Flash Facts flashfeat

Published on November 21st, 2014 | by Sharp-O

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Flash Facts: “The Flash is Born”

A rather dumb title for an otherwise great episode.
Barry faces a villain from his past while Joe digs deeper into the history of the mysterious Harrison Wells and The Flash is finally christened.

tumblr_nfah390Ufy1rp74xfo3_r1_500 tumblr_nfah390Ufy1rp74xfo4_r1_500The baddie of the week is Girder, aka Tony Woodward. While I’m unaware of his comic origin, a cursory look online reveals that his origin is mostly intact apart from the new added wrinkle of him being Barry’s old bully from school. The child actor for the flashback scene is woeful but luckily that’s his only scene while Greg Finley plays his adult self as psycho-douche perfectly. He’s a bully through and through and taunts The Flash at every opportunity and boasting about it to Iris, who he fancies. Girder kidnaps Iris because of her affiliation to the Flash and wants her to write about him instead to massage his ego. He gets his comeuppance though in a beautiful one-two combo with Barry hitting him at Mach 1.1 and Iris follows up with a wicked cross, the only thing she’s done this season that’s endeared her to me.

tumblr_nfac70CzVb1tnvsx0o1_500 tumblr_nfac70CzVb1tnvsx0o2_500Throughout all this, we get flashes to Joe trying to teach young Barry to box and it’s adorable, both because Joe is the best TV dad ever and because young Iris was clearly trained by Wildcat and mops the floor with Barry.

Joe asks Dr. Wells for help solving the Nora Allen case, as the foremost authority on metahumans since, y’know, his particle accelerator created a bunch. It’s a good dynamic between two professionals and Martian and Cavanagh have a good rapport. Things go south when Joe has the thought that many viewers have; What if Wells killed Nora Allen? Wells dismisses the idea of speedster 14 years before Barry, because there was no accelerator accident and then rebuffs Joe’s accusation that Wells did it by revealing his past. Well, giving Joe the name of his late wife, whom he lost around the same time as Nora died. Joe apologises and requests his help once more and Wells takes off his gla–RUN! No, he doesn’t do anything sinister, just remarks how tenacious Joe is and that Barry is lucky to have him.

tumblr_nf9oyl9vx51slfce6o1_1280Later, however, Joe is visited by The Man in Yellow, as a vortex of yellow and red fills the room. In a matter of seconds, the Reverse-Flash is gone and Joe is left visibly shaken, without the Nora Allen case notes and with a stark warning in the form of a knife through a picture of Iris: Stop or Else. This is a FANTASTIC cliff hanger, because the first hint of RF fills you with dread and the aftermath is just as unnerving.

Another brilliant episode of The Flash and more build up to The Man in Yellow means we’re running full-speed to a confrontation with him but before then, we’ve got an epic team-up in a couple weeks and I’ll see you all next week for Power Outage.

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