‘The Flash’ season 3, episode 12 review: Iris’ new danger; are Caitlin, Julian a thing?
Iris West is going to die. This was the prophecy that was foretold by Savitar in the winter finale of “The Flash,” and for the past few weeks, we’ve seen Barry Allen do everything he can in order to make sure this doesn’t happen.
However, maybe he and Iris both didn’t put a whole lot of stock into the idea that something could happen before then. Introducing Yorkin, our new meta-human who has the power to make people decompose at a rapid speed. He’s someone who had roots within Flashpoint, so this meant that he was in turn a creation of Doctor Alchemy. Insert some guilt here from Julian, who was reminded of his former life and some of the monsters that he created.
Yorkin had an agenda in this episode that was fairly easy to describe: Take out all of the people who wronged him in the world. Think of this almost as Oliver Queen’s list from “Arrow,” but flipped around. He wanted to, slowly and methodically, take down many people he had a grudge against, and this eventually led him to Joe West. While in the midst of a family visit to Jitters with his girlfriend Cecile and her daughter, Yorkin turned up — which should be considered yet another reminder that Jitters should just move somewhere else sticking around Central City is at this point really getting them nowhere. It’s only causing them more trouble; maybe take out a lease in Hub City?
Iris becomes the target – When we saw Yorkin eventually grab Iris, it put her into a utter despair. He didn’t have her long enough to kill her, which allowed the team back at STAR Labs to keep her alive using one very specific power: Caitlin Snow’s ice, which caused her in turn to slowly turn more and more into Killer Frost again. Were it now for Julian surprisingly playing the hero and giving an impromptu pep-talk, who knows how this would’ve end up going?
Also, let’s go ahead and throw it out there that we ‘ship Caitlin and Julian more than we have either Ronnie or Jay Garrick over the past few seasons. He’s a little less of the classic All-American guy, so he probably appeals more to us as a result of that.
The great train rescue – With Iris in recovery, the team then pinpointed who Yorkin’s next target was going to be, and this put Barry out on the rescue path once more! The problem here is that he had to push himself outside of his comfort zone in order to save a crowd of people on a train. Then, he had to convince Wally that he was capable of phasing through Yorkin and disabling his powers using his blood — he had never done it before, but luckily all of those practices and inspirational speeches from Barry did the trick.
If this was another show, we’d be more critical of the “everything just so happens to work out in the nick of time” storytelling, but it’s “The Flash.” It’s meant to be happy and optimistic, so it feels almost jerky to be overly cynical about it.
Overall – “Untouchable” is one of those episodes where you probably wanted more just because there wasn’t much on Savitar or the larger mythology of the season. Also, it was obvious that Iris was going to survive — the biggest development was Joe finally being told about the vision of the future.
In the closing minutes of the episode, we did got a nice moment for Caitlin and Julian. (They’re getting a drink, people!) Also, Joe’s starting to make a bond with Cecile and her daughter … thanks mostly to her love for Kid Flash. We also forget the super-lovely Iris / Barry moment where she told him how much she trusts him.
Now, your cliffhanger — Wally saw a breach open to Earth-2 open, and Jesse came through! She made it clear that Grodd had her father captured in Gorilla City! Episode Grade: B+.
When is the show returning? – You can get some more answers to that subject by heading over to the link here. (Photo: The CW.)