Jessie Robertson reviews the tenth episode of The Flash season 5…
Back from the Holiday break and no Cicada in sight! Hallejuah!
The Good:
Our mid-season finale last year left us with a tasty little nugget where tired, worn out Thawne has been held in a Pipeline-like prison and Nora can visit him and has been for some time. Tonight we learn it’s in the year 2049 and she has learned quite a bit from, like how to time travel, which makes a lot of sense considering what she’s been up to so far in the show. I tried to keep her movements off my mind when thinking about how badly she could have messed it up; don’t pull on that thread. I have to say I felt like Tom Cavanagh got a little over the top with his performance here, but reined it back in at the end of the episode in a truly tense moment, as the audience, we are Nora, wondering, actually kinda hoping we can trust this man. On the other end, Sherloque continues to pull on the threads he’s been finding in Nora’s wake, and I think it would be most interesting for him to be the man that discovers this other version of himself in the future.
Besides Nora being front and center star this week, we get a fun cute Cisco-Caitlin side story which seems fairly rare these days. Once all the shards have been removed from Cisco (and he gets the meta suture from Killer Frost), a new side of Cisco shows up where he’s actually been pretty okay with not having powers. It causes a rift between the long time friends as everything about Caitlin’s life revolves around her meta abilities; hell she’s had them since before anyone else, so to hear Cisco jump for joy when a possible cure can be brought up for all metas really raises her red flags. It’s fun and rewarding to see these two friends work through these issues, and only a deep friendship can repair this broken bridge when Caitlin offers to give her guidance and advice as Cisco works to see if this can even be possible.
The Not So Good:
This was an episode of The Flash without THE Flash. Nora, whom I’ve gushed over multiple times here, was perfect and full of energy and even if her trial scene felt a bit hammy, she did a superb job bringing it back around and applying the lessons of her father to her meta villain predicament. Barry, on the other hand, was kept locked up so he wouldn’t just phase right out of existence. And what pray tell brought this on? Our latest villain of the week- Silver Ghost. She’s not a meta; just using meta tech. A device that can imbue any car with crazy meta tech: speed, maneuverability, stealth and even invisibility. It’s a strange and oddly specific ability she’s got and luckily, there’s a crazy high tech car she learns about (Thanks Waynetech!) that would be perfect for capers. But, she needs a partner and we’re drawn into a strange scenario where she breaks Weather Witch out of jail to help her. Now, the last time we saw this character, she was trying to brutally murder her dear old Dad, and was quite hateful. When we’re reacquainted with her now, she’s sad, mopey and seemingly almost a different character. We didn’t get nearly enough of Cecile back on duty, but now with meta powers to further confuse her while lawyering it up. It’s a good effort to try and show us villain reform and have Nora be apart of that to push that narrative home, but it didn’t seem to gel with what we knew of this character. And who’s this car junkie to push her like this?
Rating – 7/10 – a fairly pedestrian episode with a lot of major characters either missing entirely or missing in action as Nora (fairly competently) holds her own as our title character this week.
Jessie Robertson
