The Flash: Invincible
May 18, 2016 11:25 AM - Season 2, Episode 22 - Subscribe

Barry fights the new meta-human threat, knowing God is on his side!

Cisco and Barry watch Caitlin sleep.

Zoom uses the weakest meta-humans to wreak havoc on Central City.

Wells creates an immigrant killing machine.

Henry Allen 'dies'.
posted by FallowKing (30 comments total)
 
Barry's route around the city was an irregular, vaguely squarish shape but because it was a closed loop I'm still filing this under "running in circles always works."
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:40 AM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Haha. Your summaries crack me up.

Henry Allen 'dies'.

Yeah. What is up with that. How are they going to bring him back so he can get it on with Dr. McGee, the scientist? There was such an obvious set up for that.

So Wally and Jesse are gonna be baby speedsters, yeah? I would love it if they had to fuse their powers like Firestorm but it probably won't happen that way.

I was hoping for more from Black Siren....the character wasn't all that exciting. Her role basically consisted of walking really slowly. Anyone else notice that? She had a very distinct walk...very hip swively and almost slow motion. She was in no hurry to do basically nothing. No hurry at all.

Fave moments:
Cisco and Kaitlyn pretending to be Killer Frost and Reverb.
Wally running over Black Siren with his mad car skillz. All that illegal drag racing finally pays off!
posted by the webmistress at 11:59 AM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't watch Arrow so I had no particular expectations for evil Laurel.

I did initially think Cisco's Earth-2 vision was of dead canaries, which would have been clever.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:20 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


How are they going to bring him back so he can get it on with Dr. McGee, the scientist?

Option 1: He's not actually dead. The killing blow wasn't televised, and even if it was that's not guaranteed death.
Option 2: Earth-2 Henry Allen, I think he's the real Jay Garrick and the man in the iron mask.
Option 3: Time travel. That's always an option.
Option 4: Magic. It can do anything.
Option 5: It was a dream caused by a meta-human working for zoom.
Option 6: Henry Allen is a meta-human who can heal people.
Option 7: Aliens. The Thanagarian could intervene and use superior technology to heal him.
Option 8: A new meta-human is introduced who had a power that prevents him from dying or heals him.
Option 9: Zoom didn't actually kill him. He did something else that looked like killing.
Option 10: A worm hole opens up and stuff happens.
Option 11: Barry reads an old book and discovers unicorn blood can bring back the dead. Barry goes hunting.
Option 12: Another Lazarus pit.
Option 13: Barry heals him with the power of the Speed Force.
Option 14: They find an immortality idol and Oliver powers it with the magic of friendship.
Option 15: Henry Allen is actually the Speed Force, and cannot be killed.
posted by FallowKing at 12:45 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Option 16: Wally discovers his car's extra noisy exhaust pipe failed to pass its last emissions test because it's really a cleverly disguised regeneration beam which can bring people back to life (only if premium gas is in the tank). Barry excitedly asks to borrow the car keys, hooks his dad up to the tailpipe, revs the engine a few times and voila.
posted by the webmistress at 1:11 PM on May 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Option 17: That was actually a temporal echo of Earth-2 Henry that Jay/Hunter/Zoom convinced to impersonate Barry's dad and then die painfully in exchange for some really tasty pie.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 1:20 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Option 18: Henry is dead for now, but Supergirl crossing from CBS to CW next season triggers a plot inversion wave across the Arrowverse which revives him.
posted by Servo5678 at 1:51 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Option 19: Eobard Thawne/Reverse-Flash/Dr. Harrison Wells/Tom Cavanagh/Ed makes a machine that no one (including him) understands at all, but he explains it succinctly in ten words or less while everyone's eyes glaze over as they nod amiably and pretend to have any inkling as to what he's talking about. Even though he doesn't understand a thing about the machine or what it actually does, Barry eagerly and happily points it, closes his eyes really tightly, and shoots it at his dad.
posted by the webmistress at 1:56 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Option 20: Henry isn't dead, he's just trapped in a kind of limbo by the Flashback Force and can only reach out to people in the present via their memories. He has to come to terms with the fact that he and Joe raised an inept hero before he can regain his gift.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 3:26 PM on May 18, 2016


Option 21: Barry will wake up in the Season 3 opener to realize that Season 2 was just a dream.
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:57 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Option 18: Henry is dead for now, but Supergirl crossing from CBS to CW next season triggers a plot inversion wave across the Arrowverse which revives him.

AKA, Supergirl punches a hole in reality.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:30 PM on May 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Is Henry's gift the ability to make me start to say "hey, is that John C. McGinley?" every time he shows up on screen?
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 4:45 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I liked this episode, but I yelled "Ewwwwwww!!!" at the screen when Iris agreed to...do whatever with Barry. Okay, Cersei and Jaime, you do you, I guess.

I think my favorite thing was the crappy purse-snatching supervillain. He apparently could summon a moderately impressive lightshow, but was either muscled out of more ambitious projects by the real badasses from Earth-2 or was just a total slacker. What was his costume, a camo Snuggie?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:24 PM on May 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Oh, also: The dead birds felt like a shoutout to the beginning of the Brightest Day comics series from a few years back (see also Iris' mention of the "blackest night"), but I don't know if that's anything deeper than an easter egg for comic book nerds.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:31 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Aside from the lipstick, Laurel looked so much better here with darker hair than she did on Arrow with the blonde streaks. Yes, I know Canary is a blonde but I don't think it really works on Cassidy.

So were any of the Earth-2 metas supposed to be recognizable? I thought one looked like X-Men's Storm. Another had the Question thing going on. At first I thought the green one was supposed to be Fire, but then I realized it's a guy, so I guess not.

So everybody was invited to dinner except Harry. He must have felt so left out. And of course as soon as they put all of those people in a room together who know Barry's secret, it was inevitable that Wally was going to find out.

I still don't like Wally as a character. And I particularly don't like him as Wally. Maybe if he had been his own person, like Larry West or Gary West, I'd have an easier time warming up to him, but he's just too dour and dreary to be Wally.

Okay, I'll confess, as somebody who watched the original Flash series when it first aired, I was hoping for at least one more episode with original Barry and Tina getting friendlier.

And since it seems to be required...
Option 22: The Waverider happens to be passing by Central City and the team is able to pick Henry up, stick him in the medbay and have Gideon regenerate his heart (or whatever organs Jay disrupted). At least that way we could get both shows together again and maybe we'd get an explanation of how Gideon escaped STAR Labs and got press-ganged into hanging out with the most incompetent team of time travelers in history. (Or Option 22B sees the team arrive before Jay managed to phase through Henry.)
posted by sardonyx at 9:32 PM on May 18, 2016


Oh, and I'm really disappointed Cisco and Caitlin for that matter didn't take her visions more seriously. I mean come on, you know Weird Things Happen (TM) in Central City, so when something weird starts happening you know it's going to be trouble.

Also, did I miss something. I thought last episode Zoom told her to chose sides. Now she's suddenly free? Part of me was questioning whether she was really Caitlin or some sort of shapeshifter impersonating Caitlin or Caitlin under some type of mind control. Maybe I shouldn't fast forward through the "previously" openings.
posted by sardonyx at 9:37 PM on May 18, 2016


Option 23: Henry now has extreme regenerative powers, as a side effect of the event that gave Barry back his own powers.
posted by amtho at 10:08 AM on May 19, 2016


The best way Barry has to beat Zoom is to do the last thing Zoom expects -- be a total dick. Barry's so nice he turned his powers over to Ted Bundy on the basis of a pinkyswear, so there's no possible way Zoom would anticipate Barry showing up to an appointed throw-down with a huge fucking axe. At superspeed, Barry just comes at this dude and takes his arms and legs off. As this human throw pillow looks up at Barry trying to figure out what the hell just happened, Caitlin appears and drops a giant rock on Zoom's dome, killing him horribly. Everyone agrees never to speak of this again and they all go out dancing.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:29 AM on May 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


That was so much less satisfying than the season one finale.

Zoom is a still the big bad, and although I think the actor is great in the part... I am now so tired of Zoom.
posted by Faintdreams at 11:25 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


The season finale is next week.

(I just checked, because my first response was "holy shit, did I completely miss that this was it?")
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:44 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Option 24: Henry IS Zoom!!
posted by Pendragon at 12:52 PM on May 19, 2016


I liked this one, although it was not without significant problems.

Stuff:
* I completely agree that the Barry/Iris stuff was gross. Somehow, not even talking about what they had planned made it *more* gross, not less.

* Dr. McGee recognizing Barry was certainly called for. (And reminded me of an old Conan O'Brien sketch that I will never, in a million years, get tired of.)

* I liked Barry's overconfidence. That felt like a good reaction to encountering basically Speed God - he acted like a guy touched by higher powers, down to worrying everyone. That was good.

* I liked Caitlin's PTSD, too. Her imagining Zoom everywhere felt spot-on.

* Hooray for Cisco starting to develop offensive powers. I can't wait for this to be more of a team show.

* I liked Barry absolutely destroying the lower-tier villains, to the point where they barely even showed it.

* Zoom is still incredibly boring and lacking in goals. (I agree that the actor's offering a good performance, they're just not giving him anything to do.) I'm also a little baffled by the breach he created in this episode - not because he could travel between universes, (as established by the Flash/Supergirl crossover), but because he didn't do it sooner.

* Black Siren was funny. I didn't have a lot to add to that, as a non-Arrow-watcher. But I did appreciate her nearly chumping Barry.

* This is the first time I've liked Wally. I mean, what he's doing was dumb, but it felt emotionally correct - he lives in a world with increasing costumed vigilante-ism, he's been established as an adrenaline junkie with poor judgment, this all rang true. Him rescuing Barry was all right.

* My money is on Option 2: mask guy is going to be the real Jay Garrick/new Henry, although I am still amused by the possibility that literally everyone on Earth-2 is just a (shape shifted) temporal echo of Zoom.
posted by mordax at 1:32 PM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Option 25: Mike shows up, jerks a thumb towards the corpse, says "Ten bucks if you bring that guy back to life." Wells rolls his eyes and invents human resurrection so he won't lose the bet.
posted by middleclasstool at 9:46 PM on May 19, 2016


Glad this was not the finale (apologies for my mistake) it would have been an uncharateristicly downbeat one.
posted by Faintdreams at 12:36 AM on May 20, 2016


Yeah. What is up with that. How are they going to bring him back so he can get it on with Dr. McGee, the scientist? There was such an obvious set up for that.

That was two things:
1. Fan service. So much fan service.
2. Yeah, he's Earth Two's Jay Garrick.
Did anyone else notice the actor was limping?

Wally running over Black Siren with his mad car skillz. All that illegal drag racing finally pays off!

He's like the Latino Ghost Rider.... but from the wrong universe... and creepier. If he was around the corner, in his car... was he just chillin'?

This show is getting progressively dumber.
posted by Mezentian at 4:43 AM on May 20, 2016


If he was around the corner, in his car... was he just chillin'?

I like to think he didn't see the metahuman, and just thought he hit a random person with his car, then out of panic, he chased after them. What he said to Joe was just to cover up for his hit-and-run.
posted by FallowKing at 8:20 AM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


If they move Supergirl into the Flarrowverse, Kara could take a job at Iris' newspaper, Iris could become a character on the Supergirl show, and Barry could...date someone who isn't his sister?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:41 AM on May 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


and Barry could...date someone who isn't his sister?

You're right. He should date Wally.
posted by Mezentian at 3:30 AM on May 23, 2016


OMG, the Speed Force turned Barry into a CHRISTIAN! I expected him to defeat Zoom just by walking up to him, putting his hand on his shoulder, and saying "Have you accepted our lord Jesus Christ as your saviour?". Because that would send me back to Earth-2 forever.
posted by briank at 6:28 AM on May 23, 2016


This is the first time I've liked Wally. I mean, what he's doing was dumb, but it felt emotionally correct - he lives in a world with increasing costumed vigilante-ism, he's been established as an adrenaline junkie with poor judgment, this all rang true. Him rescuing Barry was all right.

Seconded! He might as well!

I was mildly amused at the doppelganger fail moment.

Oh, Henry, just brought here to die.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:55 PM on June 7, 2016


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