The Flash (Season 6, Episode 3): “Dead Man Running”
Central City’s Scarlet Speedster is running out of time, and he is not the only one. Much of this week’s episode is focused on the question, “What do you do once you’ve been handed a death sentence?” In Barry’s case, he chooses to brief his team on his meeting with The Monitor and the Crisis that is coming to wipe them all out. He neglects to mention that he knows their only way of stopping it is for him to make “the ultimate sacrifice.” It’s a classic Team Flash move to not tell the whole truth and then feel guilty about it for awhile, and that’s just what happens here, with most of the guilt weighing on Iris and not Barry for a change.
Barry is more worried about getting his team ready for life after The Flash. This week, he decides to turn Frost (who gets the body for a second week in a row, making me wonder if Danielle Panabaker is just tired of playing Caitlin) into his protégé. He’s had protégés before (Wally, Ralph, & Nora) and he has a history of not being the greatest teacher. This time around, things do start off a bit rocky, but Barry eventually realizes that Frost is having such a hard time because she’s angry she might die now that she’s finally chosen to live her own life. Barry gives her a pep talk about everyone always risking their lives, and it helps her help him kill the bad guy.
This week, the bad guy is a literal dead man, trying desperately to stay alive via dark matter injections which make him increasingly less human and more powerful. This guy, who Ramsay accidentally murdered and turned into a zombie last week, is a nice metaphor for tonight’s central theme of the inescapable nature of death and the dangerous desperation that comes from raging against the inevitable. It is also a good opportunity for Barry to get some screen time with Ramsay. The stand out moment of the episode comes when the two discuss their differing philosophies of what constitutes virtue in the face of death.
Both Grant Gustin and Sendhil Ramamurthy deliver strong performances in this scene, and I genuinely thought we were doing the legwork to make Ramsay an intriguing, morally grey X-factor moving forward. However, by episode’s end, Ramsay has learned he can control whatever being is possessed by the dark matter that has been mixed with his own blood, and he seems to be in full on super villain mode in his lab.
Elsewhere, Hartley Sawyer’s Ralph has a tough day when he starts out trying to exonerate his mom for robbing a store (with the help of DA Cecile who seems to have REALLY forgotten what a DA does at this point, but who does make a good scene partner with Ralph) and ends up learning his mother lied to him his whole life, leading him to believe all her past boyfriends, most of whom with which she broke up, had died so he didn’t have to relive the traumas of his father abandoning him. Sawyer does a really tremendous job flexing his dramatic acting muscles in this subplot, but I think the show is overestimating how invested we are in Ralph if it thinks his emotionally cathartic interlude with his mother can carry the B-plot with only Cecile to support him through it.
Finally, Iris’s new intern Allegra spots a new Harrison Wells. It turns out, this Wells is more of an action/adventure model, and he’s on a quest to find something which Iris seems to wreak of for some unknown reason. The episode teases that he’s discovered what he’s looking for, but the audience and Team Flash are still in the dark for now.
Allegra reasonably thinks it’s the OG Harrison Wells who must have faked his death, and she wants to write a story about it. However, Iris decides she shouldn’t find out about the multiverse just yet so she keeps the truth from her and takes her off the story. Eventually, Allegra calls her out on how hypocritical and unethical it is for a reporter to try to control the truth, but Iris convinces her to stay on without actually giving her a good reason to not quit. This whole story is meant to further aggravate Iris’s guilt over not being fully honest with the team, which allows her to encourage Barry to change his mind and tell them everything including his imminent death. He agrees and they tell the team together as the episode ends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAuCelzIkog
