Justifying Flashpoint
A common criticism for season 3 is that Flashpoint was too underwhelming, especially compared to comics or animated series. And it’s fair if you don’t like it, but I can’t say it was necessarily bad considering what they had to work with.
I mean the CW already has a limited amount of DC IPs. So they can’t do anything like the animated series with flashpoint where they explored Batman in Flashpoint, as well as every superhero suffering from the butterfly effect. Anything even REMOTELY similar would need to rely on other TV shows (Flashpoint versions of Arrow etc). But considering Arrow was still airing at the time of season 3, there’s gonna be obvious scheduling conflicts between the Arrow actors and Flash. And that’s one thing, but Flashpoint also needs the consequences to be relayed throughout the series, and so even if the scheduling headache is sorted out, from there season 3 will either be entirely Flarrow (which isn’t fair to anyone cause the Arrow already has a show and the Flash should be focused on) or making Flashpoint largely filler, which would also suck cause that means less time on the actual story and it will likely end up underdeveloped (as we see in later seasons).
So with the limited resources we could only explore the alternative lives of side characters, which we did. And although alternative Batmen, Arrrows, Legends, etc can stretch multiple episodes for an interesting story. I really don’t think the same can be said about less known hero’s like Vibe. So if they did make Flashpoint multiple episodes it also would have just overstayed its welcome.
So if they couldn’t do anything interesting with Flashpoint itself the next best thing is to make the consequences of Flashpoint the main focus of season 3, which I think they did really well. With alchemy and Savitar and etc.
Again I think it’s fair to like other iterations of Flashpoint better but I also don’t necessarily think saying this Flashpoint was “poorly handled” is really accurate either