‘The Flash’ episode 7 review: The Blackout battle; the Harrison Wells mystery
Now that we are a good seven episodes into this first season of “The Flash,” we are starting to get more and more of an idea as to how this version of the Barry Allen story is going to be told. Humor is heavily emphasized more so than “Arrow,” and so are super-heroic moments. Ultimately, it’s a fun show!
The one thing that it still struggles with is that it is a hokey show, and they are really insulting the intelligence of the Iris character right now by not having her realize that Barry is the Flash. The two are of similar builds, he showed up right when Barry woke up, and with the way that he is acting right now, he may as well wear a sign over his head proclaiming himself to be the fastest man alive.
The Iris story is by far the weakest part of the show right now, which is somewhat unfortunate because we’re supposed to root for these two to be together. Meanwhile, we have a feeling that the entire SnowBarry camp is really only picking up steam, even though that seems unlikely to become Olicity 2.0 for the time being.
What made “Power Outage” a reasonably good episode of the show was seeing a whole lot of Harrison Wells, and also starting to understand a little bit of what he is really up to. He wants to preserve the future using Barry, and will protect him at all costs. This means basically allowing Girder to be killed as a temporary way to ensure that they could distract Blackout, the awesome villain of the week, long enough for Barry to figure out how to use his powers again.
While all of this was going on, the West family had to deal with the return of Clock King (Robert Knepper) to this universe, as he nearly escaped with Iris as a hostage after holding up the entire Central City police department. By and large, this was definitely entertaining, but we have to wonder if it could have been more effective as a separate episode. Given how great Knepper is, he deserved more screen time than what he had.
We find ourselves liking the show mostly for Barry and for Dr. Wells right now, while most of the rest of it is okay. Caitlin is by far the most-improved character since the pilot, but they are still figuring Iris and Cisco out. This is a show worth going on the journey with for now, even if we get a sense that it is going to be a long story before this show really meets that potential. If only we could peek into the future like Harrison can. Grade: B.
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