Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Flash. This week’s episode is the Halloween Special and it’s named “There Will be Blood” and Dr. Ramsay finally went full villain, Bloodwork is born! Let’s dive right in.
1. “How do you convince your best friend not to save your life?”
Last week, Barry tried to help Caitlin deal with his upcoming death, and now it’s Cisco’s turn. How do you cope with the death of your best friend? How people with Cancer or other chronic deceases deal with their impending death?
Well, as Barry tries to mentor Cisco to become the leader of Team Flash once he is gone, Cisco steals a vial of the potential cure to Ramsay’s HLH, and they have a fight? Which life should Cisco save? His best friend, a superhero who could keep saving billions of lives? Or a random guy?
To him the answer is pretty clear, but that is going against Barry’s decision, his personal choice as the person who’s going to die, if you can save other people, chose them.
Barry criticizes Cisco for not having what it takes to be a leader, but I think Cisco’s choice was a leader’s choice; he choose to save his friend, and potentially saving the rest of the world with him, but, at the end, it’s Barry’s choice.
2. A cure
And what cure am I talking about? Well, in order to save Ramsay, Nash Wells offers them a quid pro quo: he helps them get a serum in McCulloch Labs that can replicate healthy cells while killing bad cells, and he will get a gizmo from Cisco that will help him in his secret mission.
And just when you present a Deus ex Machina like that, a serum from the Dominators’ planet that could potentially save someone’s life, even from dark matter, Barry chooses to give it to Ramsay, who wastes it because his decease has advanced past cures. No problemo, the Crisis is still coming.
3. Blood Vampire and Blood Zombies!
Meanwhile, he saw flashbacks from Ramsay and his mother, juxtaposed with him slowly dying, not just his body, but also his humanity. At his most desperate he discovers that the bonding agent to his blood and Mitch Romero’s blood was the fear, the adrenaline and endorphins from his victims are what will save him.
So, he decides to go to the hospital and have a little bit of revenge against his mother’s doctor, while also taking blood from everyone he could. That’s where Frost and Flash come in, they try to stop him only to be attacked by Bloodwork’s personal army of zombies! How fun is that? Well, those people died, and as Barry said, 5 families were broken, so not so fun after all, but hey, great action scenes for the Halloween episode!
4. Ralph and depression
A little subplot of this episode involves Ralph and Iris, she handles him a lead on Sue Dearborn’s case and he didn’t care. Later, she questions him, and he tells him that it doesn’t matter, the Crisis is coming, why bother with saving the world if she should be enjoying her dying husband. Latter, Joe intervenes, and encourages him to keep looking for Sue, that’s a life he can save.
And I empathize with Ralph, everybody has had moments of depression, when you prefer to not do something because what’s the point? But we need help sometimes, we need our friends and we need to stand up and do something for ourselves. (Just to be clear, I’m not talking about clinical depression, that’s another topic, our friends can’t save us if we need psychological and medical treatment.)
5. A father’s loss
But damn, Joe is a tough guy, after talking to Ralph, at the end of the episode he had a little one-on-one moment with Barry, and that’s where they broke, they both cried, it’s fucking hard to cope with the death of a partner, or a friend, or a father. Or a son.
Barry’s biggest reason to be thankful is Joe, his lessons and his love when his father went to jail, he had a noble man looking after him, raising him, and he is thankful for that.
Damn, I cried a little her, kudos for taking a show about people in disguises and daring to do slow, contemplative scenes like that, Grant Gustin and Jesse L. Martin are on fire, they could very easily be nominated for any acting award, this is not just a show about superheroes, and this is a drama worth watching, particularly this season.
That’s it for this episode, a wonderful one, filled with fun Halloween themed action but also with slow and meaningful, I love it. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 605, “Kiss Kiss Breach Breach.”
