The Flash: The Reverse-Flash Returns
January 28, 2016 10:31 PM - Season 2, Episode 11 - Subscribe

When Cisco gets a vibe of Eobard Thawne, Barry and the team don’t believe it. But, after an attack at Mercury Labs, Christina McGee confirms that the Reverse Flash is back. Meanwhile, Iris and Francine share a nice moment that brings Iris closer to her brother, Wally.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich (25 comments total)
 
Okay, so, first: even by Flash standards, none of that time-travel gibberish made any sense. I'm okay with it, but still. Dang. That's some next-level nonsense.

Second: THANK GOD PATTY FIGURED IT OUT.

Third: Hunter Zolomon?! Are you kidding me, show?
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 5:40 AM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Third: Hunter Zolomon?! Are you kidding me, show?

Straight from the comics. Come to think of it, so is the time-travel gibberish.
posted by kewb at 6:18 AM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh, I know. It's the implications for the season arc that I'm WHAT?!'ing at.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 6:33 AM on January 29, 2016


Yeah, that time travel nonsense was just too much this time around. "Now I know what era you come from" What was that. He's a time traveller with a super-smart AI and he couldn't just hop on whatever his era's equivalent of Google is and do a search for Flash's history? I mean he said he studied the Flash, so you'd assume that would have involved reading about when he first appeared. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
posted by sardonyx at 7:49 AM on January 29, 2016


Yeah, that time travel nonsense was just too much this time around. "Now I know what era you come from" What was that.

I had assumed that meant the Flash was just doing a lot of time travel, and was hard to nail down, but then the thing about him dying soon makes less sense. We also know the Flash has a death date that's certain in Future Thawne's knowledge of things, but maybe younger Thawne doesn't know that yet? The time travel was stupider than usual this episde, as noted, so who knows. For instance, Earth 2 Harrison Wells' explanation about being protected by the Speed Force made as much sense as anything involving the phrase "protected by the Speed Force" ever can, and then bam! he undid it seconds later with a different and, to my ear, contradictory explanation that made zero sense. It was a solid episode if you ignored that hows, though.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 8:55 AM on January 29, 2016


So is Patty going to be making late night, cross country booty calls?
posted by ODiV at 9:01 AM on January 29, 2016


Also he said Thawne must have been in the speed force to be protected from the timeline shift except he wasn't, he was gloating in front of Barry.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:26 AM on January 29, 2016


So is Patty going to be making late night, cross country booty calls?

Technically, Barry could. There's no such thing as a long-distance relationship with the Flash.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:21 AM on January 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


My husband was all "waitaminnit" and hitting the googles the second Hunter Zolomon was mentioned.

It was a bit of a grab bag episode. One from column A, one from column B, etc. That was harder for me than all the timey wimey stuff.
posted by immlass at 10:52 AM on January 29, 2016


What really sealed the nail on the coffin though was the explanation that Reverse Flash came to understand the accident that created Barry. Well, the explosion at Star Labs would have definitely had a fixed date in time that would have been easily searchable.
posted by sardonyx at 12:47 PM on January 29, 2016


While I enjoy this show (and Cisco & Wells) I must say that..

Holy freakin' Christ they ruined Patty for me this episode! She was an upfront, badass chick who wasn't afraid to call Barry out on his BS. (Remember the "You can't see can you?" on the sunglasses date?) But then he tries to talk to her, and she shuts him down saying she's moving, doesn't hear him out, then goes to him basically saying "Well if you just BEG ENOUGH I MIGHT STAY!" Then Barry explains that he can't control her and wants her to do what she wants to do and doesn't want to ruin her dreams of going to school (which is one time when he's not being an idiot around girls) then she does it AGAIN saying "I'll stay if you tell me you're the flash! sob sob" WTH. Who is this chick?

I literally yelled at the screen "You're in charge of your own damn destiny girl. If you want to stay, then stay!" Like, they could have still hand a drama conversation without it being a total 180 of her character and suddenly she's playing mind games outta nowhere. Uhg.

So yeah, I actually had a pretty hard time paying attention to anything in this episode because of her total drama llama flip flop out of nowhere. The writing seemed so off all of a sudden.
posted by Crystalinne at 3:45 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Sooooo angry at passive-aggressive Barry, soooooo angry at Patty pulling a false alarm to see if she's right that her boyfriend a liar.

Everything else was fine by me.
posted by Kitteh at 5:36 PM on January 29, 2016


she does it AGAIN saying "I'll stay if you tell me you're the flash! sob sob" WTH. Who is this chick?

I wasn't very patient with that part either. But I felt like what they were trying to write in their ham-handed way was that she was looking for a sign from Barry that he was going to commit to her. Specifically, if he admitted that he was the Flash (which is a big trust leap), that it was a step toward him stopping being distant and fucking around in the relationship and she wouldn't have to leave, or, more importantly, WANT to. Whereas it seemed to me that Barry had cut ties and moved on already so there was nothing to save or say. Either way, it was badly written.
posted by immlass at 6:56 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


I loved that everyone on the train just kept doing whatever they were doing after The Flash arrived. "Oh, it's The Flash! ...Whatever."
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:06 PM on January 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


Yeah, that was weird.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:57 PM on January 29, 2016


Stop being so blasé about your superhero, Central City.
posted by Kitteh at 3:26 AM on January 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Seriously. There were people who went right back to their reading.
posted by brundlefly at 12:31 AM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hunter Zolomon?! Are you kidding me, show?!

Hunter Zolomon, with Jay Garrick's face and Cobalt Blue's backstory. GO HOME, FLASH, YOU'RE DRUNK

Something horrifying that occurred to me in the Arrow thread: Maybe the reason The Flash series has started name-dropping basically every single DC speedster on the show is so they can fall back on [insert name here] for speedster stuff once DC goes "we're doing a Flash movie in two years, so no more Eobard Thawne / Wally West / Jessie Quick for YOU!"
posted by nicebookrack at 3:28 PM on February 1, 2016


Bad News for Team Flash Women #1: I am quite fond of Earth-2 Jay for all that he's mostly sat around looking handsome and presumably doing crossword puzzles. But I'm kinda uneasy now that he's gonna turn out to be evil and/or Zoom and thus totally crush poor Caitlyn's heart again. You can't have Jay Garrick / Hunter Zolomon Doppelgängers and have them both be good guys, and evil orphan Zolomon is almost...too easy? I am looking forward to the threesome fanfic though

Bad News for Team Flash Women #2: It stung that in the same episode as Iris talking about how much she's mourned Eddie, we find out that Eddie basically died for nothing(?). And no one told Iris that Eobard Thawne was back. I'm undecided whether she needs to be told immediately or whether that's one secret everyone should keep from Iris forever.

Bad News for Cisco: The Legends of Tomorrow crew simply needs to drag Cisco along on their time-travel jaunts as a geiger-counter of how badly they're screwing up the timeline. "Has Vibe fizzled out of existence yet? No? Okay, keep going!"
posted by nicebookrack at 3:50 PM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


she does it AGAIN saying "I'll stay if you tell me you're the flash! sob sob" WTH. Who is this chick?

I read it as basically saying "Are you going to stop lying to me? If you stop lying, we could have the possibility of a relationship. No? Well fuck."

Then again, at this point, pretty much every time Barry talks to a woman, my reaction is "DON'T ANSWER HIM! DON'T MAKE EYE CONTACT! MOVE TO ANOTHER DIMENSION!!!"

Seriously, Barry is so freaking toxic at this point, I cringe at the idea of him being in any relationship.
posted by happyroach at 9:43 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


If Barry learned anything from Oliver's terrible romantic history and advice, it should have been to only date people who already know your secret vigilante identity.

Honestly, Barry, it's too bad you're still hung up on Iris, because Laurel, Thea, Cisco, and Leonard Snart are single!
posted by nicebookrack at 11:22 PM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Seriously, Barry is so freaking toxic at this point, I cringe at the idea of him being in any relationship.

Shepherd was like, "I just love Grant Gustin! He's so cute." I responded, "Yes, but hopefully he is not made of Terrible Relationship Communication Mistakes like Barry."
posted by Kitteh at 7:42 AM on February 2, 2016


I suppose it's just relationship shorthand in these shows, but is it at all realistic that you're expected to let the person you've been dating for a month know absolutely everything about you? The kicker is that if they do stick around longer than a few episodes they'll end up having a host of their own mysterious secrets.
posted by ODiV at 8:06 AM on February 2, 2016


I think the key question should be "Is this person important enough to me that a villain will kidnap them to use against me, or harm them to hurt me?" In that case, there's a duty to warn.

Of course in Barry's mind the idea is evidently "Good enough to sleep with, but not good enough to warn them of the danger in associating with me."
posted by happyroach at 6:37 PM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Various thinkings:

1) It's a CW show. I'm not sure they can even conceive of a show without Major. Relationship. MELODRAAAMMMAAAZZZ. A lot of their shows (and a lot of the shows on their predecessor networks UPN and The WB) could be subtitled "Terrible Relationship Communication Mistakes". So I don't expect it to improve - mostly I suspect I'll just burn out on it sometime around the fifth or sixth go 'round. (I've pretty much abandoned Arrow at this point because Too Much Melodrama. Flash being a lighter less grimdark show might keep me around longer, but we'll see.)

2) BUT . . . . Joe's DadTalk with Barry right at the end, about choosing the life of a hero means Barry has to make hard decisions and sacrifices, makes me nervous. Like the whole point of Patty was just a set-up so Barry could learn a lesson about making sacrifices, because the whole rest of the season is gonna lead up to a Major Sacrifice. (Which of course once again would mean that a female character exists only as a tool for manfeels. Blech.)

3) I hope like hell it's not Cisco that gets Sacrificed, because he might be my favorite character at this point. This episode shows just how far the character has developed from the first-season's simplistic "idiot-savant-stoner." The Cisco parts were the best parts of this one. ("Don't slurp." "Slurp." "Don't." "Slurp." "Dooon't." "Sluuurp." . . . . "slurp.")

4) Joe really is a terrible liar, isn't he? You'd think a career cop would be better at it.

5) I think the key question should be "Is this person important enough to me that a villain will kidnap them to use against me, or harm them to hurt me?" In that case, there's a duty to warn.

Of course in Barry's mind the idea is evidently "Good enough to sleep with, but not good enough to warn them of the danger in associating with me."


What's especially annoying about this is that this idea has been sooooo overused in so many kinds of stories, and inevitably (INEVITABLY) the bad guys figure out the connection between the hero and whoever they're trying to protect regardless. Why waste the time and effort trying to keep the person you love in the dark? And it's not like Barry has to live through it to figure it out - read a couple of damn Robert Ludlum novels or something, dude. "Protection through ignorance" doesn't work there, it won't work for you.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:19 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


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