Ultimately, the episode felt like nothing more than a stall for time before the grand finale — it didn’t even take five minutes for DeVoe to immediately replace the satellite the team spent the whole episode working to destroy with another (which effectively rendered Amunet’s heist subplot last week pointless as well). Now, it isn’t always a bad idea to take a beat right before a finale, so the characters have time to process previous events or brace for the storm to come. But THE FLASH has struggled to get any real momentum going this season, in large part due to dragging its feet so much when it comes to the main storyline.
It’s true that Barry worrying about his friends’ safety after losing Ralph isn’t the worst way to spend an episode; even so, Barry’s already had the past few episodes to grieve, and, as Cisco himself pointed out, it’s tiresome to see Barry needing once again to learn about The Power of Teamwork after four seasons have having it pounded into his head. Nevertheless, there was still quite a bit of satisfaction watching Cisco let loose on Barry by pointing out how his guilt has morphed into self-pity.
The team’s new training-therapy also inadvertently led to Caitlin accessing a repressed memory of Killer Frost manifesting in her childhood. In and of itself, this is a pretty interesting idea, especially since it predates the STAR Labs explosion; however, there’s been an absurd amount of retcons when it comes to Caitlin’s Killer Frost identity, to the point that there’s almost no consistency from one story to the next. You feel like the writers must being going down a list of tropes until they find one that magically fits. The trouble is after this many rewrites, it feels futile to theorize or even get excited as there’s no way to tell it this particular Killer Frost origin will stick, no matter how much potential the concept has.
Iris meanwhile continued her hunt for Marlize, with an increasingly ill Harry as her bumbling sidekick. While Marlize straightforwardly joining Team Flash is a little disappointing after being portrayed as more of a morally ambiguous character during her previous appearances, it’s doubtful there would have been enough time in the season to effectively utilize her as an independent operator. I’d rather she be used well in a predictable way than kept to the sidelines just to keep us guessing about her allegiance, which felt definitely like the case during her last few episodes.
It also felt appropriate that Iris was to one to get through to Marlize by wonderfully quoting her own words from before she met the Thinker back to her. The two have gone head to head in the past, but more than that, Iris has always been the most hopeful character in the series and her appeal to Marlize’s former idealism felt totally natural. Even with a silly premise like the Thinker’s ‘return to the stone ages’ plan, that fundamental optimism/pessimism conflict Iris summarizes that still seems to really get to the heart of what THE FLASH is about when it’s at it’s best — that it’s okay to believe in someone else and that choosing positivity isn’t the same as being naive. It’s a shame this angle of the DeVoe conflict wasn’t played up earlier, but with any luck it’s a sign that while the plot may be up in the air, the show has at least straightened out its priorities on a thematic level before launching into our dénouement.
Written by Kaitlin Roberts, THE FLASH Beat Writer
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