‘The Flash’ season 2, episode 21 review: Barry and Iris’ moment, Zoom’s gathering in ‘The Runaway Dinosaur’
If there is one word that we’d use to describe Tuesday night’s new episode of “The Flash,” it would be this: Unusual. It’s like that part of “Final Fantasy 7” where Cloud gets Mako poisoning and has the weird sequence where he questions his very existence. For at least three-quarters of this episode, we were treated to a series of unusual scenes of Barry talking to the human manifestation of the Speed Force, who tried to convince him at various times that he was not ready to have his powers back. Why? According to this said force, a big part of it was apparently that he was not ready to deal with the fact that his mother had died.
Yes, this was all incredibly strange, and probably could have been done in a lot less time. However, we did find it interesting, especially getting to see different sides of the likes of Joe West and Henry Allen. Eventually we also saw his mother Nora, where she gave him a little pep talk, they spent some time together, and he started to understand more of the choices he made and had the closure he’s probably been looking for.
Luckily, he did make it back into actual Central City when he did, given that the entire team at STAR Labs were running into a series problem in Girder, who had become the world’s most dangerous reanimated corpse. He of course defeated him, and by the end of this, we also saw Jesse wake up after being unconscious for a while (at least since the incident to get Barry his powers back).
As much as we did enjoy parts of this episode, we do have to admit that there was a lot that felt like filler. Sure, Barry and Iris had a moment and he has his powers back, but the most exciting part was Zoom assembling an army at the very end to destroy Earth-1 completely. That’s a great tease for next week, but we would’ve preferred something that had a bigger balance of the atypical and the traditional here. Grade: B-.
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