Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Flash, did you miss it last week? This week’s episode is named “License to Elongate” and it was very weird to me, they chose particularly unusual team-ups for the storylines of this episode. Let’s dive right in.
1. Weird team-up #1: Nash and Allegra
The first one involves Nash and his quest to find and unmask the Monitor, we start this episode directly following the last scene from two weeks ago, where he tells Team Flash that he knows how to save Barry, he explains that across from the wall in the sewers there’s a portal but the wall is impenetrable because it has eternium, so he looks for a way to identify where the eternium is and pick the wall around it.
So he finds that tool in Allegra García, the intern of Iris form episode two of the season, to be honest I didn’t remember her powers but I googled it and they were supposed to be electromagnetic, so why was she useful to literally show the eternium in the wall?
Well Allegra questions the morality of Nash, she doesn’t want to facilitate an assassination, because Nash seems to be willing to kill if that unmask another myth, and she is reforming so, why would she help with “villain” stuff? Well Nash convinces her that her path is not the same of the path from her cousin and she does help him. In their last scene Nash tells her that she reminds him of someone and he looks at her in the couch with a nostalgic look, is he his father in his original Earth or something like that?
2. Weird team-up #2: Cecile and Chester P. Runk
Chester woke up! After six episodes he finally comes out of the machine he was in and he is alone in S.T.A.R.Labs, so, he enjoys the installations all for himself. Then, Cecile helps him recover his life, because he was presumed dead, and the only thing he is missing is that he tried to ask a girl from CCJitters out and now it has passed six weeks, so Cecile volunteers to help him with that too.
I mean, what? Why should I be invested in his love life? He just woke up from the meta equivalent of a coma! Doesn’t he has more pressing issues to solve? Do you still have a house? Well, all of this is necessary to explain that Cecile is feeling worried about her transition from DA into meta attorney and she’s reflecting those insecurities into Chester, at the end she tells him to be himself (The Book of Ralph doesn’t lie) and he is released from the nervousness of asking a woman out… but still don’t get the date.
3. Helping Ralph by not helping at all, or cheesy spying tropes
Barry is trying to pass the torch as the official superhero of Central City to Ralph, and he plans to do so in a surprise press conference, but first, Ralph goes to Midway City following a lead in the Sue Dearborn case, so Barry goes with him to solve the case as fast as possible.
Barry gets impatient soon, and he attempts to suit up as Flash to look in the whole building, he also has terrible spying skills so they get captured very early in their investigation.
By the way, this is a spoof on the tropes of spying films and this is my favorite category of spoofs, cheesy fights, a very cliché villain with a very cliché plan to sell some weapon to other bad guys. I loved it! It kinda reminded me of the fight scenes in Batman ’66, an adequate tribute, intentional or not.
4. A tribute to the heroes
But the most important thing of this episode is a line Ralph says to Barry that sums up what being a hero means, he chose to go as a “human” spy to the mission because “both parts of my identity have value.” When you become a superhero, you often worry about being that, and forget to focus on your “normal” identity, Ralph sacrifices his time saving the city instead of investigating, Caitlin has barely been seen this whole season, Cisco chose to take the meta cure and Barry keeps saving the City instead of spending all the time in the world with his wife.
Continued belowAnd this could be a metaphor for us also, I mean, we don’t have a secret superhero identity, but we do focus on our “internet” identity or our “cool person” identity IRL, we often forget to be ourselves in the real world, making up an identity to show ourselves more likable or at least less weird. It was meaningful because I think we deserve to be ourselves every once in a while, just like any super.
5. The Future of the show
I think there’s a reason why this episode featured those really unusual team-ups, I do think Barry is dying permanently, I can’t even say he’s going to be dead, after all, the series is named The Flash and not “Flash’s sidekicks,” but he’s definitely going to be gone for a while, I think at least for the latter half of the season, maybe with him coming back in the season finale or something like that.
And why do I think that? All season long we have been getting the obvious tease: “Barry must die in Crisis,” but also, we have been focusing on every other character in the show, with special attention to Cecile. We also got introduced to Chester and Allegra, both characters look like they were written with the intention of being meaningful recurring characters, I mean, otherwise why would I have in this episode a love story of a character that has been in a chamber for the last 5 or so episodes? I don’t even really know him enough to care about his love-life!
The way I see it, it’s because the writing team wants us prepared for a period of time without the main character. Otherwise, why would they develop so much of the characters if they are not getting the spotlight soon?
Place your bets people, is Barry really going to die? And if so, how much time is he going to stay dead?
And that’s it for this episode, I still cannot wrap my head around the weird team-ups of last night but I still enjoyed like a kid the spy story. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 607, the first of a two-part story before Crisis named, “The Last Temptation of Barry Allen.”
