The Flash season 7, which will air during the 2020-21 TV season, will have a familiar face joining the ever-expanding cast of the Scarlet Speedster’s CW show with Chester P. Runk being upped to a series regular.
Though we’re roughly halfway through The Flash season 6, it looks like plans for the future of the show are beginning to form, and now we have the first bit of news about The Flash season 7. According to Entertainment Weekly, Brandon McKnight’s Chester P. Runk, who first appeared in the season 6 premiere, will be a series regular when the series returns this fall.
Chester has appeared in three episodes so far this season, and recently on The Flash season 6, episode 13, worked with Kamilla and Frost to save Barry from Gorilla Grodd’s mindscape (because Barry’s original team was MIA). His earlier role during the season started when an experiment went awry and he started, unknowingly, creating black holes around Central City while in a coma. Then, Team Flash put him in one of their devices to mellow out.
Now that he has, it appears that Chester — with the little background information we know about him and his role in current stories — is being written to fill the void of the team’s resident engineer, Cisco Ramon. Cisco’s presence on the show has been greatly diminished over the last season and a half as rumors swirl about actor Carlos Valdes’ potential exit from the series (though those rumors are unsubstantiated).
Though he’s only been in three episodes, his relationships with two characters in particular, Barry and Frost, have already started to be fleshed out. It’s looked like he would be sticking around since he first appeared, especially since we’re all so worried/convinced that Cisco’s exit is inevitable.
Whatever the case, Team Flash will continue to grow, which isn’t necessarily a good thing…
‘The Flash’ season 7 needs less series regulars
As it is, there are already too many people packed into Star Labs on a daily basis. We definitely don’t need more people there on The Flash season 7. Over the last three years, the show has struggled with balancing the characters they already have, and this season has definitely just gotten worse. We have had four more characters to follow throughout the season (Allegra, Kamilla, Chester P. Runk, and Sue Dearbon), on top of the unnecessary additions of Ralph, Cecile, and another Wells.
What made the show successful has now faded away as the original actors are being pushed out for fresh faces, which is really killing interest in seeing the show continue. Caitlin and Cisco have fallen to the wayside, Barry’s gotten significantly fewer stories this season than usual, and now we’re seeing entire stories around other characters. I mean, it feels like Allegra has had more screentime this season than many of the series regulars, so what’s the deal?
Not to be that person, but isn’t the show called The Flash? The same thing happened with Arrow in the last three seasons, due to Stephen Amell being burnt out (like Grant Gustin probably is), but it’s really time for the Arrow-verse to account for this and avoid shows with one starring hero, like we’re hopefully going to see with Superman and Lois and Green Arrow and the Canaries.
Even if someone leaves to have an empty space on Team Flash (since Danielle Panabaker is currently pregnant and rumors about Valdes’ exit continue), we really don’t need more series regulars. What we need is a smaller cast that has well-balanced stories. It’s understandable that the show can’t be all about Barry, it’s just not realistic based on how these shows film and operate behind-the-scenes. But that’s just more reason to have a few other main characters that actually get decent stories, rather than shortchanging everyone with a large cast.
That’s something every show in the Arrow-verse needs to take into consideration from now on.
For now, I’ll try to remain more open-minded about Brandon McKnight’s Chester P. Runk joining The Flash season 7 as a regular, but things really need to change… and soon.
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW!