The Complete Second Season of The Flash arrived on Blu-ray and DVD earlier this week and may be one of the most extras-packed sets in the history of the medium.

Here’s our review. Disclaimer: This Blu-ray set was provided to us by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment; opinions here are solely our own.

The Episodes: Spread across four discs, the set includes all 23 Season Two episodes and the episode of Arrow that was part of the November crossover (sadly, the episode of Supergirl featuring Grant Gustin was not included). While the season itself wasn’t as consistent as the first, there are some wonderful stories within, from the season premiere to a cool Dr. Light story, the introduction of Wally West, a trip to Earth-2, a Rogue team-up, and more. Most excitingly, The Flash Season 2 introduced the audience to Earth-Two… a world that is different from the one we know, with different characters and situations.

I cannot stress enough times how much of an asset Grant Gustin is as Barry Allen. Barry makes mistakes – a lot of them, actually – but he’s played with such charisma and goodness by Grant that you still can’t help but root for him. Really, this whole cast elevates the material on what is already a good show to begin with.

I do admit I wasn’t as invested in this year’s “Big Bad” Zoom as I was with Harrison Wells/Eobard Thawne in Season 1, but that’s not the fault of the actor who is revealed to be behind the mask (spoilers removed to protect the innocent and the unspoiled). It is just that I felt such depth in the character that Tom Cavanagh played; a character who you just didn’t want to be bad. I will say, watching these episodes again and knowing now how the Zoom story would pan out, I’m noticing a lot of subtleties in the performance of [spoiler] that make it a lot more fun.

Still, The Flash might be the best comic book based show on broadcast television, and if you watch both this season and Season 1, you’ll certainly understand why.

The Extras: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment went all out here. I do question the inclusion of some of the features, as they seemed to have been created during Season 1 or the pre-production of the show, but hey, any Flash is good Flash. One of those dated features is Grant Gustin’s screen test with Emily Bett Rickards, which takes you back all the way to Arrow Season 2. In total, there are 23 bonus features spread over the 4 discs, and that’s not even counting the deleted scenes.

About those deleted scenes, by the way: While occasionally these clips are extraneous, with The Flash they were all quite good. It makes me wish The CW could just drop a “Dare to Defy” trailer out of the mix so we could get longer episodes so scenes like these could be included in. I think my favorite, of course, is a deleted clip from the premiere between Barry and his father, but there’s good stuff all around.

The bonus features feature interviews with a lot of talents behind and in front of the camera, including the amazing VFX work by Armen Kevorkian, but to be honest, there are two that stand out more than anything else.

One is the blooper reel. Usually, these are not funny, and involve people making weird faces and a blahblahblah tongue move to the camera, which stopped being humorous after the 2nd DVD or Blu-ray to include the reels. But The Flash… they went all out. For starters, the gag reel begins with opening credits in the style of the original 1990 Flash TV show starring John Wesley Shipp, complete with the theme song. It’s amazing. But secondly, this cast is full of such likable, funny people that there’s no way it is not enjoyable.

The other great feature – clocking in at almost an hour – is called “Chasing Flash,” about the journey of Kevin Smith as the director of “The Runaway Dinosaur.” Bonus points for emulating the Chasing Amy logo in the design for that one, but more than that, it’s just really in-depth, with interviews with many producers and cast members. I’ve been a big fan of Kevin Smith’s since Mallrats and I think I could watch this feature 37 times. It’s that good.

The set also comes with a redemption code to download the first three episodes of The Flash Season 3 when they become available… for free.

Packaging & Design: The cover art is great, though I wish the individual discs were more colorful, which they rarely seem to be with Blu-ray.

Is It Worth It? Even though you can watch the episodes on Netflix soon enough? Absolutely. Warner Bros. seems to realize that if they still want people to buy Blu-rays, they need to have good reasons, and this is full of good reasons.

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