NOTE: 90% of this article was written before the Nazi humanizing mess that was the Crisis on Earth-X crossover, but even with the character interactions in those episodes, the points in this article still apply.
In episode five of season four of the CW hit The Flash, the focus of the villain of the week wasn’t on Barry. In a rare turn of events, it was Iris and the other women of the show (and other shows) that came to save the day while the Flash was drunk off his ass for the first time in 5 years. While the concept of an all-girls team up is enticing, the actual execution of it leaves, in a great understatement, much to be desired. In the episode, Iris teams up with Caitlin Snow, Arrow’s Felicity Smoak, and her stepmother Cecile to get rid of the bad guy. As stated before, this on the surface is a good concept, but looking at the 4-season history leaves a lot of questions as to why this was what we were given.
One of the major problems that both The Flash and Arrow suffer from is a lack of female friendships. In the pilot seasons of both shows, the two women who would go on to have the most screen time on the shows, Iris West (Candice Patton) and Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker), and Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) and Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) respectively, had minimal interaction. This is primarily due to Iris and Laurel not knowing about the vigilante identities of Barry and Oliver during that time. Because Caitlin and Felicity were only around their respective heroes due to that aspect of their lives, there was little reason for them to interact with Iris and Laurel. Logically, one would think that once Iris and Laurel had the identities of the Flash and the Arrow revealed to them, they would become more involved in the teams and as a result spend more time with Caitlin and Felicity. Unfortunately, this was one of the many, many areas of the story in both shows where potential was wasted.
Starting with Arrow, it was revealed to Laurel near the end of season 2 that Oliver Queen was the Arrow. Because she was involved with the team so late in the season, the episodes leading to the season finale didn’t leave much room for her to begin bonding with Felicity. When watching the episode this can be rationalized; Felicity was out helping Oliver while Laurel was with Sara in a completely different part of the city. The only time they’re in the same room in that timeframe is when they’re both kidnapped by Slade Wilson. Fortunately, season three started out with a lot more potential for a female friendship. Episode 3x03 features a conversation between Laurel and Felicity where Felicity asks, “Are we favor friends now? Are we friends?” This was a good launching point for their friendship, and while the show did a good job of showing that they grew to deeply care about each other, that only started to develop when Oliver wasn’t even in Starling City. As Laurel officially joined Team Arrow as the Black Canary, it became more apparent that she and Felicity were friends, but despite what any viewer could infer from what they were shown on screen, the writing for their friendship didn’t really take anything as far as it did with the bond between Oliver, Felicity, and John. It can be argued that that’s because they were the “Original Team Arrow”, but the fact still stands that Laurel and Felicity were the only primary women on the team, and there was no reason not to show them specifically bonding more than the few times we were given. Still, Laurel and Felicity’s growing friendship isn’t poorly written and baseless; it’s just a sidelined for the rest of the story and deserved a bit more behind it. When speaking to IGN during the production of season four, Cassidy said that, “she hope[d]…there [was] room for [the friendship] to grow,” and while Laurel and Felicity only had smaller moments together, their friendship is shown to be strong up until minutes before Laurel’s death in episode 18 of season four, and it was made very clear that their bond had continued to flourish off camera.
That however, is the issue. While the writers established the foundations for a solid relationship in the third season, they essentially stopped there. Laurel and Felicity are clearly no less friends in season four of Arrow than they are in season three, but the writing does the bare minimum to develop the relationship any further on screen. Rickards and Cassidy even state in interviews that in scenes where they had no dialogue with each other, they would try to be as close to each other as possible to at least give the visual cue that Laurel and Felicity were good friends. Their actions showed that they wanted more from the writers, but also knew that if they really wanted anything to happen that they would have to take matters into their own hands. With the death of Laurel, Rickards again stated that she wanted more female friendships on the show, something that is seemingly still on the backburner for the writers. Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) has been a regular on the show since season five episode 10, where it was revealed that she would be replacing Laurel as the new Black Canary. While she’s been in 20 episodes of the show so far, her interaction with Felicity has been scarce. It’s obvious to even the most casual of viewers that she has deeper friendships with the men on Team Arrow, mainly because she gets scenes alone with them to talk. That’s not to say that Dinah and Felicity have never spoken outside of the team or that they don’t care about each other, and it’s clear that Rickards and Harkavy are taking the same measures that Rickards and Cassidy did to show a friendship when possible. The issue stems from them not having something that Laurel and Felicity did: scenes where it’s just the two of them. Every interaction that Dinah and Felicity have ever had is in a group setting. Even when Felicity is trying to console Dinah over the identity of Vigilante (Dinah’s supposedly dead partner), the moment is undermined by Dinah having to speak to everyone else in the room. The possibility of a friendship is there, but the chances of it developing don’t look good, and now seem even less likely when you consider that Dinah and Felicity are now on separate vigilante teams following the conclusion of the Arrow mid-season finale.
Arrow might not be amazing at showing friendships between women, but The Flash falls even flatter in that area considering the show didn’t even try to show a deeper relationship between the two regular female characters until its current season. As stated before, Iris and Caitlin had no real reason to be close in season one of the show; Iris didn’t know that Barry was the Flash, and that was the only reason that Caitlin even knew him. While even a hint of a closer friendship could’ve been inserted in the second season of the show, nothing happened. Iris and Caitlin remained isolated from each other and rarely interacted with each other unless they were both in the same room as Barry. Once season three rolled around, it seemed like a friendship between Caitlin and Iris was an impossibility. Not only did Caitlin’s actions make it seem like she had no real regard for Iris’s wellbeing (“I couldn’t help you, even if I wanted to” ringing any bells?), things went even more downhill when Caitlin took full form as Killer Frost and was an active participant in the attempted murder of Iris. To many people, that was the last shovel of dirt on the grave of any positive relationship between the two. It was even more unfortunate than the loss of any female friendship on the Arrow seasons running at that time because Iris and Caitlin were the only female characters on the show, whereas Arrow could still pair up Felicity with Thea Queen, Evelyn Sharpe, or Dinah Drake. All the other female characters on The Flash are either villains or characters that only have recurring or guest roles and barely interact with Iris when they occasionally show up. While many fans of the show gave up hope for a new female relationship, some hoped that when Cynthia Reynolds (G*psy) or if Linda Park returned to the show, Iris would get to interact with them more. Cynthia has returned to the show twice (so far) in the fourth season, but she’s only spoken a sentence to a group that Iris was a part of, and they’ve had no direct interaction so far. With the Malese Jow working on another show, it’s very unlikely that Linda will return soon, so that again leaves Caitlin as Iris’s only option.
Again, a friendship between the two of them seemed impossible that this point. Not only had they been acting as people who were just acquaintances for a full three seasons of the show despite both being close friends with the same people, Caitlin had tried to help murder Iris and never once apologized to her directly about it. Caitlin apologized to everyone in the West family except Iris, yet after all of this, the writers decided to start developing their friendship without this crucial step. Caitlin makes a good point in episode five of season four; she and Iris aren’t actually friends. The current season has led to more friendly dialogue between the two, but that means nothing when their friendship has no foundation to stand on. Even worse, there’s no blueprint for it, and it’s undeniably not enough for them to justify Caitlin being Iris’s maid of honor. It should be noted that in season one, Iris was Caitlin’s maid of honor when she had an impromptu wedding to Ronnie Raymond, but that wedding was…impromptu. Ronnie and Caitlin basically said, “Screw it, let’s get married” because the universe had kept pulling them away from each other, and Iris and Eddie stood in as the best man and maid of honor because they were the only couple there. The wedding was rushed, so it made sense, but when Iris and Barry have been engaged for eight months, Caitlin being Iris’s choice doesn’t make much sense. Iris (and the writers) had at least 8 months to come up with someone to be her maid of honor, and Caitlin is who they pick? After all she’s done to directly hurt Iris? When she hasn’t once even spoken to her on screen to at least acknowledge what she did? Does. Not. Make. Sense. Unless you have no other female characters to choose from. It’s clear that despite Iris’s better relationships with non-regular characters and characters from other shows, the writers wanted to keep the wedding party within the series regulars. Without the context of the show, that makes a lot of sense; one would assume that the main characters on the same show would be pretty good friends. The issue is that the writers know that Caitlin and Iris aren’t friends. They know what Caitlin did to Iris, they’re the ones that wrote the story. But instead of doing something that could naturally develop the relationship between these two women, they decided to sweep Caitlin’s attempted murder of Iris under the rug for the sake of “#feminism”. To quote Cisco Ramon himself, “That’s not how feminism works.”
It seems that the writers might’ve been scrambling for something when they decided to do this, likely due to someone voicing that, “Wait. Iris has no friends, who are we putting in this wedding party,” and people didn’t know what to do. But it would’ve been better for the writers of The Flash to not act like writing a complex relationship between two women was like pulling teeth. You know where it would’ve been easy to establish a friendship between Iris and Caitlin? The season two premiere. Iris’s fiancé and Caitlin’s husband had just died in the same catastrophic event, and while they could’ve easily shown that the two had bonded over that trauma, the writers did nothing to show that they had even spoken since that day. They looked over a detail that could’ve been the foundation of a friendship between Caitlin and Iris. That was a simple way to connect those two, and the writers did nothing.
As if it couldn’t get worse, DCTV isn’t just a failure at intra-show relationships with women, they’re a failure at inter-show relationships as well. This wasn’t the case when The Flash was still in its first season, but as the franchise began to spin off into more shows, it became a clear issue. Take Felicity and Iris, for example. In episode four of season one, Felicity comes to visit Barry in Central City as he’s woken up from his coma, and she and Iris hit it off right away. They become decent friends over the episode, enough that Iris thinks she’s good enough to date Barry, and when Felicity returns in episode 18 with Ray Palmer, it’s clear that they are still very fond of each other and probably keep in touch over the 600-mile distance between their homes. Unfortunately, these are the only big visualizations or mentions of their friendships. After this, they barely mention each other on their respective shows, and Felicity gets no large interaction with Iris until episode five of season four of The Flash. There was never any talk of Iris crossing over to Arrow for any reason, and she was barely a part of the 4-way crossover in the 2016–17 television season. That was the first canon interaction they’d had since episode 18 of season one of The Flash, and they didn’t even share any lines; much like Felicity and Laurel in season four of Arrow, they stood next to each other to at least imply some level of friendship.
It’s not just the female/female friendships over the shows that are weak. Barring Felicity and Cisco’s friendship, the relationship between the women of the universe and any other character are far less developed than the ones between the men on the shows. There are a few more exceptions to this issue of course; Kara and Barry have a very solid friendship, as do Ray and Felicity, and most of the Arrow characters and Sara Lance. However, apart from Barry and Kara, these characters all spend time on Arrow, and that’s where the basis of their relationships evolved. Barry and Kara have had not one, but two episodes dedicated to their close friendship, and the only reason for this is that they’re both leads on their respective shows. But while these important cross-show friendships were being molded, every other character, the women especially, were left in the dust. Iris has never had a real conversation with John Diggle, Sara Lance, or any character from Supergirl that isn’t Kara or Mon-El. Even then, that wasn’t to flesh out a relationship with either of those characters, it was either to help figure out how to save Kara and Barry or to fill airtime. Their interactions had no actual impact on their friendship, and while it is certainly harder to develop relationships between people on different shows, even Cisco, Wally, and J’onn have a more believable friendship than Iris does with Kara and Mon-El.
The root of this problem goes back to one thing: The exclusion of crucial female characters from the main plot of the story. Felicity and Laurel only developed a friendship once they ended up in the same room as each other more often, Caitlin and Iris didn’t even get that far despite the similarities between them, and Iris barely has one believable friendship with anyone outside of her own show. The writers of these shows don’t seem to care about the relations female characters have outside of the men on their own shows, and they certainly aren’t making a worthwhile effort to fix the problem in a way that makes sense. Yes, the main focuses of Arrow and The Flash are the male protagonists, but that doesn’t mean that the women on these shows should be left friendless until the writers have a need for them to interact with someone who isn’t the core cast. Not only does it show poor skill on the part of the writers, it makes the idea that all the other shows are in a connected universe much less believable. Would it be so hard for Iris to travel to Star City for an article? Is it that unrealistic for Felicity to mention that she spoke to Iris recently? Single lines could fix this issue, and the issues of inter-connectivity could even be ignored for a small time if the intra-show relationships between female characters were better developed.
Unfortunately, Arrow is already in its sixth season, and The Flash is in its fourth. Unless the writers can reorganize and rethink how they approach these relationships, we’ll be stuck with this tomfoolery until the franchise dies, and everyone who watches and loves these shows should know that they and these characters deserve better from the people in charge of these stories.
