Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Flash. This week’s episode is named “Masquerade” and I loved it! The driving theme this time was failure and how we deal with it, let’s dive right in!
1. New changes, Chester is in charge now
We’ll start with the fact that we have a new makeover to the set, S.T.A.R. Labs has a new manager, and Chester is making himself at home, modifying his work environment. He installed speakers and put up posters of Martin Luther King and Tupac, among other little details.
For the first moment Eric Wallace stepped up as showrunner, we have been having slight modifications to the show, and now we have different expressions and styles, other than “the white experience.”
It is sad that the most important Latin character on the show has left, but now we have Chester, a black character with a different way of working and relating to the team. I remember at the start of the sixth season all the praise the media gave to the show because of something as simple as actor Candice Patton rocking her natural hair, and she was happy as well.
That is just one example of how showrunner Eric Wallace is steadily giving us a more open expression of black culture, from natural curls to storylines that involve the struggles of minorities. In the same way, the presence of Chester will give us a new perspective on the show and its interpersonal relations, and it is a very meaningful change.
By the way, Insider released an interview with Wallace, Danielle Nicolet and Kayla Compton about this very topic, I haven’t finished reading it, but so far it’s great.
2. Cecile is not Cecile
There is someone or something is using Cecile’s body, and it is using her to manipulate the team, when Barry tried to help Cecile with a case, he ended up on a coma and woke up in a mental-mental ward (get it? Because it’s in his mind) with the real Cecile next to him.
Back in the Crisis in Infinite Earths, we briefly saw Psycho Pirate escaping from prison, and in this episode, we discovered that the mask is the one that has power, and now it possessed Cecile; it consumes its host until there’s nothing left to take of them, then, the mask finds a new one.
Now, the mask has a plan to permanently possess Cecile. But first the fake Cecile has to free the mask from a museum, and to achieve that, she manipulates Chester and Team Flash, and convinces them to steal it, and to achieve this they call the best thief they know: Sue Dearborn
3. Sue is Back
If you remember, she is one of my favorite characters introduced recently and I still am sad that they had to remove the plot of the Dibny family from the show and I hoping for them to return soon, even with a new actor as Ralph if necessary.
So, she is back to help them rob the museum, but everything seems suspiciously easy, although Chester assures her that it is because of the effort he put into investigating the mission. Sue breaks into the museum, Mission: Impossible-style and has a dance session to avoid the classic lasers. Frankly, it’s a scene we’ve seen before, but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable, at least until the team discovers that it is Cecile who put Barry in a coma, but it is too late now and Psycho Pirate is awake in Cecile’s body.
4. Failing now
Back at S.T.A.R. Labs Sue confronts Chester because he wasn’t ready for all the possible scenarios and therefore he didn’t realize that it was their friend who set them up. This makes Chester rethink his new life, Psycho Pirate took vantage of his insecurities as “the new guy” and he failed the team.
He said WWCD (What Would Cisco Do) because he thought that it was Cisco confidence that made his plans work, Iris tells him that the whole Team Flash have his back, and she knows that in return they all can trust Chester. He is part of the team now.
Continued belowAnd it is hard to feel like you failed at your new work, but it is the help and confidence of the whole team that makes the difference, I feel like I connected to Chester’s story because everybody has been in his place, figuring out how everything in the new job works.
5. Failing in the past
While Barry and Cecile were trapped in their collective mind, they try to escape the hospital, only to be attacked by another version of her, wearing a patient gown. Barry wakes up again trapped on the first room and he talks to Cecile about why they are there and why she knows it’s geography.
Cecile admits that she has been there before; she was a patient of the ward. She tells a very moving story about how she wasn’t there when her mother passed away, and the guilt that made her feel, it got so bad that she had a mental breakdown and ended up hospitalized.
That is a story that deeply affects her, she is ashamed by her past, she prioritized her school instead of her mother’s health and it affected her own mental health, she buried it in her past and avoided talking about it as if it didn’t happen. At the end, to defeat Psycho Pirate she confronts her own past, and let her wounds heal.
At the final scene, Cecile tells the truth to Joe, and he mentions how hard it is to the black community to recognize mental health problems and ask for help. I thought about that phrase and googled about it: in the UK, black people are three times as likely to be put in mental hospital, and of course, the US has a history of white supremacy when we talk about psychiatry.
This is exactly what I was talking about at the beginning, these themes are barely present on Network TV, and Eric Wallace and the whole team are making them visible, recognizable for the people who need it. I seriously hope to see much more of stories like this.
BONUS: Joe is investigating Kramer, and she is hiding a dark secret.
And that’s it for this episode, I think that this was my favorite of the season so far, truly a great episode with two very meaningful stories about what we do after we fail. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 714, “Rayo de Luz,” an Allegra-centric episode.
