Welcome back to Central City! When last we left Team Flash, Barry had accidentally released his arch nemesis Eobard Thawne from future jail, but, with a little help from his friends and his adult daughter from the future, Nora, he almost got the best of tricky ole Thawne. Just then, Nora started to be undone right in front of her loving future-parents. The timeline she came from had been so thoroughly altered by all the heroic meddling she did in the past that she no longer existed!
In the chaos, Thawne gets away, promising to see Barry in their next “crisis” (more on that soon), Nora says goodbye to Barry and Iris one last time, and Team Flash returns to 2019 to watch a “just in case things go wrong” video Nora made for her parents. Barry and Iris tearfully walk away, just as a time quake hits and the date on the future newspaper headline teasing The Flash vanishing in a crisis, which we first saw at the end of Season one Episode One, changes from 2024 to…2019!
Moments later, “Into the Void” begins. We see just enough of the aftermath from the time quake to see that our heroes did not see the date on the newspaper change but did see an energy burst in the time vault where both the future newspaper and Nora’s video message, now destroyed by the surge, are before we jump ahead four months. A weird clone version of a future speedster from Nora’s origin story, Godspeed, is on the loose, but fear not; Barry is on the case! He catches him in no time and we learn he weirdly sounds like a dial-up modem. Team Flash is unconcerned. This is the fourth of these weird Godspeed dupes they’ve encountered recently. Cisco is quick to let us know that this doesn’t seem like a mystery we will be solving today, and he’s correct, as the show will never mention it again for the remainder of the episode. Instead, he’s off with his girlfriend Kamilla to a barbecue at Joe’s to help improve his work/life balance, thus verbalizing the main theme of the episode.
In the months since all the craziness of last season, our characters have mostly dove into work to avoid their feelings. Ralph is freshly back from scouring the globe, unsuccessfully, to solve a missing person’s case. Joe has settled into his new office and the title that comes along with it. Caitlin has been without her alter-ego, Killer Frost, who may be grieving for their recently dead father. Iris has managed to obtain 100,000 subscribers for her blog/newsletter/amateur digital newspaper thing. And Barry has been working overtime arresting baddies, all with a giant smile plastered on his face and an eternal optimism in his heart.
Early in the episode, Iris and Barry assure their friends and family they are actually totally fine with their future-daughter disintegrating into flecks of pure light as they cradled her lovingly in their arms. They feel great about it because they know they’ll see her again sometime once they’ve actually conceived her the more traditional way. Both their emotions run high as they try to solve the not-so villain of the week, before realizing they need to both actually be honest about the fact they are grieving the daughter they knew, who will now never be, and rely on each other to get through it. Candice Patton, who plays Iris, does a great job throughout the episode riding the emotional waves of denial, repression, desperation, and crushing grief, even if some of her dialogue is a bit clunky and on the nose at times.
Speaking of clunky and on the nose dialogue, Caitlin’s corner of the show this week was plagued by it. I’ve long been a fan of Danielle Panabaker, whose really been put through the ringer on this series, but she cannot salvage any of the dreadful material the writers give her as she tries to figure out why Killer Frost has been MIA, and she hardly tries to. Along the way, she meets her med school mentor’s son (Heroes’ Sendhil Ramamurthy as Dr. Ramsey Rosso) at said mentors funeral. This usefully reminds the audience that Caitlin’s father recently died as well, which might be why Frost won’t come out, and sets up a season-long guest star in Ramsey.
Everything about Ramsey’s character so far is classic comic book accidental villain, but we only get a tease of that for now, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, Detective Ralph figures out Frost isn’t afraid to die or sad about her dad. She’s afraid…to live. I’m glad the show is finally dealing with the strange reality that Caitlin has an alternate personality living inside her that has been bestowed personhood and yet only gets control of the body when Caitlin needs her freeze powers. It was an ethical dilemma the series has mostly ignored up until this point. I certainly wish they could have found a less ham-fisted way of introducing this new arc for Caitlin and Frost, but at least they are finally dealing with it.
Many of the teasers for the season premiere suggested this episode would start setting up the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event teased by the date change on that future-newspaper. The Monitor eventually does pop up in the final scene to let Barry and Iris know the Crisis has been moved up five years and that he has no choice but to make the “ultimate sacrifice” and die during it to save billions.
Those of us who watch Arrow know that Oliver already traded his life for Barry and Kara’s (Supergirl), who do die in the comic book version of Crisis on Infinite Earths, making this declaration a bit confusing. However, much more of this episode than I expected is devoted to the case of Chester P. Runk (Brandon McKnight). He’s a genius who accidentally created a machine that generated a black hole which merged with his consciousness. The episode left him comatose and the black hole to pop up at random places near and dear to his heart at an ever increasing size.
Most of this portion of the episode is devoted to some seriously silly sci-fi shenanigans, resulting in Barry running into the black hole, scored to the theme song from Flash Gordon, in order to get back the half of Chester’s consciousness he needs to wake up. Of course, Barry pulls it off, the black hole safely collapses, and Chester wakes up with eyeballs full of the cosmos. Apparently, it is going to take a few weeks for that to wear off and he’ll need to hang out at Star Labs until it does, which this genius tech geek is more than happy to hear.
“Into the Void” feels a lot like a microcosm of The Flash‘s fifth season. Over the top acting from villainous guest stars, Barry and Iris relearning lessons about their feelings we’ve seen them learn on the show many times before, and one of either Caitlin, Cisco, or Ralph getting a poorly written, loosely tied C plot. We were just missing a bad accent from Tom Cavanagh and a stray line of dialogue lamp-shading the fact a character is MIA because the actor wanted the week off to get the complete set. However, buried in there, I’m also reminded of all the things I love about the show. Barry’s earnest commitment to doing the right thing; crazy comic book sci-fi nonsense; consistently excellent acting from Candice Patton; the engaging camaraderie of Team Flash; and a promise of timey-wimey, universe breaking shenanigans which also sometimes connect to the wider Arrowverse in fun ways. Let’s hope, moving forward, we see more of what makes this show great and less of what makes it feel like an aging serial on its last legs.
