The Flash came back just in time for the Supergirl crossover they’ve been setting up. Everything came roughly around the same time, too. Almost like they’d planned it that way or something…
Barry spends an awfully large amount of time obsessing over getting faster. His attempt at recreating the Snake River Jump increasing his speed ultimately fails. Which is why Cisco brought his drones… and a net.
They decide that they need to take a break since they’ve made no headway against their problems. Jessie begs Harry to let her go with them to the cloughb club. He initially resists, but lets her go on condition that she take his metahuman identifier watch/chronicle of his darkest secrets. Yeah, nothing bad can possibly happen there, Harry.
Jessie’s not old enough to drink, and it basically has no effect on Barry so I don’t know why he bothers. Iris and Wally show up at one point, pretty much for the sake of obvious foreshadowing on Wally’s part. Jessie gets sick of the detector going off every three seconds around Barry, and (not) coincidentally Wally, and takes it into the bathroom to fiddle with its guts, accidentally activating Harry’s voice logs and hearing the bit about how he’d kill (Barry specifically) to get her back from Zoom. Oops.
Barry and Iris are watching Cisco fail to dance when a speedster breaks into the club and pickpockets everyone’s cash. Barry tries to catch up to them, but simply can’t match their speed. Obviously this was someone who was aware of the needs of a speedster based on attire alone. Barry laments the fact that there’s nothing that could possibly even the playing field, and that’s when Caitlin brings up the Velocity 9.
He’s understandably pissed that they’ve been hiding it from him all this time. Caitlin and Harry point out that it was killing Jay every time he used it, though.Since there’s only one way (that they know of) to become a speedster, they draw the logical conclusion that Velocity 9 is involved. Caitlin mentions that an old colleague of hers helped her with stabilizing the cellular matrix, and she and Joe go to check on her.
Iris has a side plot dealing with her new editor. He keeps wanting her to write an article about The Flash going bad, because he has an almost J. Jonah Jameson-type obsession with The Flash being evil. It’s due to an early job he had where he’d exposed a political figure as corrupt, but no one cared. Also, he awkwardly thinks their discussion of this over coffee is a date. It really doesn’t go anywhere in this episode, but it’ll probably crop up again in the future.
Jessie and Harry have it out over the recording. She’s sick of the paradoxical thinking he’s using in regards to protecting her. He’s still trying to protect her, but that will only hold her back at this point. This ultimately leads to her leaving at the end of the episode, just to get away from his overzealous need to protect her.
Caitlin’s friend is more that cooperative to them. Joe admits that they have to take her at her word when she says that there’s no way she’d backwards engineer Velocity 9 from what little she knew of the drug. But come on, she may as well be the butler, because she did it.
This portion of the episode plays like a sports movie about a performance enhancing drug scandal. Dr. Harmon is addicted to the stuff, and literally has a voice in her head telling her to keep taking it and cause chaos. She’s also taken to calling herself Trajectory, to Cisco’s chagrin. Harry convinces Barry not to take V9 by appealing to his better angels and pointing out that it won’t make him better in the long run.
Trajectory breaks into STAR Labs, locks Barry in the pipeline, and demands they make her more V9. She tests it on Jessie sending her into shock due to the drug’s purity, before leaving and taking more herself. Barry catches up to her destroying a bridge. He saves everyone on it, but the bridge collapses before he can catch her. He makes the jump he couldn’t earlier in the episode, and knocks her out, briefly. She responds by taking more V9. Unfortunately for her, it turns her lightning blue and causes her to disintegrate at super speed.
Barry hypothesizes that Zoom might be suffering from the same situation. The only person they know that was suffering from the cellular degeneration from the drug was Jay. Cisco pipes up about vibing Zoom the entire episode, and handing him Jay’s helmet confirms that Jay is Zoom, and that Zoom is dying. Which is why he needed Barry’s speed.
I was surprised The Flash didn’t set up the crossover this episode. I’m guessing it will involve dimensional travel as a means of returning to Earth-2, though. Barry did talk about it… sort of.
Final Thoughts:
- Every time Cisco gets excited about someone, they die.
- Handing his daughter the most incriminating thing he could was not a bright move on Harry’s part.
- I’m now wondering if they’ll go any further with Velocity 9 being addictive.
About Author
