This week, on ‘The Reverse-Flash returns’, the Reverse-Flash returns.
The intro to this show makes no sense. ‘My name is Barry Allen, and I am the fastest man alive.’ Dude, you’re, like, the third fastest now that Eobard Thawne is back. Joint-second at best.
Thawne’s first evil move is to rig the brakes of a truck because apparently that’s the first thing you do when you’re looking for someone with super speed.
Barry, who, to our knowledge, has never driven in his life, decides that his best course of action is to get inside the unstoppable truck, but you know no one’s in danger because we’re still in the first five minutes of the episode.
Barry does eventually get his shit together and stop the truck by taking the tyres off, but it would have been more interesting to see if he could super sonic punch a truck.
At S.T.A.R., the gang finds Turtle’s dead body, and they begin to distrust mysterious Tom Cavanagh. ‘How’d this happen?’ asks Wells, the one man who knows exactly how this happened.
Iris goes to the hospital to visit Francine. ‘I’m not angry at you any more for what happened,’ she tells her mother, even though she should be a little bit.
But Iris has really matured since the show started. She forgives her mother, convinces Wally to do the same, and is altogether becoming a whole lot more likeable this season.
Barry, who has one last chance to tell Patty he’s the Flash, not so much.
Barry knows Patty’s super smart and a great detective who can take care of herself, and he’s been known to go faster to protect those he cares about (if it came to that), but he throws away a chance at an actual working relationship to ‘protect her’.
Isn’t that the excuse he gave for why he didn’t tell Iris last season? Iris, who has proven herself to be great at keeping secrets and an effective member of the team and absolutely not as good for him as Patty.
If he wasn’t going to tell her, he should never have been with her. Talk about not learning from your mistakes. That’s a step backward for character development right there.
Even after she finds out because of the whole being a detective thing, he still won’t let her in. If I were her, I’d tell god damn everyone who he was.
Meanwhile, Eobard Thawne doesn’t know where (or when) the hell he is, so he goes to Tina McCan’tAct to return him to his time.
Wells helps Cisco vibe Thawne so they can find Tina, and he learns that the best way to do that is to scare Cisco so much that he shrieks in terror.
In fact, terrifying Cisco leads him to vibe so hard that he sees the future, where Thawne kills Tina with the vibrating hand thing that he does.
Matt Letscher is no mysterious Tom Cavanagh, but it’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of his take on the Reverse-Flash character.
His childish obsession with the Flash is adorable to watch, and yet you completely believe that he would stab someone with his own vibrating hand.
Barry finds time in his busy schedule of being a terrible, terrible person to save Tina and capture Thawne, but he soon learns that it’s a mistake to keep Thawne from his timeline.
As Thawne explained last season, the two of them are destined to do this forever.
Barry and Thawne team up to use their speed to open one of those science holes, and Barry throws Thawne through it, and into the future.
Although they had to work together (sort of), there’s no love lost between Barry and Thawne, and I’m so glad they didn’t try to redeem Reverse-Flash in some way. I was worried that he would join them in the fight against Zoom.
But no, Reverse-Flash was just another villain of the week, but one that brought some great callbacks, a weird sort of origin story (season one hasn’t happened to Thawne yet – in fact this episode is where he gets the idea to take Wells’s body) and some closure on the Eobard Thawne storyline. Now to focus on Zoom.
And speaking of, Jay found his Earth-1 counterpart this week, as he tries to replace his dying cells with fresh ones, and it’s Hunter Zolomon, the man who becomes Zoom in the comics.
Although we can assume things will play out a little differently here (I still think Zoom is Earth-2 Eddie), this was the cherry on top of an episode full of Easter Eggs.
For me, only the Patty subplot keeps ‘The Reverse-Flash Returns’ from being another great episode.
The Flash returns to The CW next Tuesday.
