And that's not even counting the alien she married and the other, female alien (disguised as male) she was gaslighted into thinking she'd married. (And of course being pursued by Mxyzptlk against her wishes is straight out of the Silver Age.)

Maybe. Random person to random person is pretty doable. FBI agent to (ex-?)-KGB guy being developed as a CIA asset? There's a decent chance Vlad's phone would already have been hacked, and nothing on a phone is safe at that point. It's noteworthy if there are messages being exchanged between Stan and Oleg at all,…

The retaliation was for the KGB assassination of a scientist and three FBI bodyguards with a bomb. The viewer knows that the KGB hired the killer but then tried to countermand the hit at the last minute, but all the FBI (including Stan) knew was that the KGB had suddenly and inexplicably escalated to blatant…

There's still a big difference in the treatment of the experiences of a protagonist compared with a secondary character. The Morozovs spousal interactions are done differently from the Jenningses, with the latter being done in much closer focus (literally as well as figuratively), much more time and detail, etc. The…

Coincidentally, the show it taking place almost precisely when the idea of there being a Russian site on the (then entirely academic and government) net was being used as an April Fool's joke:

Comic's Mon-El's origin was a gimmick story (and one recycled from only a few years earlier). But his time in the Legion of Super-Heroes developed him into a reasonably interesting figure: a space explorer with PTSD from a millennium of imprisonment who saw his homeworld enslaved and devastated by the DCU's byname…

I think that's more due to the fact that Paige is a secondary protagonist, whose internal experience has to be communicated to the audience, while Henry is still someone we're seeing almost entirely from the outside.

My wife and I do that. But usually it's because we got two cupcakes and we each want to have some of each.

IIRC, he had two Silver Age appearances: bullying Superboy as the Knave of Krypton— where it was established that he outdid Jor-El by saving his entire family as well as himself; not bad for a teenager— and then later demonstrating his reformed status as a member of the Interstellar Counter-Intelligence Corps.

Though breaking them up and pairing them with Brainy and Shady respectively would at least address the complaints about not enough relationships involving people of color.

According to Wikipedia, Mr. Tawny doesn't show up till 1947, where Jimmy is unambiguously there by 1941. (With earlier appearances on radio, IIRC, plus previous comics appearances by a not-yet-Olsen "Jimmy the office boy".)

"There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, 'Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and…

"…because it's not as if I have multiple opponents from the future whose pasts, and consequently mine, I can mess up!"

To be fair, he still could be. Both because escaping his offscreen execution is practically a given, and because Abra makes it clear he's had extensive experience with Barry in Abra's past/Barry's future.

That actually wasn't necessary to bench Firestorm this time— none of them have their powers in the changed reality.

Darhk and Merlin both wanted to make major societal changes. I'd have expected empires of a third of the world each, plus a Central City for Snart and Rory to play in.

Snart made a deal with Barry that he would stop killing and would keep Barry's identity secret, and Barry would limit himself to trying to stop his crimes rather than going all out. (That last was sort of unclear, but I assume it meant not destroying the cold gun, shoving Snart in the Pipeline, etc.)

I'm sort of amused that the superspy hasn't listened in on/recorded Henry's phone conversations. (I know, who has the time?)

To be fair, that's a lot closer to how someone from Verona would actually say it.

The piling on is for the same reason: if you have an indefinitely extended serial, you have to keep coming up with ways to keep the reader/viewer interested. Same as any long-running TV series, except that mostly those don't last nearly as long as soaps or first-string superheroes before being cancelled or rebooted.