I am not entirely sure what to say. Up until the very last scene in last night’s THE FLASH, I was thinking “this is an okay episode. Nice of them to focus on Cisco a little bit. I love Cisco”. And then they go and have Barry disintegrate right before my very eyes. I mean, did we really just watch that?
Obviously, Barry is not dead, so let’s all take a collective deep, calming breath. He is the title character, they are not going to kill him off. But that was certainly shocking. If that had been the season finale, we would have an entire summer to speculate about what really happened and if Barry was still alive or how could he even recover from, you know, not having a body. Fortunately, we only need to wait until next week to see the aftermath of the tragedy that unfolded last night.
But now that I think about it, if they did this on episode 20, I am scared to think what the finale cliffhanger is going to be like.
“Rupture” brought a brand new metahuman to Central City, one that just happened to be Cisco’s brother’s doppelganger from Earth-2. When Cisco got a vibe about his brother Dante, he reached out to him to check if everything was alright. It turned out that Dante’s doppelganger had crossed over to our Earth and was on a vindictive path, thinking Cisco had been the one to kill his brother Reverb. So he attacks Cisco and Dante, but they manage to escape.
Cisco brings him to Star Labs, so he can be safe, but once they get there, Dante finds the note he had left for his family when he went to Earth-2. When Dante confronts him about it, he tells him the whole thing, about being a metahuman, about Earth-2, everything. Except they are not close at all and Cisco points that out to justify not telling his family about what he really does and about his powers. After all, it’s not like they would care.
Elsewhere, Barry is trying to decide whether facing another particle accelerator explosion is the best thing to do. He brings his dad up to speed and Henry is completely against the idea; Harry is pushing him to do it and Joe tells him he should make that decision on his own. After all, last time they tried that – as Cisco helpfully pointed out – they tore a hole in the universe. Eventually, Barry decides against the idea. They need to be sure that the explosion won’t affect the entire city, so he wants to wait until they know that for sure.
Meanwhile, since Barry lost his speed, they have been using a Flash hologram to give the city the impression that Central City is still being protected by the speedster. But Zoom has already crossed over to our Earth with Caitlin and he starts his reign of doom by setting up headquarters at CCPD, driving all officers out of them. So the police sets up shop at Jitters and Zoom sends Rupture, Dante’s doppelganger, there to kill everyone. Caitlin manages to warn the team at Star Labs with a text message and they prepare to use the Flash hologram to distract Rupture until the police can catch him.
And it works too – the police manage to catch Rupture, but Zoom is not happy about that. So he goes over to Jitters, kills a bunch of officers and reporters on live TV and then proceeds to kill Rupture for being such a disappointment. Jay really has some serious anger issues that he needs to work on. Barry is shocked and so is Cisco – after all, he has just watched Zoom kill a guy that looked just like his brother. So he rushes over to Star Labs and we got to watch such a touching scene between him and Dante when they reunited.
Now Barry is a whole other story. After watching Zoom kill everyone, he is determined to try the particle accelerator explosion. He needs his speed back. Harry says he’s got it all under control and he gets in position. Harry tells Cisco to use the Weather Wizard’s wand to create a storm, so they can recreate the lightening bolt that struck Barry that first time around. By then, the Harry Potter references are dropping left, right and center, with the best one being Cisco’s “Expecto Patronum!” when he created the storm.
But that’s when everything goes wrong. Instead of recreating his speed force, Barry disintegrates before their eyes.
Oh, also, Jesse and Wally get caught in the blast, so I guess that’s how they are going to become speedsters, right?
A new episode of THE FLASH will air on May 11 at 8/7c on The CW.