Welcome back to Flash Facts, everyone! I don’t know about you guys but it’s been one helluva month for me with starting a brand new job! I’m currently writing this high on painkillers so maybe that’s having an influence but I think Godspeed was a fantastic episode and a very strong directorial debut for our resident snow queen, Danielle Panabaker!

Picking up immediately after the last episode, Team Flash is still reeling from the revelation that Nora has been working with Thawne since the beginning and, naturally, pretty much everyone is more pissed with Sherloque for revealing the secret. Okay, that’s not entirely true but it was certainly true of Iris. She kinda walks that back by being the one to let Nora out of the pipeline to explain herself though.

The majority of the episode is set in 2049 via flashforwards as the team reads Nora’s diary and the setting isn’t especially fantastical. A very grounded take on the future, befitting a TV budget. Little details here and there show the advancement of technology but the architecture is largely the same as every other CW show set in the present.

The origin of Nora is pretty interesting, expanding on the details we knew but throwing in a lot of time with Nora’s best friend/girlfriend Lia (A possible nod to the Flash of Earth-9?) and how their investigation into a new speedster results in not only Lia’s death but Nora travelling back in time.

Speaking of the new speedster, having Godspeed tie back into Zoom and the Velocity 9 subplot is an effective way of manufacturing a speedster to act as a foil. I don’t know much about this guy since he’s relatively new but it’s a cool design and he’s voiced by BD Wong and that’s also pretty cool!

Nora’s interactions with Thawne are pretty cool, very The Silence of The Lambs, and really lends credence to why Nora puts her faith in him as a mentor. Because, despite objectively being a monster, Thawne is both charismatic and a damn good teacher and there’s a nice symmetry to him teaching Barry’s daughter the ropes. Hell, there’s a lot of homages to The Flash’s pilot episode that draws a lot of parallels between Barry and Nora.

Once Nora’s full origin is explained, we actually get the unexpected; Barry sticking to his guns and sending Nora back to 2049! I can’t believe he didn’t forgive her immediately and just dumped her ass back in the future and even warned her that if she tried to come back, he’d know. Properly laying down the dad law! That going to come back and bite him in the arse when Iris finds out though… Oh boy, that’s going to be the whole episode next week, isn’t it?

In the stinger, we get a confrontation between Thawne and Barry and Thawne comes across as the bigger man while Barry looks like a petulant bitch. His anger is warranted, mind you, but Thawne telling him not to be angry with Nora is just perfect. With less than ten minutes to go before Thawne’s supposed death, I wonder how much more we’ll see of him and if death will actually stick this time!

Overall, I highly recommend seeing this episode because it’s one of the best of the season and really went a long way to endearing Nora to me again. Be sure to come back next week when we’ll see the fallout of Barry’s decision and an unexpected reunion in Snow Pack!

Now this was a great episode! We don’t mess around by having Thawne establish that shit’s gone off the rails thanks to the new Cicada showing up and that there’s no more time to change things.

With Nora facing a difficult situation (whether or not to tell her dad she’s been helped by the dude who killed her grandma for the past year) naturally we spend most of the time with a meta du jour, with Orlin and Future-Cicada, and with Cisco struggling to keep his work and private lives separate.

In fairness, Cisco’s dilemma is legitimate and this new relationship (shame we never got to see ANY OF IT DEVELOP) is untainted by his life as a superhero so why wouldn’t he want to protect it? Ralph is there to needle him into telling Kamilla the truth with minimal talking-to and it’s all very under-developed as is to be expected.

The dynamic with Orlin and Future-Cicada is really interesting. Barry’s fatherly approach seems to have worked as Orlin is horrified to see what his influence has done to the sweet innocent girl he vowed to protect and goes a long way to redeeming himself in the end with some great acting by Chris Klein. Y’know, before Future-Cicada mercs him like a badass. I’m also glad they didn’t have spend too much time with a mystery and Team Flash know it’s Grace by the half-way point.

And finally we come to Nora’s secret coming out. Oh, she doesn’t reveal it because she’s a massive coward. No, Sherloque has been diligently transcribing and translating Nora’s diary and finally gets the piece of the puzzle he needs by going through Thawne/Wells’s possessions. With all of the theatricality you’d expect from this old detective trope, he reveals that she’s been acting under the orders of Thawne since the Enlightenment.

Hurt/betrayed/thinking clearly for once, Barry wastes no time in throwing Nora into the pipeline. Given Barry’s history with Thawne, best not to take any chances and yeah, maybe he could have listened to her but it’s good to see him act like a damn father and put his misbehaving kid into time-out. With a deadlier Cicada on the loose and Nora’s secret revealed; what else could possibly go wrong for Team Flash?

I really liked this episode and I was all ready to keep this ball a-rolling but apparently the next episode isn’t until April 16th so that’s a bummer. But we are getting Danielle Panabaker’s directorial debut, and that’s pretty neat, so join me then when hopefully we’ll be hitting Godspeed.

And it’s still just as filler-y as before! Two weeks worth of the Scarlet Speedster and there’s only a couple things I want to talk about because Primus knows the Cicada plots not going anywhere.

So let’s take about the major topic; Thawne and Nora. Thawne appears to be on death row or, at the very least, is going to lose his life in a short amount of time. It seems to be less than an hour and it’s unclear how long Nora has been going to see Thawne but it’s weird, and kinda cyclical, that he appears to be in the same kind of mentor role as he was with Barry.

What’s stupid is that Nora didn’t know Thawne killed Barry’s mother. I know The Flash Museum kinda white-washes a lot of Barry’s past but jaysus, that’s kind of a big detail to miss out. But yeah, the theme of the episode is if someone bad can become good so we’ll see if this redemption sticks. Probably won’t.

Nora’s become increasingly frustrating as a character to watch because despite apparently being a massive Flash fan, she knows next to nothing about his tactics, abilities, or his ethics. She’s really kinda shitty and the fact that Team Flash still hasn’t sent her stupid ass back to the future is infuriating.

On a more fun note, look at Grant Gustin’s stupid face. For all the BS surrounding the character, Grant is still a treat to watch when he’s given more direction than “look pensive” and “gaze at Candice”.

Another plot running through these two episodes is the idea of a metahuman cure and if reading X-Men for decades has taught me anything, cures for powers never work out and often make things worse. Granted, this may play a big part towards the finale, but for now it’s just being used as a sore point for Cisco and Killer Frost.

Frost’s motivation to stop Caitlin working on the formula is pretty solid character development and their current symbiotic relationship must be fun for Danielle Panabaker to play.

The only other thing I have to talk about comes in Seeing Red when the tables turn on Cicada and Barry lays some hands on him and it’s nice to see more of Barry’s darker edge. Yeah, he’s a goodie-two-shoes but in the comics, Barry has killed Eobard Thawne before for trying to kill Iris. Broke his neck, it was pretty metal, and this righteous anger is something I hope we see more of. If nothing else, it gives Grant more to do.

Sorry I haven’t got more to say but these two episodes where pretty light on stuff I want to talk about but I’ll be back on a decent schedule next week and I can’t wait to see what the futures holds when we take a trip inside Nora’s mind in Memorabilia!

I mean, with all the filler this season, the last two episodes feel like they’ve had to pack in all the major points they wanted to hit to wrap-up this story. We Are The Flash has a strong familial undertone, from blood-ties to the family we choose and that’s strikes a nice contrast to DeVoe, who has no one.

One of the major points is the birth of Joe and Cecile’s daughter; Jenna Marie West. Cecile’s went into labour when The Enlightenment began and Jenna was born when it came to it’s conclusion.

In a truly heartbreaking moment, Harry sacrifices the last of his remaining intelligence to use the Thinking Cap to relay a message to Cisco. It’s awful to see him slowly going and be left a gibbering mess. Oddly, he begins repeating the same phrases that Barry was muttering when he left the Speed Force and writing in the same cryptic language. Perhaps this is a long-game to tie-in with next year’s villain?

In a curious moment, amidst Barry entering DeVoe’s mind to find the last remnant of good in him, Cecile grabs Caitlin’s arm and talks about a ‘Thomas’ in an unnerving voice. Now Caitlin’s reaction could be taken a couple different ways, between shock at a revelation or simple confusion, but after doing some cursory digging, I can’t find any reference to a Thomas in Caitlin’s history but it must have significance, surely. Only time will tell if this is going to figure into the Killer Frost Retrieval Arc of Season 5.

RALPH’S ALIVE! I’m so happy that we’re not losing Hartley Sawyer and his return was suitably emotional. It’s kinda clever, in hindsight, since DeVoe is only inhabiting Ralph’s body, that Ralph could come back.

DeVoe is defeated in his mindscape, after the ropiest CGI horde of black-clad guys this side of the Burly Brawl and everyone is all smiles, which is grand. Marlize even sticks around long enough to help fix Harry.

I know this scene was attempting to be a bittersweet “end of an era” but I can’t take a Tom Cavanagh departure seriously when the odds are good that he’ll just be back next season. While he’s not back to his full intelligence, Harry seems happy that he’s back to a form of balance between his head and his heart so his character growth isn’t undone.

Wally has a brief return to give a bit of an update about his time with the Legends and to celebrate the birth of his sister. Amidst the festivities, an unannounced guest arrives to throw a spanner in the works and properly set up the next season.

Nora Allen, the speedster daughter of Barry and Iris, clad in her mum’s signature jacket announces herself to the Flash family, after some cute little nods to her various appearances beforehand, not to mention her sneakily helping Barry take out the satellite earlier. So yeah, Nora has screwed up and revealing herself is the better option than fighting this new threat alone so I look forward to having the utterly adorable Jessica Parker Kennedy join the cast next season.

Yes, you heard right, I’m looking forward to it, meaning I won’t be dropping the show and that Flash Facts isn’t cancelled. While this season hasn’t been stellar, there are still nuggets of good story-telling here and the fact that the show runners have said that they’ll be continuing the non-speedster main villain into Season 5, I’m kinda hopeful!

So, for now, I’ll just thank you all for sticking with me this past year and for your continued readership and, as always…