It is undeniable that Iris West-Allen is one of the most important characters on The Flash, both inside and outside the contexts of the show. She was the first in a wave of white fictional characters being cast with black actors in screen adaptations, making one of DC Comics’ most prominent comic book couples interracial. There is no doubt that Candice Patton’s casting lead to miles of progress, but within the confines of The Flash, Iris has been given the short end of the stick writing-wise season after season. This is not to say that she fails the Sexy Lamp Test — the plot of the show could not go on if she was replaced with a common household furnishing — but her character is short-changed when it comes to her emotions and perspectives on large events that happen in the show, to other characters or herself. From Eddie Thawne’s death in season one to Barry’s impending disappearance in Crisis in season six, Iris is always allowed to give a first reaction to something traumatic, but even when the show takes the rare trip deeper into how she feels, it is often clumsily handled and leaves her without a complete emotional arc despite a plotline being otherwise resolved.
Season one of The Flash serves more as a time to establish Iris’s past traumas from before the show is set. It is made clear that her mother is dead, and there is a flashback scene to when she saw Barry flatlining right after he was struck by lightning. Iris is very attached to the people she loves, but it goes past that. Iris lost her mother — Francine West — very early in her life, early enough that she was old enough to call the police to help her when her mother overdosed, but not old enough to remember that vividly. When Eddie died in the season one finale, it probably didn’t feel like a similar loss because she barely remembered her mother’s death, let alone her mother at all. However, in season two Iris learns that Francine is in fact not dead and that her father — Joe West — lied about her death because he didn’t want her mother in the picture. Iris, rightfully upset about this, is not only angry because her father kept this information from her for over 20 years, but she’s angry at her mother for staying away when she could have made the choice to contact Iris at any point. It would be fair to assume that by the mid-season finale of season two, Iris would feel a loss of control in her life. Her father lied to her for years, her mother allowed it to happen, and this information is coming just 6 months after her ex-boyfriend killed himself to save the world and died in her arms. These things happen within a year for her, and they finally compound with Francine dying of cancer early on in the second half of season two. None of these huge things that happened in Iris’s life are really ever resolved or examined in deeper ways that would give her character more depth. Yes, Iris’s reaction to finding out about Wally’s existence is to hide it from her father, and while she says that she does this to protect Joe from the pain of the truth, this is exactly what Joe did to her with Francine all those years ago. It was an easy point that the writers could’ve dug deeper into to give that story arc more dimension. The other issue with Francine’s death is that Iris (and Wally, the sibling who grew up with her as his only parent) have essentially no reaction to their mother dying. Francine’s existence isn’t ever revisited in season two after she dies. She just dies and everyone in the West family just moves on like it was nothing. For Iris, this is the second of her loved ones to die in the last year but there is no mention of either Francine or Eddie again in season two barring episode 17 of the season. This is the episode where Iris finally gets to address her grief for Eddie, but it’s an episode that she’s barely in. Barry spends the majority of the episode in the past, and while he’s there he has Eddie record a birthday message for Iris. This message helps Iris get the closure she needs to move on with her life at the end of the episode, but because Iris hadn’t done more than sadly look at his picture on the wall of CCPD in the first episode of the season. It’s nice that they remembered that she should be grieving for her dead boyfriend, but that’s something that should’ve been addressed much earlier in the season. This grief could even have been the catalyst for Caitlin and Iris to become friends as Caitlin’s husband died — for the second time — in the same event that sucked Eddie’s body into a black hole. All in all, season two lacked in giving Iris a perspective in the events of the death of Eddie and her mother. Did they show that she did have feelings about them? Absolutely, but they only scratched the surface of what her reaction could have and should have been to these incredibly important events in her life.
Season three of The Flash had amazing potential to rectify the mistakes of season two and really go deep into Iris’s headspace, especially in the second half of the season. Instead, they dropped the ball onto their own foot. In the previous seasons, Iris was never directly in danger from any of the big bads. Could she have died? Absolutely, but she wasn’t the direct target of The Reverse Flash or Zoom, so the material she got when they were the villains seemed proportional. In season three, Savitar’s only goal was to brutally murder Iris in front of Barry. The audience saw it over and over for the 13 episodes leading up to the finale, and the whole back half of the season is about trying to stop Savitar from killing Iris before it’s too late. The writers give Iris a few moments to acknowledge that she’s going to get stabbed to death in four months, but when it comes down to it, she only got one episode that started to dig into how she felt about her impending death before the season ended. Iris finds out that she’s going to die in the tenth episode of season three and compared to Barry, Iris seems to accept that she’s going to die rather quickly. While he is quick to say that Iris dying is only a possible future, she tells the team (minus Joe) that she’s going to be killed and that she, “[is] okay. Really.” In the same episode, she says that “[her] future isn’t the only future [the team] needs to change” in reference to Caitlin becoming Killer Frost. She deflects again in episode 19 before Barry travels to the future to learn who Savitar is. While he is still optimistic despite the failures the team has faced, Iris makes him promise to take care of her father and brother if she dies. In this moment, Barry keeps trying to tell her that he won’t let her die but she doesn’t want to hear it; all she wants to do is make sure that everyone else ends up okay after she dies. The only break in the façade Iris puts up comes in episode 11. Iris’s behavior throughout the episode is nothing short of reckless; she keeps her trip to the warehouse of an arms dealer a secret which would be fine if she didn’t ditch Wally the second he left to make sure everything was safe. Iris ends up with a gun to her chest, a gun that she purposely walked into and when Barry asks her about it, the audience is given one of the best moments of Iris being vulnerable in the entire show. Iris tells Barry that she doesn’t want to end up like her mother, “gone without making a mark, without leaving anything behind.” Iris was chasing the story of the arms dealer because she wanted to make sure she did something good with her last months on Earth, and she was so reckless with it not only because she knew she wouldn’t die at that moment, but because she was holding in her feelings about her looming murder. Barry “resolves” this thread by giving Iris what is essentially a fancy “I love you” and moving on, something that I think is a disservice to both of their characters. Barry out of anyone had seen Iris 1) accept her death outright and 2) push everyone to focus on things that aren’t about her murder. He easily could’ve confronted her about these things and it would’ve been a great way to get her to say how she really feels about the situation, but no one ever pushed past what they gave the audience in 3x11.
The end of season three brought yet another traumatic moment on the heels of Savitar; Barry’s disappearance into the Speedforce. Not only does Barry disappear for 6 months, he disappears right after Iris has almost been murdered by an alternate version of him. Iris has to deal with the fact that she almost died without him while continuing to live her life like everything is okay because Barry being the Flash is a secret and because he asked her to be strong for him right before he disappeared into the Speedforce. Joe says that he’s proud of her Iris for taking charge of Team Flash in Barry’s absence but as he starts to talk about letting her process what happened after Savitar, she cuts him off and says that she is “fine” and that she cant “curl up in a ball and cry all day” because she can’t do that and fulfill her promise to Barry to remain strong while he’s gone. Later in the same episode, Cisco snaps at Iris, saying that “It’s like [she] [doesn’t] even want [Barry] back” because she wants the team to focus on the active threat of the Samuroid instead of trying to get Barry out of the Speedforce. Iris is cut off before she gets the opportunity to snap back at him, and the comment is left yet again with no resolution or further discussion between Iris and Cisco. While the circumstances of Barry’s disappearance and her potential murder are decidedly different, Iris has a very similar response to both of them. Iris accepting her death while Barry refuses to is strikingly similar to her continued pushing of the team to put Barry’s potential rescue on the back burner. Iris is the first one to urge the team to focus on something that doesn’t directly involve her because that way she can ignore the things that do. She copes with Barry’s disappearance by taking charge and masking how she really feels around everyone, including her close friends and family. This is a trait that has been mentioned outside the canon of the show as well. In The Haunting of Barry Allen, Joe notes that “Even when [Iris] was younger, nothing ever seemed to phase her…not even the loss of her mother…[she] just focused on the moment and always met it head on.” While this story doesn’t actually happen in line with the show, the book was published in November of 2016, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the author took cues from the subtext that the show has had yet to expand on.
This is not to say that everything that Iris has gone through has been ignored. Though there are issues with how Iris’s relationship with her daughter, Nora, was written, she is actually given an episode to process how she feels about the rift in their relationship. Nora harbored negative feelings towards Iris for the first five episodes of season five, and in the fifth episode of the season, we see Iris processing the newly revealed reason for Nora’s resentment. In parallel to Joe trying to protect Iris by lying about her mother’s death, Future Iris lies to Nora about Barry’s death in Crisis and suppresses her powers to keep her safe. She expresses to Barry that just because she tried to be a good mother and protect Nora doesn’t mean that she was actually a good mother. Barry immediately says that this isn’t like Iris’s situation with Francine, and it’s one of the few moments where the writers show how deeply Iris and Barry know each other. She’s able to articulate that she still feels pain over not being able to bond with Francine before she died and that that pain has resurfaced in the wake of Nora’s future coming to light. This revelation isn’t left alone either; Barry is there to talk Iris through what she’s feeling, and by the end of the episode she and Nora have begun to repair their relationship in spite of what the future potentially holds. This emotional arc was one of the only times that Iris’s feelings are thoroughly explored and given some sort of closure by the writers. As stated before, there are still plenty of criticisms about the entirety of Iris and Nora’s relationship, but this one aspect of Iris’s point of view was very well handled compared to past seasons. Iris was given a decent emotional arch after Nora died as well. The season six opener gave both Barry and Iris a well-rounded arc where they finally talk to each other about Nora’s death and decide to grow together in the aftermath instead of isolating and holding their feelings in.
Unfortunately, season 6 of The Flash has ultimately been a step backward for Iris. A common complaint from fans of the series is that while Cisco, Joe, Ralph, and Killer Frost have all had episodes dedicated to how they process Barry’s impending death in Crisis, Iris was yet again given one scene that didn’t end up going anywhere for her. Cisco is given an episode with Barry that makes sense when it is self-contained; aside from Iris, Cisco is Barry’s closest friend and his frustration with how easily Barry accepts his death is frustrating to him especially now that he has no powers. In the same episode as Cisco’s journey to accepting Barry’s death, Joe has a very emotionally charged scene with Barry about his death, and since Joe is someone that Barry considers family, it would not be out of place for Iris to have a scene like this at some point as well. Killer Frost having a real personality is new, so the writers dedicated time to that while also having her cope with the coming Crisis (this also means that Caitlin hasn’t said goodbye to Barry either, something that doesn’t make sense considering that she’s the one who is actually his friend), and Ralph, who is arguably on the bottom of the Team Flash friendship hierarchy, gets an episode to himself as well where he is not only counseled by Joe about Barry’s death but byIris as well. Within the 8 episodes of season 6 that we’ve seen so far, the writers of The Flash seem to know that it’s weird that Iris isn’t spending time with Barry as much as the audience does. In episode four of season six, Ralph snaps at her about it, saying that “If [he] were [her], [he] would be spending more time with [Barry] while he’s still here.” Iris looks ticked when he says that to her, and even though Ralph later apologizes to her for what he said, there’s no further discussion as to why he said that. Delivery aside, Ralph isn’t wrong about Iris not spending time with Barry in the lead up to Crisis but there is no further investigation as to why that is the case. The writers acknowledged that it was abnormal for Iris to not be sharing screen time with her soon-dying husband but didn’t go on to do anything about that fact. The following episode sends Barry and Iris on a short vacation together, but they’re only on screen for a total of 4 minutes and 17 seconds, only mentioning Crisis as a way to establish why they’re leaving Cisco in charge for two days. In episode seven — the first half of the mid-season finale for season six — Iris is confronted by Allegra Garcia, her intern at the Central City Citizen, about the fact that Barry is not only the Flash but that he’s about to die in two days. Allegra calls Iris out on her avoidance of the article she’s supposed to write, and Candice Patton does a wonderful job of adding to the visual storytelling in the moment with Iris’s tense and closed off body language. Despite this, Patton is still the one doing most of the work and even though Iris has been confronted about her repeated avoidance of Crisis and what it means, the writers leave Allegra’s observation of her at the surface of what could be something much deeper. In the second half of the mid-season finale, Iris is confronted by Ramsey Rosso about Barry’s impending death when she tries to save Barry from his mind control. He asks her why Barry would come back to her when “[she’d] accepted that his death in Crisis as inevitable.” Ramsey is obviously being cruel for the sake of it, but the last time Iris spoke to Barry about his death in Crisis, she had accepted that his death was a possibility, not that it was the absolute truth. Despite this, when she speaks to Cisco about it, she says that she was ready for Barry to die saving the world in Crisis, not destroying it at the hands of Ramsey. Essentially, Iris was given the beginning and end of a very important emotional arc in the front half of season six. She starts out the season ready to change the future and make sure Barry survives, and by the mid-season finale, she has moved closer to accepting that the worst is possible and that Barry will die in Crisis. What’s missing here is the actual arc part of the whole thing. Ralph and Allegra’s observations show that Iris is potentially avoiding the consequences of Crisis, just like she avoided thinking about how she was going to die at the hands of Savitar, or how she avoided trying to bring Barry out of the Speedforce in case it wasn’t possible.
Avoidance is one of Iris’s — albeit unhealthy — coping mechanisms when it comes to bad things happening in her life. She avoids things over and over again as a way to keep herself together but despite this being a clear pattern of behavior, it’s never truly discussed on the show. Season six was a chance for that to happen, for Iris to finally have what would not only be another layer added to her character but a real emotional arc that tied together all of the other things that have happened to her over the course of the show. Iris is the classic “strong” character, but she shouldn’t have to be the emotional rock for other characters on the show without getting to express her own emotions in turn. Almost every major event that has happened on The Flash has affected her directly, but she is consistently the character we hear the least from about these events if we hear from her at all. There have been plenty of times for the writers of the show to dig into how Iris deals with the trauma that the show puts her through, but the majority of the time what she thinks and feels is brushed over and never seen again. Iris West-Allen is the emotional heart of The Flash, but the audience shouldn’t have to guess at how she feels while she serves as the stability for so many other characters on the show.
