Last night’s The Flash was an episode borne out of two questions: 1) what would Iris be like as a speedster, and 2) how can we actually stop DeVoe? We got answers to both, but I don’t know if either was really satisfactory.
1. Iris wants to show Ralph that she gets it
My biggest problem with this episode was eventually resolved by the end. Early on, Iris tells Ralph that she understands what he’s going through, living in constant fear. He asks her why, and she says something like “because I’m the team leader!” It’s a nothing answer, made even more so by the fact that she has an actual reason to sympathize. Last season, she knew that Savitar was going to kill her, and had to live in constant fear of that. To share that would have been truly helpful to Ralph, perhaps a little therapeutic for Iris as well. Instead, she gives him this bullshit story about feeling fear for her team or something. It rings incredibly hollow, and is a lame excuse to set up her having to ‘prove’ herself later in the episode.
As an actual speedster, Iris is fine, if not a little green. An unintended consequence of this episode was it showed just how good Barry is at being the Flash. But there were a lot of missing scenes for Iris’s one and only speedster appearance. Why not have her call Wally and go for a run? Why not have her do something sweet for Barry, like run and get his favorite meal or something? Why not have some fun with it?
2. Also, team leader?
I know they’ve been calling Iris the leader/point person/something for awhile now, but I see no actual evidence of that. She rarely makes the decisions, she’s certainly not the person coming up with the plans. I’m glad that by episode’s end, she’s back to writing again. Sure, that’s not the most exciting thing for her to do, but it makes a lot more sense than just having her on comms all the time.
3. Melting Point
The idea of a meta whose power it is to steal and transfer meta powers is fun, even if Melting Point (what a shitty name) was sort of tossed into the episode sans motivation or character development. From a writing standpoint, this is a really convenient way to eventually take out DeVoe. The question becomes who does he put the intelligence into? The obvious answer is Harry, who has been messing with the ‘thinking cap’ already, and might be getting a little too comfortable with the idea of heightened intellect. Come to think of it, that might set Harry up as the Season 5 big bad. I wouldn’t hate that.
4. That Eric Wallace?
When I saw the writing credit for this episode as ‘Eric Wallace,’ I had to instantly check to see if this was that Eric Wallace. The Eric Wallace who wrote one of the worst books of the New 52, “Mister Terrific.” The Eric Wallace who killed Ryan Choi for seemingly no reason. The Eric Wallace who wrote two lousy Shazam comics around the time of ‘Blackest Night.’ It was the same one!
I may be a little hard on Wallace, but he took some of my favorite characters and made them obnoxious for a few years there. And so, imagine my surprise when this episode was…ok! It wasn’t horrible, nor was it overly dark or bringing up weird racial issues for no good reason.
Color me surprised.
5. Minor league
I know that this was Iris’s first time as a meta, but both of the situations she found herself in seemed like things that Barry could’ve figured out in no time. And with Barry in her ear, and a team of metas at her side, she should’ve been able to solve them, also. This whole episode felt very small, in terms of threats, didn’t it? I’m not against that in theory; I know each week can’t be “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” But, I also think the show works best when the characters are stretched beyond their comfort zone. This, though it tried to give that appearance, didn’t successfully convey that. At least, not to me.
