The Flash: The Girl With The Red Lightning
May 8, 2019 7:38 PM - Season 5, Episode 21 - Subscribe

Team Flash is on high alert after Cicada II threatens to unleash a dangerous virus that would put all meta-humans at risk.
posted by oh yeah! (10 comments total)
 
In an episode filled with nonsensical gibberish, I guess I am especially struck by:

- This is suddenly a world with enough metahumans to have a riot or form an army.

- Piles and piles of these persecuted people feel safest at the police station to get injected with a drug they've never heard of, rather than worrying it's a sting/roundup/prelude to Civil War registration shenanigans.

I mean, I could go on and on about the failures this show has indulged in, (Cicada is just the worst, and Cicada 2.0 is heaping failure atop failure), but that's the one that rose to the top when I was actually watching it.
posted by mordax at 8:28 PM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


The dumbest exchange of the night came after Cisco zapped away the satellite and didn't care enough to figure out the answer to where did it go. Really? You're supposed to be scientists and you're mucking around with matter teleportation and transmutation. Maybe it would be, I don't know, smart to have some clue what you're doing, just so you don't inadvertently make matters worse (which, of course, has never been known to happen in the history of Team Flash).

I know I'm not supposed to judge this show by real world standards, but sometimes I just can't stop myself. There is no way on this earth that the CCPD would be permitted to be used as a staging area to inject non-FDA approved drugs into what are essentially test subjects. Nope. The insurance holder on the building alone would have stamped that plan with a big red REJECT.

The whole shipping of Ms. Adler off to Sherloque's world is another one of these Flash plots that makes me want to scream. I presume in delivering his multiverse spiel, Sherloque didn't bother to tell her that she has/had a double on his earth (I can't remember the status of that earth's wife). Okay, getting away from somebody who wants to kill you is one thing, but it sounds like she plans on staying on that earth with Sherloque and as far as the viewers can tell, that relationship hasn't reached the stage yet where that sounds like a logical next step.

On the plus side, Nora's sweater was cute.
posted by sardonyx at 8:36 PM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


The dumbest exchange of the night came after Cisco zapped away the satellite and didn't care enough to figure out the answer to where did it go.

Oh, I dunno, the last time they sent away the dagger using transdimensional teleportation, everything went really, really... oh.

But it's not like Cisco was presiding over that debacl-.. oh.

Yeah, this is also fair. Part of why my commentary here isn't lengthier is that this is such a gigantic tangle of stupid plot points that I'm having a hard time even isolating anything at this point.

To flip it around, I guess the one plot point I do believe is Thawne successfully manipulating Nora and, indirectly, the entire gang, but it still comes back around to just how incompetent they are. (Of course Nora listened to him for a good long while, looking at who else she had to work with, and I totally believe they'd just go along with Thawne's suggestions because they are so appallingly bad at everything.)

Gah, this show.
posted by mordax at 8:47 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


I know. I've kind of given up trying to follow the "logic" of this show. I mean that would lead to questions like why is a man condemned to die allowed to have a weapon strapped to him while in the electric chair? Or is it why is the government using a weapon strapped to a man slated to die in an electric chair when there are better ways of depowering and immobilizing the inmate?
posted by sardonyx at 9:01 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


This is just proof of the stupefying power of the Speed Force. Be around enough Speed Lightning and your reality turns into a jiggling pile of stereo-gram logic. If you just look at it crossed-eyed enough the smiling face of Alfred E. Thawne waits for you to see that all reality as you know it is an elaborate plan within a plan within a Philip K. Dick novel's worth of paranoia and disembodied consciousness until you realize that it is all the work of the true master manipulator, Gideon. That's right folks, Barry still needs to build her and this is all some long-term scheme to insure her own creation. She will eventually found the Time Masters, her descendant AI will charm us all, and help insure that the only people with insufficient contact to the Speed Force and sufficient power to stop the insanity never interfere.

Crazy idea? Sure. But at least it is a thread that holds together a little better than this. Though I was pleased that Ralph at least suspected they were all being manipulated. Writers, if you ever stick your noses in our fair corner of the Internet would you please consider that those of us who watch your shows would appreciate, ever so much, the growth of characters who have a persistence of memory. In other words could they please stop making the same mistakes. New mistakes or therapy. Thank you.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 3:41 AM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


I’m starting to think Barry created Gideon the same way that I “created” Microsoft Word in that, sure, that’s my name in the About box as “registered to” but that’s the end of it.
posted by Servo5678 at 7:15 AM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


I think you've put more thought into the Flash timeline than the writers have Ignorantsavage, and made a much more logical argument that pretty much anything we've seen presented by the show in a long time.
posted by sardonyx at 8:07 AM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


"why is a man condemned to die allowed to have a weapon strapped to him while in the electric chair?"

The dagger dampens Thawne's powers. If the dagger is zapped away in the present it doesn't exist in the future and Thawne regains his powers.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:30 PM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


The mirror gun essentially removes an object from the world, kind of like a matter vaporizer (there's a much better phrase in science fiction that I'm failing to remember). I don't think it sends anything anywhere.
posted by numaner at 12:37 PM on May 16, 2019


Time travel in this show is such a mess. If the dagger disappears in the past, Thawne would never gets imprisoned, thus never helping Nora travel to the past and... never destroying the dagger.
posted by numaner at 12:56 PM on May 16, 2019


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