THE FLASH Season 3 Episode 20 Review: Savitar Unmasked


After spending most of the last episode on the run, we finally got to see Killer Frost face off against her former friends this week and show off some new ice powers in the process. The Vibe vs. Killer Frost showdown has been teased via Cisco’s visions for quite some time now, so it was gratifying to see it finally come to pass. The show hasn’t been terribly creative with how they’ve used Caitlin’s ice powers in the past, mostly she’s just used icicles like knives or frozen objects, so it was exciting to see her branch out a little bit during her ice slide chase sequence. Hopefully as Killer Frost comes more into her own as a villain, her powers will naturally blossom. 

While I’ll be disappointed if this is their only confrontation given that their actual fight was incredibly brief, the show certainly went full force with the emotional drama by showing what exactly it meant for Cisco to go head to head with his best friend. I appreciated that the show tied his anxieties back into his recurring fear about losing control of his powers; it wasn’t that long ago we saw Earth-2 Cisco easily keep Earth-2 Killer Frost under his thumb using his powers. While that encounter was never directly referenced, it did give quite a bit more weight to Cisco’s worries as we saw just how easily he could kill her under the right circumstances. 

But even as Killer Frost closed in on them, Team Flash found themselves also tasked with locating quirky supergenius-to- be Tracy Brant, who 2024 Barry revealed holds the key to stopping Savitar. I find myself rather torn when it comes to this new character. I’ve been a fan of Anne Dudek since way back in her House MD days, and Tracy is both funny and adorable; not to mention that she’s a woman on a series where you can list all recurring female characters on one hand. However, Team Flash is beginning to feel seriously overcrowded these days. 

Despite the fact that this current storyline centers on saving Iris, we’ve rarely gotten see her react to any of the major revelations about Savitar. Often she’s the one comforting Barry, despite how backwards that seems. Similarly, Wally has had very little to do since Barry decided that he had to to take down Savitar by himself, so much so that he was absent for almost the entirety of the episode (supposedly on a romantic getaway to Earth-3, even though his sister is knocking on death’s door). I can’t help but feel the show would do better to spend its time developing the members of Team Flash it already has rather than introducing new ones this late in the season. 

Of course, what set the internet abuzz more than anything else in the episode was the ending, which gave us the answer to a question many of us had grown quite tired of: just who is Savitar? And as it turns out, Savitar is in fact another version of Barry, as many, myself included, previously speculated. I will say that am surprised that he is still from the same timeline; I was counting on him tying into Flashpoint somehow. But if, as Savitar says, he has all of Barry’s same memories, it doesn’t really make sense that Savitar would wait this long to kill Iris (though why he would want to kill her at all is another question) or continually make moves he knows are destined to fail. 

I can only guess that Savitar is a time remnant of a future Barry’s — since they were name-dropped during Barry’s flashback — and that perhaps he does not have access to all of the original Barry’s history. All of this might feel exciting to speculate about if it were happening earlier in the season. As it is, at this point the whole painfully drawn out way they’ve handled the Savitar storyline makes it hard to get that invested. 

We’ll no doubt continue to be fed bits and pieces of Savitar’s backstory, but it seems doubtful we’ll get to explore what exactly an evil Barry would mean for the team or why Savitar’s powers manifest differently from Barry’s when there’s so little time left. It certainly doesn’t help that it looks like next week will be dealing with Barry having a sudden bout of amnesia rather than actually addressing the issue head on. Fact is, all the build up in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t get the payoff, and I fear it’s going to make much of this season seem weak in retrospect if they don’t find a way to pull this off.

Written by Kaitlin Roberts, THE FLASH Beat Writer -- Click to read Kaitlin's posts


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