‘The Flash’ season 3, episode 11 review: Cisco, H.R. find common ground through Gypsy’s arrival

For everyone out there who wanted to see Cisco Ramon suddenly be forced into the role of Vibe, Tuesday night’s new episode of “The Flash” entitled “Dead or Alive” brought that fire and then some. He felt his biggest adversary to date in Gypsy, who just so happened to be one of the biggest inter-dimensional travelers in all of her home world of Earth-19. She was basically the show’s version of the Dimension Police.

The violator was none other than H.R. Wells, famed novelist and man of many blunders. Gypsy arrived to take him back to Earth-19, as traveling to other Earths is a violation of their law punishable by death. Apparently, one other rule from their Earth is that you can have trial by combat, which suggests to us that “Game of Thrones” must still exist over there. Cisco, despite Barry’s wishes, put himself up at her mercy. Part of this may have been wanting to impress someone he found to be beautiful; another part of this was him holding onto a little bit of the gratitude that he felt towards Wells over everything that he did for him in the past. Cisco had his doubts — plenty of them — but he got the training necessary to prepare for battle.

Also, kudos to Julian for finding his role on the team now: Grumpy realist. He relayed to everyone on the team some of the hard facts, but also devised for Cisco a way to beat her that almost felt like when you get a strategy guide telling you how to beat a final boss of a video game. It worked! Also, he won! Julian’s “she must have been having an off day” line at the end was hilarious.

Cisco didn’t actually want to kill her, so the good news is she gets to walk away from this. She’s returning him, and made a deal that she would let H.R. stay there so long as he never returned home. Basically, she was planning to lie about killing him in order to cover her own you-know-what.

Iris and Wally strike out alone – In looking to recreate the crime-fighting duo from Flashpoint, she wanted the help of Kid Flash to take out an arms dealer that she’d had her eye on at work. Was this a little reckless? Sure, but Wally certainly is, and we dig his sort of joyous / free-wheeling superhero style. She also felt confident that she wasn’t going to die because of the fact that she’d seen the future, but her actions were absolutely causing her some serious trouble thanks to Joe, who was nervous. After all, the guy was still in the dark about what was really going on out there.

The ending for the week – Barry and Iris celebrated her getting a major article out there for everything to read, while H.R. gets to breathe a little easier — for now.

Your cliffhanger is rather simple: After some experiments, Barry realized that it is Wally, and not him, who may be capable of taking on Savitar.

Grade: B+. This was a fun episode of the show. We didn’t seriously think that any person was in jeopardy, and this seemed to set up a situation where we could be seeing this particular incarnation of Wells around for a rather long time.

Next week – A new meta-human is entering the fray, and this could be someone who poses a threat to Iris just like Savitar does. Whether or not she takes it serious remains to be seen. For now, you can head over here to get some other details surrounding what is coming up next. (Photo: The CW.)