Last week’s joyful episode of The Flash ended on a pretty big downer, and Barry’s still feeling it. The Monitor told him he’s going to sacrifice himself and vanish forever in the coming Crisis. Now, he’s in a spiral of hopelessness. Fortunately, it doesn’t last the whole episode. Iris gives him a pep talk, reminding him that if the future article changed, it can change again. They just need to figure out how to change the future. Barry’s got an idea: Run to the future to see what exactly this Crisis is. Yay time travel episode!
Not just yet, though. He straps on a mobile version of Gideon and runs towards the future… and right into a barrier of antimatter. To get past it, he’s going to need help from an expert: Jay Garrick of Earth 3. OK, so not a time travel episode just yet, but a parallel world-hopping episode. Those are good too! And hey, it’s always nice to see John Wesley Shipp again. Turns out Garrick has some questions about that antimatter wall, too. Signatures are appearing all around the multiverse, putting all worlds at risk. He wants to know where they come from. I think even the show itself is tired of lectures about the ethics of time travel at this point. Good on them.
Grant Gustin as Barry Allen, John Wesley Shipp as Jay Garrick, and Michelle Harrison as Joan Williams. (Photo Credit: Robert Falconer / The CW)
The problem is a physical body can’t break through the antimatter wall. They’ll have to send his mind forward in time. To help with that process, Garrick introduces Barry to his wife, Dr. Joan Williams. She looks exactly like Barry’s mom. Which I’m sure puts him into a great mental state before he has to hurl his consciousness through an antimatter wall. That doesn’t come up though, because Barry does get a glimpse of the coming Crisis. Kind of. They’re saving the real details for the actual event. For now, Barry sees billions of timelines all at once. He sees everyone dying, painfully. Swallowed up by antimatter. The monitor is right. To stop it, Barry has to die.
We all know it’s going to be more complicated than that, but impending doom adds some urgency to the season’s story. The process overloads Barry’s neural pathways, and he has to spend most of the episode healing. Knocking The Flash out of commission works in the show’s favor. So far, The Flash seems to have learned how to better juggle its multiple storylines each episode. Instead of dragging one out too long at the expense of the others, each plot gets the time it needs. That means we still don’t get too much development on Bloodwork, but we have a whole season to build up that villain. Instead, focus is given to the impending Crisis, and a solid metahuman-of-the-week.
Michelle Harrison as Joan Williams. (Photo Credit: Robert Falconer / The CW)
With Barry out of commission, the rest of Team Flash has to step up. I love it when the show gets the other heroes more involved. Though we get to see Elongated Man in his costume briefly, it’s his detective work and Cecile’s empathy that’s the star here. The story concerns Allegra Garcia, a girl accused of manipulating radio waves to kill a man in a car explosion. She’s been in and out of the system since she was 13, so the case seems open and shut. That’s until Cecile gets in the room with her and senses her innocence. She requests parole for the girl, which backfires when she’s found next to the dead, burned body of the case’s eyewitness.
The show tries to play up the tension between Cecile’s job as prosecutor and her knowledge that the girl she has to prosecute is innocent. It gets pretty hokey, especially when she and Joe argue about the nature of her job. The heightened emotion of the scene isn’t earned. It’s here because the episode needed more drama. The resolution comes together a little too quickly, but it’s still fun to watch Cecile, Allegra, and Ralph piece it together. And hey, it might be setting up a future storyline. It turns out, Allegra had a cousin with the same tattoo named Esperanza. She was also caught in the S.T.A.R. Labs explosion, but everyone thought she died. Turns out, she was transferred to an organization turning metahumans into assassins. She’s the one who killed the guy in the car, and now she’s taking out all the witnesses. Including Allegra.
Grant Gustin as Barry Allen, Hartley Sawyer as Dibney, Danielle Panabaker as Killer Frost, and Carlos Valdes as Cisco Ramon. (Photo Credit: Sergei Bachlakov / The CW)
The fight in the police station is just OK at first. When Esperanza, now only going by Ultraviolet, is tearing the place apart, the flickering lights of the scene make it dizzying and hard to tell what’s going on. Though the case itself is wrapped up a little too neatly, it ties into Barry’s character growth nicely. Even though he’s still recovering, he runs to the police station to save everyone. The flickering stops and the scene turns into an evenly matched fight, given that the assassin’s ultraviolet waves are faster than Barry. Now, I’m invested in the fight. It also crystallizes advice Joe gave him earlier about the coming Crisis. Trying to save everyone, knowing you’ll probably die, isn’t giving up. It’s a sacrifice they’re prepared to make. Yeah, it’s super corny, but in a charmingly Flash way.
Yes, comparing a superhero emblem to a police badge is super suspect, especially in the same episode where a character realizes the system doesn’t work for metahumans. It serves a purpose for the season, though. It gives Barry a purpose even though he knows he might have to die. It’d be real easy for the coming Crisis to cast a depressing fatalism over the first half of this season. That’d lead to another Season 3, and nobody wants to go back to that. Instead, the Crisis motivates Barry to make every next step count, including preparing the team for a world without him. That’s a much better attitude for the show to take, and acts as a driving force for the rest of this half of the season.
Danielle Panabaker as Killer Frost. (Photo: Sergei Bachlakov / The CW)
Though this week’s The Flash wasn’t quite as exciting as last week’s, it’s only because the premiere was exceptionally strong. We can’t expect them to top Barry running through a black hole while Queen’s “Flash Gordon Theme” plays. Instead, we got a solid episode with a lot of fun character work. Even Killer Frost’s story was enjoyable, though it does feel a little silly that everyone’s suddenly into fine art now. It’s all about her learning what it means to exist in the world full-time and be a good person. This week, that means not dumping all over people trying to express themselves while you’re still figuring out how. It gives us some charming character interactions, especially between Frost and Cisco. If this is going to be a regular b-plot this season, I’m all for it.
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
Previously on The Flash:
- ‘The Flash’ Season 6 Premiere Recap
- ‘The Flash’ Season 5 Finale Recap
- ‘The Flash’ Season 5 Episode 21 Recap
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