Tonight’s episode touched on multiple ‘heavy’ topics. Such as further investigation into the death of Nora Allen and the fall out from last week’s revelation that Ronnie Raymond had been fused with Professor Martin Stein. Even though the subject matter was admittedly a bit dark, this episode had more than it’s fair share of laughs. That is actually one of the many things that make The Flash such an enjoyable show. If this show solely focused on the darkness, it would be its emo cousin “Arrow”. What? Don’t look at us like that. This writer loves Arrow, but lets be real, that show can be a bit of a downer at time.
It seems that Barry is finally trying to move on from pining for Iris, which is a good thing. Barry was lucky enough to meet the lovely Linda Park in last week’s episode. Linda (portrayed by the lovely Malese Jow) is a stark contrast to the somewhat ridge persona of Iris, which can lead to some very entertaining situations with Barry. The visual of Barry getting over excited and vibrating at a Flash like speed was hysterical. Caitlin and Cisco both warned him not to move to fast with Linda (pun totally intended).
Up to this point the team at S.T.A.R. Labs has been content to let Ronnie Raymond A.K.A. “The Burning Man”, A.K.A. “Firestorm”, A.K.A. “F.I.R.E.S.T.O.R.M” (with all these name it must be the 90’s and he must be a member of the Wu Tang Clan) roam free. Until Ronnie’s other personality Professor Stein tries to communicate with a former colleague, loses control and nearly kills his fellow scientist. Dr. Wells, Caitlin, and Barry go to Professor Stein’s home to speak with his wife. She reveals that Ronnie has been randomly showing up at her home. The team takes this as an opportunity to set up a stakeout in the hope of getting Ronniestein (What? It’s better and makes more sense than Bradgelina) to come back to the lab so they can help them get separated.
While all this is happening Joe enlist Cisco to help him investigate the Allen murder at the old Allen house. Joe is hell bent on proving Dr. Wells was somehow involved in Nora Allen’s murder. It’s hard not to understand where he is coming from. You would have to be blind, or indebted to Dr. Wells not to see that he is sketchy at best. In what could best be described as the, “Just go with it” part of the episode, they manage to find 15 year old blood splatter that was covered up by a fresh piece of wallpaper. Seriously, just go with it. Joe asked Cisco to test the two samples they found and see if one belongs to Dr. Wells. Cisco obviously didn’t take Joe’s intimation that the beloved Dr. Wells is a murder very well.
During their second date Linda essentially attempts to, ahem, jump Barry’s bones on his couch before they can leave. Further proving she is the complete opposite of Iris. Linda knows what she wants and she goes after it. In classic superhero fashion, just as Barry is about to get the girl, for lack of a better term, his phone goes off and he has to go deal with the half crazy Burning Man who is in front of the Stein home. As Flash and Firestorm go head to head, Firestorm defeats Flash pretty handily. After flying Flash as high up as he could and dropping him, Firestorm catches him at the last minute. This shows that even though Ronniestein is mixed up in the head, he is not a killer. At least not intentionally.
After all of the back and forth Linda decides to give Barry another chance. She makes the ultimate bad future girl friend move and decides to ask Iris about Barry’s past relationships. In what could best be described as the ultimate burial, Iris goes into this diatribe about how Barry probably isn’t ready because he was into a girl who wasn’t into him and so forth. As this writer watched this, he hoped that a NFL ref would appear and throw a flag on the play. Iris was guilty of pass interference on this one. Iris claims to not have feelings for Barry, but she did a pretty good job of torpedoing any chances he had with Linda. During the brief period Linda and Barry have been involved, every time Iris sees them interact you can tell she has mixed emotions. Candice Patton has done a marvelous job portraying Iris as the confused would-be love interest for Barry. Barry coming clean to her has thrown her world into a tailspin. She doesn’t know how to feel at this point.
After running some test the team find that Ronniestein will explode if they are not separated. Dr. Wells theorizes that the only thing they can do is kill Ronniestein. That will stop them from exploding. Obviously, no one agrees with him. Cisco gets the results back from his blood spatter test. One of the samples came back inconclusive, but the other is from one Barry Allen. Ladies and gentlemen, we have confirmation of time travel! Instead of killing Ronniestein, Dr. Wells consults his evil computer-thingie Gideon and decides to use part of his stolen tachyon tech to fashion a tool that could potentially separate Ronnie and Professor Stein. All in the hopes of stopping the destruction of Central City.
The Flash and Caitlin were able to get the device to Ronniestein, but it was seemingly too late. Just as it was activated Ronniestein went nuclear. After the explosion, we see Dr. Wells old friend General Eiling telling his troops to mobilize and bring him Firestorm.
Episode Rating: 7.5 out of 10
All in all, this was a fun episode. There were tons of laughs, as well as some forced emotional moments between Caitlin and Ronnie. This writer would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little disappointed that we didn’t see more Grodd this week, but hey, at least we finally got the Firestorm storyline out of the way… or have we? #Forshadowing?
