In a lot of ways, the latest episode of The Flash felt like a finale. Maybe not a season finale, but certainly the finale of the first act of the season. Plotlines that had been percolating since the premiere came out full-force, secrets were revealed, and the scope of a season which has been relatively small for a show about a guy who can rewrite timelines through time travel became much, much larger.
One thing I was legitimately worried about going into this episode is that they would completely shrug off the Savitar cliffhanger of the last episode. It’s happened before where something big has happened to close out an episode, and then next week’s episode picks up a few days later with everyone more or less going ‘Wow, I can’t believe that thing that happened a few days ago.’ I was pleased, then, that this week’s episode picked up immediately where last week’s left off: The Flash pinned to a ceiling by Savitar, the capture of Alchemy absolutely falling apart, and Wally trapped in a cocoon after making contact with the Philosopher’s Stone. After some hyperspeed shenanigans – and ‘hyperspeed’ is really the best way to describe what Savitar does, as he makes Barry basically look like he’s standing still – Cisco and Caitlin both join the fray, using their respective powers to teleport to Barry’s aid (Cisco) and freeze Savitar in his tracks (Caitlin). Savitar escapes because that would be too easy, and Barry is saved, but Caitlin, who only agreed to help after Iris begged her to, immediately starts to feel the effects of having used her powers in such a major way, and we’re off to the races for the ‘A’ plot of the episode. It was a really nice way of resolving last week’s situation and springing into this week’s seamlessly.
It’s no surprise that Caitlin’s situation is front and center with this episode, and not just because of the title of the episode. Her stress about having powers has been building for the past few weeks, and particularly once she told people about them and they started pressuring her to be upfront about things (*coughCiscocough*), she was bound to burst at some point. Killer Frost seems to manifest as a separate personality within Caitlin, but it’s easy to interpret it instead as a frustrated, angry side of Caitlin that she’s been repressing for far too long. After all, this is a genius of a woman stuck hanging out in an abandoned facility with man-children who compete with each other to name super-villains that they maybe sorta helped create. At least in the Flashpoint timeline she got to have her own separate life as a pediatric optometrist, but Barry couldn’t even let her have that, and in restoring the timeline he gave her powers and upended her life completely. I’m getting a little Killer Frost-y just writing it down – imagine living it.
It was nice, also, to see Caitlin’s Killer Frost-induced bad behavior come out of a struggle on Caitlin’s part to rid herself of powers altogether. She lies to Joe West in order to get into a CCPD interview room with one of Alchemy’s acolytes, and when he refuses to tell her what she wants to know about how to find Alchemy, she threatens him until he screams. When some CCPD officers come running, she users cold breath to fog up the room and escape. This is where the real trouble begins, as everyone’s favorite British addition to the show, Julian Albert, catches Caitlin leaving the room, so she kidnaps him. Things just keep escalating for her, and she keeps going along with it.
Barry learns about Julian’s kidnapping from Detective Patterson, aka Special Guest Star Greg Grunberg of ‘everything J.J. Abrams has ever done plus also Heroes’ fame. He realizes based on the circumstances – the cold breath, the frozen interview room door – that Caitlin must be involved, and he rushes back to STAR Labs for help in tracking her down. Everyone is a quitter and ready to throw their hands in the air and give up when HR adds value to the team, suggesting they use whatever means they used to track Captain Cold (R.I.P.) to find Caitlin. They track her to a frozen food warehouse, where she is having Julian do computery things to figure out how to find Alchemy. Those computery things include running Google searches on people who have used the words ‘alchemy’ or ‘Savitar’. This is definitely a thing Caitlin could have done herself. Perhaps she realizes it, as there’s a moment after Julian gives her the results of his Googling where Caitlin is conflicted about what she’s doing and what’s going on. Julian uses that opportunity to send a signal to the CCPD. Before they arrive, The Flash shows up and tries to talk Caitlin down off the ledge, and when Julian urges him to take her down, Barry punches him at super-speed, knocking him out cold. There’s a tense conversation between The Flash and Killer Frost, with Caitlin finally laying into Barry about what a screw-up he’s consistently been this season. She also reveals to Cisco, who is listening over comms from back at STAR Labs, that Barry is responsible for the Cisco’s brother being dead in the current timeline. As they’re talking, the CCPD busts in, guns blazing. Barry rushes Caitlin out of the line of fire, but she’s still not interested in any help, which she makes clear by stabbing The Flash in the calf with an ice-spike and taking off without him.
Thanks to Julian’s work, Caitlin now has two potential people to visit who can lead her to Alchemy. Cisco hacks Julian’s computer to find the locations so they can find her and stop her. Barry’s healing fast but still injured, so Cisco decides to take one of the locations while HR and Joe will stake out the other one. Cisco in particular is more than happy to get out of the office, as he is pissed beyond words at Barry about his brother’s death. He’s been pissed at Barry before about things, but this is a whole new level of pissed off. I’ve been really hard on Barry this season, but he’s done a lot of really stupid stuff lately, and whereas most people seem to let him off the hook really easily it was nice to see Cisco react the way that he did. I was particularly pleased that it wasn’t completely resolved at the end of the episode. Maybe eventually Vibe will join Killer Frost and they’ll start the Flash Revenge Squad.
HR and Joe have a nice scene together, which is primarily around Joe’s concern about Wally, who’s still stuck in a cocoon. The science-y people aren’t going to remove him, since he might not be done with whatever transformation he’s going through, and Joe’s getting antsy about how Wally might come out of there. He was a hero in the Flashpoint timeline, but will he be twisted like Alchemy’s other creations have been? His gut’s telling him that something’s off, but no one else wants to listen to his gut. HR has grown on me over the past few episodes – he’s trying really hard to fit in and I feel for his difficulty at doing that. It was nice to see he and Joe have a chance to connect.
Meanwhile, Caitlin arrives at the location that Cisco is staking out, the suburban home of one of Alchemy’s acolytes. She confronts the acolyte in his kitchen, and he tells her that Alchemy can indeed remove a person’s powers, but also that Savitar showed them the future and he saw Caitlin there as Killer Frost. She prepares to lash out at him when Cisco calls to her from outside. She leaves the house and finds Cisco in the street in his Vibe gear. He again tries to talk her down, and when that ineveitably doesn’t work they have a full-on superpowers battle in the middle of the street. It’s not exactly what Cisco vibed last episode, but it’s still pretty much what he saw. The Flash arrives to help, but he’s still injured and having trouble running, to the point that he takes a tumble as he approaches Killer Frost and knocks her to the ground with him. Caitlin climbs on top of the dazed Barry and gives him a long kiss, which spreads cold throughout his body and turns his face blue. Before Caitlin can do serious damage to Barry’s central nervous system or to their friendship, Cisco blasts her with his powers and she flies backwards into a car before slumping over unconscious.
Caitlin wakes up in a cell in the Pipeline. Everyone has been waiting for her to wake up. They want to help her, but she’s not interested, and she verbally eviscerates all of them. Joe gets a sick feeling as he watches what Caitlin has become – he doesn’t want what’s happening to her to happen to Wally. He motions to HR and the two leave to go cut Wally out of his cocoon. Everyone else disperses, and Iris finds Barry moping about all of the mistakes that he’s made this season. Iris’s job anymore seems to be to prop Barry up and make him feel better about himself, which is exactly what she does in this episode. Her super power seems to be to lift up those around her, which is nice, but it also leads me to wonder if she’ll ever reach a breaking point the way that Caitlin has. While Barry and Iris are talking there’s a huge power surge in the building. This is apparently a side effect of Joe and HR removing Wally from the cocoon. Barry, Iris, and Cisco arrive to find Wally still covered in goop on the floor, with Joe and HR still working on clearing him. There’s an explosion – Barry races everyone out of the way – and Wally appears before them, vibrating at superspeed, immaterial, before taking off.
Joe is beside himself – he can’t believe what he’s done. Wally clearly wasn’t finished cooking, and they have to figure out a way to help him. They all realize that they’re going to need Caitlin’s help to save Wally, so Barry decides to take a chance. He heads down to the Pipeline to talk to her, and instead of trying to make a deal of some sort with her, he simply opens the door to her cell and says she can leave on one condition: she’ll have to kill Barry first. He’s gambling that there’s enough of his friend left in there that she won’t do it – after all, she could’ve killed him before but she just stabbed his leg – and he stands firmly in her way as she ices up a stake to jam through his heart. Finally Caitlin breaks through and breaks down in Barry’s arms – she’s back in control.
Back in the lab, Caitlin, now once again wearing her stylish power-dampening bracelets, has cooked up an injection for Wally that should stabilize his brain chemistry and allow him to slow down. The trick is that they need to find him, and HR turns to Joe to see what his gut’s telling him. Joe wagers that Wally probably went to his mom’s old house, since he goes there sometimes to think, and he and Barry take off. They find Wally exactly where Joe thought he would be, standing in front of the house, strobing at superspeed, unable to slow down. Joe tries to get through to Wally, distracting him long enough for The Flash to speed in and give Wally the injection. After a moment’s freakout, Wally slows down and is back to his old self again.
And now everything’s back to normal! Caitlin’s back in control of herself, Wally has super-speed but at least he’s not gone feral, and Cisco…well, as mentioned earlier, Cisco is still super-pissed at Barry. Barry desperately needs his forgiveness, but Cisco’s not ready to give it. There’s also the matter of Caitlin having kidnapped Julian earlier in the episode. Julian is in the hospital after The Flash’s speed punch knocked him out, but he’s awake now and ready to talk to his CCPD colleagues about what happened. Barry gets there first, though, and has a super-awkward talk with Julian in which he pleads with him to not turn in Caitlin. Barry says he’ll do anything Julian asks, and Julian agrees to not say anything, but only if Barry quits the CCPD. His moral compass is way off, Julian says, and he has no business being in law enforcement. It’s rough, but from Julian’s point of view, with the information that Julian has available to him, he’s absolutely right. It really felt like Barry was going to tell Julian his secret here, but instead he agrees to quit the CCPD, and Julian tells Detective Greg Grunberg that he has no idea who kidnapped him.
Joe and Iris find Barry cleaning out his desk in the crime lab, and at first Barry won’t talk about why he’s quitting. Joe, being a detective and not an idiot, figures it out pretty quickly, but Barry isn’t bothered about it. He’s willing to do anything to protect the people he cares about. It’s a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t pay the rent, Allen. Unless he’s still crashing with Cisco, which I just remembered he’s doing, and oh man that’s going to be awkward when he gets home and Cisco’s still pissed at him for killing his brother.
Later that night, Julian wakes up to a voice speaking to him. He screams for the voice to leave him alone, but is compelled to get out of bed and stagger to a secret dresser drawer. He opens the drawer, and removes a mask as Savitar tells him that he needs Julian to become Alchemy once again. That’s right, folks: Julian is Alchemy. I had a thought earlier in the episode that I think is not quite confirmed but pretty strongly implied here, which is that Julian is Alchemy but he doesn’t know it. This fits in with Doctor Alchemy’s history in the comics, where Albert Desmond had a split personality: a good side and an evil supervillain side. It also makes it easier to sympathize with Julian as a guy who’s just trying to do his job if he doesn’t know that he’s also a big bad. It’s sort of predictable that the high-profile guest star of the season would also be the villain, but it seems like they’re going to go an interesting way with it.
I don’t talk a lot about the performances on this show because they’re always pretty solid, but they were exceptionally good in this week’s episode. It cannot be overstated how great Danielle Panabaker was in this episode. It was great to see her let Caitlin cut loose. Of course we’ve seen her before as Killer Frost on Earth-2, but there was something different about it here that had so much more energy to it. She did a fantastic job here. Carlos Valdes also did great work in his later scenes, after Cisco had found out about Barry and his brother’s death. He does strong comedic work regularly on the show, so when he is upset or otherwise not happy Cisco it’s particularly powerful.
Overall, like I said before, this episode felt like something of an Act I finale. Caitlin and Wally’s stories both came to a head here, and both seem to have found some form of resolution, however temporary. There were some big status quo shifts with Cisco finding out about his brother and Barry quitting the CCPD. And the big bad of the season has been revealed in Savitar, as well as the identity of Alchemy. I wonder if they had to wrap things up somewhat ahead of next week’s ‘Invasion’ crossover with the other DCTV shows. Regardless, it was a solid cap on the first block of episodes for season three of The Flash.
