The Flash A Flash of the Lighting b Television 

Five Thoughts on The Flash’s “A Flash of the Lightning”

By | October 16th, 2019
Posted in Television | % Comments

Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Flash. This episode’s plot involved art as a way of expression and the crisis in the justice system, and it’s named “A Flash of the Lightning”. Let’s dive right in!

1. A second opinion

After last week’s visit from the Monitor, Barry is worried about the upcoming crisis, so worried that he has to break his own rule and go back to the future tm yet again to see for himself if the Monitor was right or not, a Doctor’s second opinion as they said.

His attempt to go to the future were unsuccessful, because there’s some kind of barrier that blocks his travel and let him heavily wounded, turns out that, besides matter and dark matter, there also exist something called “anti-matter”.

Then, he goes to see Earth 3’s Jay Garrick to ask him for help to cross that barrier, he ends up meeting Jay’s wife, a doppelganger of his mother. Also, Jay invented a gizmo that allows Barry’s mind to cross the barrier in the timeline, and he discovers that there are billions of futures, and there´s only one future where everybody lives, and it’s the one where he sacrifices himself, we see a scene where he disintegrates, an almost panel-for-panel recreation of his death in the comic.

This affects him heavily, I mean, obviously everybody would be affected if we get to see billions of dead people and the only way to stop it is our own death, but beside the mental breakdown, he has a “neural entropy” and it hurts him to move. He feels powerless against his impending death and even Iris thinks that he is giving up without a try.

2. Art

Meanwhile, Team Flash go to an art gallery, where Killer Frost mocks every artist, even Kamilla’s, which offends her. By the way, I love when they just give us gadgets that work perfectly for that exact situation and they only yada-yada the explanation, like Jay’s machine to mind-time-travel and Ray Palmer’s invention that disguises Frost’s powers and, ahem, saves the company a lot of money and time in adding special effects to Frost every single scene.

But, coming back to my thought, despite Ralph’s attempts to make Frost interested in art and expression, she is resistant, until, almost at the end of the episode we see that she was indeed affected by the exhibition and begins to express herself through art, with a first bad drawing but hey, we all start somewhere!

3. Humane District Attorneys

I like it when Barry is not in main story of the episode, for example, here we have an important story from Cecile and Joe, now that they are District Attorney and Captain, they work together in special cases, like Allegra García, a meta convict since she was 15, accused of killing a man and just about to plead guilty, that is until Cecile reads her feelings and discovers that she is innocent.

She doesn’t have any proof, but Cecile is convinced of her powers, which kinda disrupts her ability of District Attorney to, ahem, prosecute justice, which makes her fight with Joe, I mean, all the proof is there and they even have an eyewitness, well, had because they discovered Allegra in the witness’ home with his body still warm.

Here, they are using metas as victims of a rigged Justice System against them, you know, a direct analogy about our reality, where we have DAs concerned more about convicting people, instead of finding justice, and public defenders drown in work, ripping them from a fair process, you know, heavy stuff for a comic based show, I’m glad that they shine a light on this issues, even if the story is not as impacting as, say, When They See Us, it stills show regular viewers the problems in labeling people as criminals just for being Latinxs or Black.

4. Seeing Ultraviolet

As the struggle to find Allegra innocent despite all against them, Cecile discovers that she is protecting someone, she was willing to take the blame for her cousin, whom was with her the night of the Particle Accelerator explosion, but ended up in a coma.

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They discover that a secret agency took her body and redacted her file, in the picture they shown, there’s a man with a spiral button, which I guess teased Spyral, the agency that Dick Grayson worked on for a while.

Turns out her cousin goes now with the moniker Ultraviolet, and is willing to kill her own cousin to protect herself and that secretive agency, so, Joe protects his precinct with his gun and guts, until a still recovering from his mental time travel, saves the day thanks to the words of Joe, that he gets up every day for his duty, for his badge.

5. Giving ourselves a chance

The main theme of this episode was giving ourselves a chance, Killer Frost decided that, despite being bad at drawing, she should embrace enjoying and doing art as a way to express herself. Barry decides to still look for ways to prevent the Crisis and not dying, while also training the team (and maybe us viewers) for a potential life without him.

But most importantly, Allegra got a chance in life, one public servant believed in her and now not only she is free, she has a job (and it was damn easy interview!). They believed in her and she believed in herself, even if she needed to tell on her own family.

But, of course, the system is still rigged, but Cecile also believes in what she did this episode, and now, she will quit as DA and become a Public Attorney for accused Metas, and I really like the stories this could bring to the show, hell, bring me a spinoff from Dick Wolf: Law & Order: Meta-Trial by Jury… or something like that.

BONUS: As I wrote above, this episode tried to shine a light on the Crisis of the Justice system, if you want to know a little bit more about these problems, you can watch John Oliver’s takes on Prosecutors and Public Defenders.

And that’s it for this episode, overall, a very meaningful episode and a lot of preparation for the upcoming crisis, I like the direction this season is going. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 603, “Dead Man Running”, also, bring a new Wells now, you cowards!


//TAGS | The Flash

Ramon Piña

Lives in Monterrey, México. He eats tacos for a living, literally. You can say hi on Twitter and Instagram. Besides comics, he loves regular books and Baseball - "Viva Multiversity Cabr*nes!".

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