Both The Flash, and your humble reviewer, are back, and this week we begin to race (pardon the pun) towards the season’s end-game. Strap in, and let’s see where this episode took us.
1. Trajectory
Nothing about this episode, but especially nothing about Trajectory, was all that surprising, but it was handled very well. The split personality caused by Velocity 9 addiction, the nerdy/innocent scientist, the ‘poisoning’ of Jessie, all of it worked, even if it wasn’t the show’s most elegant or nuanced episode.
We’ve seen a lot of speedsters on this show, and I’m still impressed with how the visual effects work during these speedster battles – for shits and giggles, y’all should watch a few episodes of the 1990 Flash show, and you’ll see just how bad speed special effects were during the George H.W. Bush administration. The show’s special effects are rarely flashy (again, pardon the pun), but they always serve the story in elegant ways. Well, almost always – we’ll get to that later.
2. Iris is incredibly tone-deaf
Iris manages to make just about every conversation this week incredibly awkward, from being all, “So, Barry, when are we gonna get down and get married, even though you’re practically my brother?”, to then not realizing she asked out her editor on a date, to trying to hide her knowledge that she knows the Flash during her meetings.
The Iris problem on this show keeps showing signs of improvement before tumbling off a cliff. There isn’t just one problem with Iris, but the biggest one is that if we are to believe that she does marry Barry, then we need to, above all, work on their chemistry together. Because at this point, Iris is by far the least appealing girlfriend for Barry, after Patty, Linda, Felicity, Caitlin, Supergirl, a rando he met at Big Belly Burger…
3. Blue lightning
So, the crux of Trajectory’s downfall came in her ‘overdose’ of Velocity 9, which provided the clue (blue lightning) to uncover Zoom’s identity. We’ll get to that in a moment, but after I just praised the special effects on this show, the ‘Trajectory melts into the Speed Force’ effects reminded me of the ‘Han Solo getting thawed out of Carbonite’ special effect, which didn’t even look great in 1983.
I can’t find a gif of Trajectory, but here is Han thawing out, for your viewing pleasure:
4. Don’t Follow
This week gave us a lot of nice Harry/Jessie moments, and it helped both humanize Harry and give some depth to Jessie who, up until now, has been more of a damsel in distress than an actual character. Harry is not an easy character to like – he’s really missing his Earth One counterpart’s charm, but this relationship helps to bring him some empathy from the audience.
Giving Jessie some space in Opal City does two things: 1) it limits the amount of characters that the producers need to squeeze in to each episode, 2) it gives me hope that she can form some sort of bonds with other DC characters in Opal City, leading to some cool new characters popping up.
Also of note: while Opal City has been referenced before, it has now been referenced both on Supergirl and the CW shows – there’s no hope of us seeing Jack Knight, but maybe we can get the Shade? Oh God, can we please get the Shade?
5. The ‘real’ Zoom
Ok, so we all have now seen that Zoom has Jay’s face. Are we fully on board with him being Jay, though? We’ve seen, on Earth One, a man named Hunter Zolomon – that’s Zoom’s name in the comics – who is Jay’s doppelganger. I can’t recall (blame having a new born at home) – don’t we see Zoom drop Jay’s body on the ground before demasking last episode?
The show is well trafficked in doppels, so I would think that, perhaps, the team can/will figure it out relatively easily. That said, if it really is/was Jay, that’s a heartbreaking and really interesting development. Having the helmet as the conduit to allow Cisco to Vibe is evidence to that point, but we’ll see how the show deals with this down the home stretch of this season.
So, what did y’all think of it? Let me know in the comments!
