‘The Flash’ season 2, episode 17 review: Barry time-travels; Eddie returns; Hartley’s new ending

On Tuesday night’s new episode of “The Flash,” we had time travel on all fronts. In some ways, the same can be said on a meta level since this episode actually was supposed to air before the events of the “Supergirl” crossover. This is why it was somewhat anti-climactic in the end.

Yet, there was still quite a bit of fun stuff to like from start to finish on “Flash Back,” at least once we started to really get a chance to see how Barry’s decision to go back into the season 1 timeline would change his future. He wanted help from Harrison Wells a.k.a. Eobard Thawne, and he got it; however, in the process Hartley also had a very different fate, and luckily in the year that had passed, the team at STAR Labs with his help had figured at this point how to kill the wraith once and for all.

Was there a lot of filler in this hour? It felt like it, but we did have a few especially nice moments. Take, for example, the return of Rick Cosnett as Eddie; Barry having him record a message for Iris was a nice touch, since it ensured that she would have a precious memory of him after his impending death. It was hard not to get a little choked up seeing Barry passing that message along to her in the future, and this message about moving forward was a microcosm for the hour.

Ultimately, though, we’d say that the amount of fan service and Barry getting what he wanted from Wells doesn’t help to fix our feeling entirely that this was an episode that was a little bit of a letdown. Given that it was the last for the show before a hiatus, we expected some sort of big reveal. Not only that, but they didn’t even attach it that well to the “Supergirl” crossover. Episode Grade: B-.

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