AsThe Flashstarts to wrap up its eighth season, it appears that the CW show is bound and determined to stay out of doing anything fresh and new and instead is going to continue to bring back old enemies so that Barry can lose his temper a few more times. To be clear, there is a way the show can make the return of some of Barry Allen’s old enemies interesting. In fact,last week’s episode ofThe Flashfeatured a return of Tom Cavanaugh’s Eoabard Thawne, and it was actually some of the best television of the season. As has been the problem for this show for far too long, the series went to the well once too often this week.
While Cavanaugh’s Reverse-Flash is an interesting one mainly because he’s seemingly gone full psycho killer, the show decided it couldn’t just have one. Instead, it turns out that the original Thawne also needed to make another appearance. And the rest of the show featured Barry trying to come to terms with an old enemy who might not be an enemy at all. Once again, there are some ways that this episode ofThe Flashcould have carried out the idea of old enemies no longer being enemies, but the continued return of the same old enemies over and over and over just seems like a lack of imagination.
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The episode starts with Barry running along with the professor who has found a way to give herself speed, at least for a smidgen of time. However, it turns out that there is definitely some kind of catch, when she accidentally shoots Barry with some of her lightning and it becomes known quickly that she can’t control her powers. This is also where any semblance of an interesting storyline starts to go off the rails. Of course, maybe that’s because even the writers know that the same old story ofspeedsters popping up inThe Flashis starting to get very, very old. It’s almost as though the showrunners know exactly how much it costs for the special effects of a speedster, so that’s how most of the villains and quite a few of the heroes get their meta powers.
Maybe the writers did realize that introducing another speedster into the mix wasn’t going to be interesting at this point. So instead of finishing upthis season ofThe Flashwith a new ally, it turns out that she only has her power because she’s been working with an amnesiac Thawne. The blonde version of the villain. The original face of the Reverse-Flash. Only there’s a twist as this particular version of what has long been the biggest bad of the show’s big bads is actually a very nice guy who doesn’t seem to remember anything about his past battles with Barry and his team. Of course, the entire episode is set up in a way that the audience is supposed to wonder if there is going to be a twist. If Thawne will eventually show his hand. The problem is that it’s not clear if it will really matter. Because The Flash fighting the Reverse-Flash has been done so many times already.
While the story of Barry and Eobard took up a great deal of this week’sepisode ofThe Flashit wasn’t the only thing going on. While the show was far more focused than some of the previous installments have been, there was at least a small side plot where Cecile seems to becoming an even more powerful telepathic empath. Her powers have changed in a way where it appears she’s able to “infect” people with thoughts or emotions that stop criminals in their tracks. At the moment, this new power is mostly a mystery, with a few comments about how her powers have increased by hundreds of times - it’s not clear by what metric they are measuring - and there’s no answer as to how this happened or why.
It also appears that the final few episodes are going to delve into this mystery a bit more and one has to wonder just how big a mess the plot of those episodes is going to be considering everything else that’s apparently going to go on. For starters,Iris West continues to be a total no-showin this latter half of the season. Not only that, but she continues to not even be a plot point. Barry is just out doing his own thing, not even attempting to get his wife back. Considering the lengths the show has gone to show how in love the two are, it seems odd that he’s not at all broken up about the fact that his wife has now been missing for quite a while.
Time has always been hard to pin down inthese episodes ofThe Flash. It’s unclear if days have passed, or weeks, or even months. But even given the benefit of the doubt, Iris has been gone for a week and Barry seems to mostly be ignoring the situation. It seems clear that Candace Patton doesn’t want much to do with the show at this point, but there should still be some mention of a major character not being around at all. Of course, she’s not the only one whose role has been reduced to a ridiculous degree.
Caitlyn Snow has also been relegated to a 30-second appearance where she continues to talk about a plot that has seemingly been left behind when itcomes to resurrecting Frost. It appears that the show decided it needed to remind the audience that Caitlyn still existed and was still there in some regard. Of course, that’s more than the show did with Iris or Allegra for that matter. In some ways, the show should be better when it spends time focusing on one plot point likeThe Flashand his battling a speedster who tapped into an unnatural way to get her speed. But despite the singular focus, the show went from promising to uninteresting over the hour’s run time.
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