I was honestly expecting this episode of The Flash to deal with crossover related things. Well, technically, it does to some degree. It just doesn’t do so directly, as you might expect.
Barry desperately needs to up his speed. Caitlin shows him all of the data available to compare between him and other speedsters, and it turns out that despite the fact that they all move their legs at the same speed, they all move faster than he can. Barry promptly begins the usual pity party which always gets interrupted by something.
At dinner, Iris mentions her half date with her editor, mostly to bring up how much she still misses Eddie. Wally shows up late, which is the obvious joke with someone obsessed with speed. As they’re sitting down and waiting for Joe to bring out the food without oven mitts, Wally mentions how his professors are seriously discussing his engine ideas. Specifically, how he had read up on the more famous performance car makers like Enzo Ferrari and Ferdinand Porsche, including manuals and writings as research. This snaps Barry out of his funk and gives him a terrible fucking idea. Which he ditches dinner to head over to STAR Labs and implement.
Oh, yes, he plans to time travel back to a time where Eobard Thawne wasn’t dead and get some very directional tutoring from him. Harry is against it, but when has Barry NOT ignored him as was convenient? The answer is never, and Caitlin gives him a sedative that should knock his past self out long enough for him to get what he needs from Eobard!Wells. Cisco suggests the time between when Hartley showed up and his attack on the dam, as everyone was suspicious of Wells at that time and his actions won’t arouse too much suspicion.
He travels back, being passed by a ghostly apparition along the way. He arrives too early, though; just as his past self was dealing with Hartley for the first time. He accidentally gets his own attention, and there’s a brief fight over the attempted sedation, which Future-Barry wins, switching chest emblems with his former self to complete the disguise. He makes quick work of Hartley.
He then immediately begins fucking up the future like everyone told him not to do, because he can’t help himself. He nudges Cisco to check for Hartley’s aural implants, immediately turning up that they were set to do something. Eobard!Wells notices the catch, and becomes even more suspicious when Barry lays out what, for the time, is a fairly unorthodox plan to increase his speed. Since the horrifying ghost thing rips it’s way through the CCPD building, Barry doesn’t get his answer immediately.
Barry quite literally sees a ghost when he gets there, since Eddie’s still alive during this time. Barry takes the brief opportunity to trick Eddie into giving an honest account of his feelings for Iris, supposedly as part of a birthday video Barry plans to make. The posthumous delivery of Eddie’s video actually winds up being sort of sad and sappy, but that’s okay. The whole episode is weird.
Before Barry gets back, the ghost attacks STAR Labs, only being driven away by Hartley’s gauntlets. Something to do with finding its frequency. When he gets back, Wells knocks him out and they have a nice chat in the time vault. Eobard isn’t an idiot, and the crossover proved that Barry can’t really keep a secret all that well. He does, however, apparently lie well enough to convince Eobard that not only will his plans work out, but that he’s actually taken steps to protect himself from being disposable to Wells. Wells identifies the thing as a Time Wraith, and most Speedsters that time travel (yes, there are more) take steps to avoid them entirely, but Barry’s luck clearly ran out.
The whole trip turns into a clusterfuck when Past-Barry shows back up. Their only real solution to the Time Wraith problem is that Barry traveling back to the future gives them the time to figure out how to kill it. Wells tells Future-Barry that tachyons are the answer, giving him a Time Vault compatible thumb drive with the info he needs. Since he can’t help fucking things up further, Future-Barry lets Cisco know that Hartley knows where Ronnie is. He switches emblems with his past self again, and his past self helps throw his future self into the future while the Time Wraith harries them.
Back in the present, they didn’t actually figure out the problem, since the gun Cisco built doesn’t really work on it. The Time Wraith is well on its way to turning Barry into the Cryptkeeper when Hartley shows up and blasts it with his gauntlets, having found the right frequency. Barry’s intervention completely changed the original ending of his episode, and the mention of Pied Piper and the tachyon device dovetails with the crossover. It clearly worked to help Hartley turn his life around, since he’s talking with his parents again.
So The Flash has fucked his own timeline again. One day, he’s going to crush the butterfly that kept the world from becoming a fascist hellhole, and only he will know that he screwed everything up. At least this time, the damage seemed to be minimal, I guess?
Final Thoughts:
- The rights to “Never Gonna Give You Up” have to be pretty cheap at this point.
- Past-Cisco actually makes mention of how he can’t just psychically figure out where the Time Wraith is. Good game, writers.
- One of the writers across The Arrow/Legends of Tomorrow/Supergirl/The Flash is a Wrath of Khan loving Trekkie. I have no problem with this.
- Next week is Zoom’s origin story time.
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