Happy Halloween everyone! Though The Flash dipped its toes into horror with the beginning of last week’s episode, this is the real Halloween episode of the season. You can tell because there’s a candy-filled jack-o-lantern in every scene. Fitting, because Ramsey is acting like a vampire. The first thing we see him do is steal a bunch of blood bags from the hospital. The black blood he got from the zombified corpse of a weapons smuggler only temporarily cured his disease. He needs more blood. A lot more. Just the perfect story for this kind of week.
He’s not the only one trying to cure this disease. Cisco isn’t taking the news of Barry’s impending demise well. Barry needs to get him focused on saving someone else’s life, so he’ll stop being such a downer. Yeah Cisco, it’s only your best friend dying, lighten up. They have some unexpected help in the effort. The Indiana Jones-style Harrison Wells shows up and offers a convenient solution. There’s a serum that can duplicate healthy cells so that they completely replace cancer cells. It’s kept in an encrypted safe inside a high-tech facility. It’s also the only vial in existence because the company that has it didn’t make it. They discovered it when the Dominators invaded three crossovers ago.
Carlos Valdes as Cisco Ramon and Grant Gustin as Barry Allen — Photo: Robert Falconer/The CW
Barry’s able to run in and disable the security cameras, but won’t be able to use his powers further in. There are metahuman dampeners everywhere. It’s heist time! Why is Wells helping them? He needs Cisco to build him a circuit for the gauntlet on his wrist. We don’t find out why until the very end of the episode, and honestly, it doesn’t matter that much. The heist itself is fun, and Wells proves he’ll be a useful addition once he joins the team proper. (We all know that’s coming.) Some guards catch Barry and Cisco, but Wells disappears. He tosses out a noisy device that incapacitates the guards, allowing Barry and Cisco to find the safe. There are a couple fun almost-getting-caught moments, but it all feels anticlimactic when Cisco opens up the safe and nothing’s there.
They can’t just get to the scene where Barry tries to save Ramsey. They have to drag out Cisco and Barry’s argument about who’s saving who. Cisco pocketed the serum because Wells told him it works fast enough to save someone from getting swallowed up by antimatter. He wants to use it on Barry, rather than Ramsey. As that would be a way too easy way to sidestep the whole crisis, we know that’s not going to happen. Barry and Cisco have another big fight and Cisco almost ends their friendship over it. I’d be more broken up about this, but we’ve seen this story before. We know it never lasts long, and this one will be resolved before the episode’s over. This entire argument feels like padding, which makes even the fun heist scene that preceded it seem needless.
Grant Gustin as The Flash — Photo: Robert Falconer/The CW
In any case, Barry delivers the serum to Ramsey and it… doesn’t work. We all saw that coming. The show wasn’t just going to get rid of the season’s big villain four weeks in. Ramsey’s disease is too far gone for the serum to work. So we still have a bloodsucking villain and we lost the universe’s one get-out-of-Crisis-free card. The villain part gets worse too. Ramsey figures out the reason his first victim’s blood worked so well was because he was afraid. Adrenaline was the binding agent. So that means to stay alive, he needs to kill people, and make sure they’re scared when they do it. So we have a villain with a believable motivation, a gruesome power, and a creepiness that will last beyond Halloween. This is the strongest villain the show has had since Season 2. I’m so excited for the rest of the season.
The big action scene of the episode is pure horror too. Ramsey attacks a hospital, draining patients and doctors of their blood. Killer Frost and Flash arrive on the scene to find the hallway littered with bodies. When they reach Ramsey, he takes a doctor hostage to keep the Flash at bay. Then, he turns everyone he’s killed into blood zombies. It’s an effectively scary scene that also leads to a fun Killer Frost fight. As she’s checking out a dead body, it comes alive and tries to strangle her. Danielle Panabaker sees a lot of action in this episode, and it’s all the better for it. It’s fun watching her flip through the air off an ice blast. And blocking the door with a wall of ice for the zombies to claw at makes Ramsey’s hostage situation even more frightening.
Danielle Panabaker as Killer Frost — Photo: Robert Falconer/The CW
Ramsey kills the doctor and escapes, and all the zombies try to follow him. As he gets further away, they all turn into a black bloody goop. It’s a gross enough scene to be mildly disturbing even if the CGI leaves a lot to be desired. And it’s way obvious that the only reason they made the blood black was to sanitize this villain for TV. It’s a little disappointing. If you’re going to build your season around a blood villain, I’m going to want some blood. It takes me out of it just a bit if we get fake-looking CGI goo. The story is effective enough though, that this is really only a minor complaint. The Flash has always been the closest thing the CW DC universe has had to a kids’ show, so I shouldn’t be surprised they toned down the gore monster.
Fear wasn’t the only emotion this episode dealt heavily in, though. Instead of a traditional b-plot, the episode used its remaining time to show us how each member of Team Flash is coping with Barry’s impending death. To summarize: Not well. Not only is Cisco shutting Barry down, Ralph has given up on looking for the missing girl, blowing off Iris when she gets him information on her case. She doesn’t know why he’s being such a jerk until he makes a comment about why she’s not spending time with Barry they have so little left. I guess you don’t join Team Flash because you’re emotionally healthy.
Grant Gustin as Barry Allen and Jesse L. Martin as Captain Joe West — Photo: Robert Falconer/The CW
Everyone eventually comes around and talks out their feelings. If Barry’s accepted his own death, they all have to accept his. The one that surprised me was Joe. He and Barry have a big emotional release at the end of the episode. Joe assures Barry that he’s saved so many people already, so he shouldn’t beat himself up too much over Ramsey. Barry tells Joe that he learned everything from him. Barry says he wouldn’t have become The Flash if it weren’t for Joe. Both actors are really pouring their hearts out on screen and what could have been hokey becomes genuinely affecting. The Flash didn’t make me cry here, but it got closer than it has in a long time.
This episode had a bit more filler than I would have liked, but a mix of fun horror and well-acted emotional character drama had me glued to the screen for the entire hour. I would like to see more of Wells, though. I’m interested in this new version, but we still have no idea what he’s here for. In the final scene, we see him use Cisco’s circuit to track the Monitor’s movements. Why he’s after the Monitor, we have no idea. But it seems he’ll have a bigger role to play as we move closer to “Crisis on Infinite Earths.”
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW
Previously on The Flash:
- The Flash Season 6 Episode 3 Recap
- The Flash Season 6 Episode 2 Recap
- The Flash Season 6 Premiere Recap
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