Oh man, this is it. The first season finale of CW’s The Flash. They managed to stuff an hour with so much stuff, it’s crazy.
They’ve kept Wells in the accelerator containment cell since they caught him last episode. I thought it was pretty funny how disappointed he was that Barry didn’t bring him anything from the Big Belly Burger, since they’re out of cows in his home time. It would normally be a very Futurama type of joke, but it’s not played up. The scene pretty much lays everything on the table, or at least all we’ll really get. Eobard gives Barry a deal; if Barry helps him return to his own time, Eobard will let him return to the past and undo the many, many wrongs he did, starting with the murder of Barry’s mother.
Much of the episode is a “will he, won‘t he” type of deal. Every time it looks like he will take the offer, something comes up, be it a problem with the method, the danger of opening the wormhole, or Barry’s own reluctance to change things. The problem with undoing Eobard’s wrongs is obviously very real, to anyone familiar with the sort of time travel shenanigans that have happened. Realistically, there’s no way to erase the events of that night, and simply stopping Eobard from killing Barry’s mother wouldn’t be enough, as the events of that night should never have happened in the first place. Many of these fears are brought up by Professor Stein, who explains the crux of the drama in much the same way as the Ray Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder. The further back you go to change things, the more compounded those changes are, and simply going back to stop a change would introduce a whole host of new problems.
One of the best parts of the episode involves Eobard and Cisco. Over the season, there have been little hints in regards to Cisco’s character in the comics. In one episode, Wells alludes to the fact that he thinks Cisco and Caitlin are better off in his altered timeline. In another, Cisco makes a comment about understanding sound waves. But the most important of all is the fact that Cisco remembers being killed by Wells in the timeline that Barry changed. When he reveals that to Eobard while trying to get a fix for the time machine he’s building for him, Eobard informs Cisco that he was, in fact, altered by the accelerator explosion. See, this is one of those things that the show doesn’t explain, but that a quick wiki search will. All of the metahumans created by the accelerator explosion were not, in fact, really created by the explosion. They, Barry and Cisco included, were carriers of something called the metagene, which in the comics is generally used as an explanation of why some people randomly sprout superpowers when exposed to, say, lethal radiation, while others die. The event in question activates the metagene and they get super powers. Cisco was meant to be Vibe, but Eobard’s timeline monkeying prevented the event that would’ve originally triggered his gene. Why did I explain all of this? Because it says a lot about Eobard Thawne’s character when he tells Cisco to remember that he gave him that gift, and that it was given out of love.
Ultimately, despite all of the problems of doing so, Barry decides to travel back to the night his mother died The effect used for the trip is interesting, to say the least. You can spy a few scenes that have been on the show, a few that have yet to happen, and a few that were supposed to happen and never did. When he gets there, he winds up in his old room, goes downstairs and sees the scene play out exactly as it did in the past. He’s about to walk out when his past/future self holds up a hand and shakes his head, stopping him. He doesn’t save his mother because of this, but he does have a moment with her as she’s dying. Grant Gustin really shows what he can do in this scene; it’s a very genuine response to watching a loved one die.
As Eobard prepares for his trip, he applauds the skill with which Cisco built it. He name drops Rip Hunter in doing so. When he sees a Flash helmet pop out of the wormhole, he tells everyone that it is his cue to go.
He thanks Cisco, hops in the time machine, and powers it up. Just as home is within his grasp…
The time machine is destroyed, and Eobard is pissed. Time ticks down, and the wormhole is stopped from turning into a singularity by the slimmest of margins. Eobard has Barry on the ropes, but just can’t resist monologing about how he always wins. A single shot rings out, but Eobard was not hit. Eddie shoots himself in the chest, causing Eobard to cease to exist, and culminating Eddie’s arc for good. As he and Eobard die simultaneously, the wormhole grows into a singularity even though Caitlin, Ronnie, and Dr. Stein turned off the accelerator. Barry gets Joe and Iris out of there, and the singularity rises into the sky to threaten the world. Barry makes the decision to stop it as other characters watch on, and we get left with a cliffhanger.
Overall, this is what I really like to see. This is how you end a season. I don’t like cliffhangers that much though. That’s pretty much the only reason it’s not getting a perfect score, because the ratings for the season prove that it was unnecessary. But maybe they’ll do something with it next season? Who knows, but the writers and producers?
Final Thoughts:
- Oh man, season 2 will be nuts! Hype!
- That scene with Barry’s mother hit me pretty hard, for reasons I won’t discuss here
- This is, according to the producers, not the last we will see of Tom Cavanagh. I’d love to know how.
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