Whether done purposefully or not, this season of The Flash has been consumed with inevitability. And it’s not your standard twenty-something TV inevitability. Team Flash isn’t worried about getting older or their relationships progressing. This is something different. Thanks to all of the Flash’s recent weirdness (Flashpoint, Earth-2) we have multiple characters within the show imagining their futures through the same lens someone watching the show would; their comic destiny. This week’s episode showed us how two characters in completely different positions are dealing with it and SPOLIERS they’re both doing pretty terrible jobs.
On one hand, you have Wallace. Poor sweet stupid Wallace. When he came on the scene in the middle of Season 2, Flash fans immediately recognized Wally as the show’s next super speedster. We knew he would eventually get powers and become some sort of sidekick to Barry because we knew the character’s comic origin story.
What’s interesting is, this week Wally found out about his origin too. He learned, like we already did, that Wally West is supposed to be dressed in a yellow and red costume running around Central City at super speed. It’s in the character’s comic DNA. And like the TV audience, the only question on Wally’s mind is “When are we going to actually do this?” It’s a fair question.
I remember the groans in the theater when Rhodey passed up the Iron Man armor in the first movie. “Next time baby” was exactly what fans DIDN’T want. We knew War Machine was going to happen and willfully keeping him out of Iron Man felt like less of a “We are trying to tell a longer story” and more of a “We are scared that if we put this in now, we won’t have anywhere to go in the sequel.”
And while the answer was clearly a bit of both, fans have always felt anxious that the film industry would draw this kind of stuff out. Could you blame us? No one asked to split the last Harry Potter book into two movies. The Hobbit didn’t need to be a trilogy. Why should we trust Hollywood to do anything but take their sweet time with characters that didn’t need that long of an introduction?
Wally felt the anxiety, with us. He wanted Kid Flash to happen. And once the idea got into his head, there wasn’t any going back. That’s why by the end of Shade, we all wanted Wallace to touch the glowing rock and get superpowers. The time had come. We didn’t want him to turn into a big pillar, but you win some you lose some.
Caitlin on the other hand.
Since episode one, Flash fans have known a couple things would happen. Iris would get with Barry. Cisco would turn into a hero. Harrison Wells would reveal himself to be evil. Eddie would turn evil. Caitlin would turn evil. And so far we have gone three for five (and I’m not ruling out Eddie’s return) but Caitlin has taken FOR EVER to go Frost. And for a second there, it seemed like she never really would.
Killer Frost proper existed on Earth-2 for what looked like the sole purpose of having a Killer Frost without turning Earth-1 Caitlin into Killer Frost. The nerds got to look at the costume and the casual fans finally understood why every other Caitlin line had some sort of ice pun. It was fan service. But that fan service felt like closing the door on Earth-1 Caitlin actually getting those powers.
Enter Flashpoint.
We have no idea what changed, but we do know that Caitlin now has all of the Frostyness of Earth-2 with a much stranger attitude. And it is my opinion that Dr Snow is making some big logical leaps in diagnosing her situation. She went from, “I make things very cold” to “I am going to be evil” in about a sentence. From what we know about Killer Frost, she wasn’t evil. Zoom was evil. Frost was just bad. She had criminal tendencies and you could say she was a little quick to violence, but it seemed like that was mostly because of her environment. Zoom does that to people. Caitlin has no reason to assume that getting ice powers will turn her into Hannibal Lecter.
So she decided to hide her gifts from the team which led to this week’s very awkward Cisco/Caitlin arc. Shouldn’t everyone know that future-Vibing isn’t an exact science? It has been completely wrong multiple times. Cisco could have easily explained “So, it looks like we’re fighting but we probably aren’t because future-Vibing is usually wrong” but instead he chose to lie with a phoniness that I only though thought Caitlin was capable of. That led to him making the equally horrible decision to out her in front of the group, which in turn led to Barry explaining that her powers were kind of his fault. So as usual, everyone made terrible choices.
Other Stuff
- Julian has a girlfriend. Good for Julian.
- Shade was pretty disappointing but since we know literally nothing about him, I guess there is plenty the show can do to fix him in the future.
- Savitar looks a lot different than I expected. He is traditionally a shirtless man with a metal mask. My money is on his new Transformers body being the wreckage of the airplane he got his powers from. Maybe he can’t get it off. Maybe he’ll eventually lose it and reveal himself to be Patty. That’s probably it.
- Some internet theorists are speculating that “Mr Steal Yo Girl” HR is actually gay. I love it and whether that turns out to be the case or not, HR was the highlight of the episode. His new method of agreeing with everyone to trick them into accepting his ideas got a good chuckle. Tom Cavenaugh is great.
- I still have no idea what Alchemy is actually after. I guess he is working as a metahuman recruiter for Savitar but that still doesn’t give him any motivation, besides hating the Flash. Also why is Barry able to dodge a bullet but not a slow moving wave of light?
- This week’s MVP is Sound Editor Mark Camperell. The Savitar reveal scene really worked and I give Mark a ton of credit for that. Listen to it again. It’s very bare. When shit goes south, you don’t hear much outside of Joe and Wally trying to escape. But one by one you hear Savitar whip in and kill another SWAT Team member. You really feel surrounded and before you get a look at what’s surrounding you. Solid stuff.
Matthew Nando Kelly is an incredibly cool and handsome Senior Staff Writer for Pop-Break who was allowed to write his own bio. Besides weekly Flash recaps, he focuses on film, television, music, and video games. Matthew also has a podcast called Mad Bracket Status where he discusses pop culture related brackets with fellow Pop-Break writer DJ Chapman. He has an unshakable love for U2, cats, and the New Orleans Saints. His twitter handle is @NationofNando. Did we mention how handsome he was?
