The Flash promised us some more King Shark last week, and they delivered. Along with as many Jaws related jokes as they could reasonably cram into an hour long program.
Everyone is still reeling from the loss of Jay, especially Caitlin. Harry warns Barry and Cisco to avoid mentioning anything about their Earth-2 counterparts, as that may negatively affect them. That being said, Barry is the sort that obviously can’t carry the weight of such a secret and Cisco is super jumpy about people he knows becoming villains, so of course it doesn’t last the entire episode. Caitlin gets a bit of mileage out of that after Cisco lets the cat out of the bag, but not much comes of it other than her pointing out that she’s not just going to turn evil over it. She also mentions that he checked whether she had the Metahuman gene himself, and she doesn’t have it so he’s worrying for nothing.
Barry, on the other hand, has a harder time dealing with it. He got far more emotionally involved, against Jay’s warning, and it’s still affecting him. It takes Iris and Joe sitting him down and asking him what’s wrong for him to fess up about what happened on Earth-2. Sure, it also took a King Shark attack and Wally being an ass, but it happened.
The thing is, Wells didn’t actually kill King Shark. Under Amanda Waller’s orders, A.R.G.U.S. collected him and held him in one of their facilities. In an aquarium with a laser fence. He fakes the guards out by playing dead during feeding time, and they do the usual stupid thing where they deactivate the only thing holding the guy in there to make sure that he’s actually dead. I mean, let’s be honest, it’s like they want to be eaten or something. Diggle and Lyla are discussing her new position as director when they find out that King Shark got out.
Barry’s been spoiling for a fight to work out some of his problems. Lyla and Diggle show up to give him the heads up that King Shark was after him. After a minor disagreement over how to deal with the guy, they agree to spit into teams with some A.R.G.U.S. agents to try and track him down. Their redshirts find him first and King Shark eats most of them and escapes before Barry can even get there.
When King Shark attacks Joe’s house looking for him, Barry has to make an excuse to get away (he spent a portion of the episode helping Wally with an engineering project) and it gives Wally an excuse to be a dick about it. Barry really can’t do much to King Shark because he’s a 12 foot tall shark man who is strong enough to break most of Barry’s ribs with a single swing, and he’s also capable of predicting where Bary’s going to be when he’s running in a circle. He spits out that if he were in water, he’d be faster than The Flash, before being chased off by the arrival of A.R.G.U.S.
Caitlin figures out that King Shark is able to track Barry through electrical impulses thanks to his Earth-1 counterpart’s research. So they do the logical thing and rig up a dummy with the same electrical signature as Barry and stick it on a buoy in the harbor. They filled it with enough tranquilizers to kill an elephant, but he doesn’t actually take the bait. He hops up on the deck to threaten the agents before Barry leads him into the center of the ocean. he traps King Shark in an electrically charged whirlpool and shocks him unconscious with some lightning.
Barry gets everyone together to give a small speech about how much Jay meant to them. He reaffirms his desire to somehow save Jay, and defeat Zoom. Even over protestations that it is impossible, he’s determined to find a way. But that really doesn’t matter. Why?
Because the stinger for this week gives me everything I wanted. Zoom returns to his hideout with what is presumably Jay’s corpse. He dumps it before a very shocked masked guy, before removing his mask and proclaiming it a problem.
And just to show you how on top of this I was, proof that my editor and I saw this coming a week ago:
So I guess The Flash is going to hold out on the man in the greasy mask a little while longer, but I’m pretty sure I’m right, now. We just have to wait.
Final Thoughts:
- One of the guards calls King Shark Bruce, probably in reference to all of the problems they had getting the animatronic shark working in Jaws.
- Wells notes that the container they plan on transporting King Shark in is made of Promethium metal.
- I was as surprised to find that they were going to stretch the most expensive shot they’d done into a full episode as anyone.
- I cannot wait to say that I called it.
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