her reappearance was her daughter, Dinah Laurel Lance. (Suffice it to say, this makes Flash 2x22, "Invincible," which features a superpowered Laurel from Earth-2, very interesting indeed.)
Another superhero whose Earth-2 counterpart got married was Batman, who married Earth-2 Catwoman and had a daughter, Helena Wayne. When Earth-2 Catwoman was killed, Helena became the Huntress and hunted down her killers. (Earth-2 allowed the writers to do stories that they couldn't do on Earth-1, where Status Quo is King.)
In the early 80s, DC Comics acquired six characters from Charlton Comics and commissioned Alan Moore to write a story about them. Moore's story would have killed off a number of DC's expensive new characters, and so he was asked to rewrite the story using original characters. Hence, Watchmen.* The Charlton characters were kept on Earth-4 until DC could integrate them into their main continuity after the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
*Five of the six main characters in Watchmen are blatant expies of the Charlton characters. Alan Moore didn't like Nightshade, the female character, and based the Watchmen character Silk Spectre II/Laurie Juspeczyk on Black Canary II/Dinah Laurel Lance. Laurie's strained relationship with her mother is a reference to those fairly ridiculous things pertaining to Laurel's backstory I mentioned but didn't go into earlier.)
Crisis on Infinite Earths was a story that ran from 1985 to 1986. It destroyed every Earth save Earth-1, and also killed off the Barry Allen Flash. (He eventually got better, as did the other Earths, but I think this is enough of a history lesson for today.) DC pulled the characters they wanted to keep, like Black Canary and the Charlton heroes, over to Earth-1 before the other Earths did the big firework, and that was that. (Helena Wayne was not so lucky, but a few years later an Earth-1 mafia princess named Helena Bertinelli dressed up in a nearly-identical costume and called herself the Huntress and went off taking on organized crime.)
The Point of all this
is that Earth-2 of the comics wasn't an Evil Mirror Universe (that was more Earth-3); it was a What Could Have Been Universe, where we got to see our original heroes, as heroes, but different. (Had The Dark Knight Returns been published before Crisis, perhaps it would have taken place on Earth-2 instead of just straight-up being non-canon from the start.)
So that was a wasted opportunity, but not necessarily a fatal one. Unfortunately, the potential of the show's Earth-2 was tapped in about two episodes, and after that it was just a source of new metahuman threats. Yawn.
Zoom's "Jay Garrick" masquerade was rather pointless (there was no need for him to do it; he didn't need Barry's help the way Reverse-Flash did) and ultimately too complicated (at one point, largely to throw the audience off, Zoom murders "Jay," somehow, involving something called a "time remnant"). The evil Earth-2 versions of Team Flash members are introduced but killed off too quickly. There's an entire subplot about a drug that will make "Jay" and/or Barry go faster, but it's not at all clear who needs it, or why.
And then there's Wally West. Wally West is an object lesson in why young boys need a father, and remains nothing more than an obnoxious, ungrateful punk for most of the season. (You thought Laurel's one-note alcoholic spiral on Season 2 of Arrow was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.)
And Barry remains a colossal jerkdork, but that's a story for another post.
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