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FLASH SPOILER Review: Episode 2×23 – “The Race of His Life”

The Flash (2×23) – “The
Race of His Life”
Written by:         Aaron & Todd Helbing
Directed by:       Antonio
Negret
Once more unto
the breach, dear friends.  Again we pick
up right where we left off with Hunter murdering Henry.  Barry responds the only way anyone would, by
attacking Zoom but Zoom has gotten really good at creating time remnants and
just as good at killing them.  After he
kills “himself,” he tells Barry that he’s “almost ready.”  For what, lord only knows it may be cliché but
Zoom is crazy so whatever he wants will be equally crazy.
Later, they
put Henry to rest and while the wheels might not be falling off for Barry
emotionally, he’s clearly thrown a couple lug nuts.  He tries to say a few words to remember his
father but can’t fortunately Joe is there to pick up for him.  Barry is able to pull himself together enough
to vow revenge though.
At the wake,
Wally approaches Barry and tries to offer what support he can as well as thank
him for what he’s done and though it’s all very heart felt but Barry’s not
hearing him.  All he can think about is
getting his hands around Hunter’s throat and twisting it shut.  As usual Team Flash is there to point out
hopeless the situation.  (This off-season
they need to hit the Burt Ward school for sidekicks, because guys you quite often
genuinely suck at this.) 
Sure Cisco
is seeing the end of X-Men: Apocalypse
(Cisco compared it to Transformers but X-Men: Apocalypse was a lot better) in
his head and yes, Zoom can open up breaches at will but Barry’s got to get his
revenge on.  All of the “positivity” is too
much for Barry and he bails out on the room. 
So Iris follows him to try and help him but in all seriousness, how is Barry
supposed to get it together after both of his parents were murdered by his
enemies?
Zoom races
by and Barry gives chase and at long last we get to hear Zoom’s master
plan!  This is gonna be good!  I mean, Thawne wanted Barry to run fast
enough to break the time barrier so he created the Particle Accelerator Explosion
and opened the world to incredible things. 
So lay it on us big man!  Zoom’s
big plan is… a race?
He cracked
open the space between universes to drag race? 
That’s it!  Where did I put the
table flip picture because this plan is super-unimpressive.
When Barry
tells the rest of the gang, they are equally unimpressed.  Fortunately, Wells is there to think things
out.  See, when Black Siren leveled
Mercury Labs, Zoom stole a device that he could modify to act like a
pulsar.  Basically he could use it to
crack a planet, a lot like Cisco’s visions of Earth-2.  So, thankfully Zoom’s master plan isn’t
racing for pinks.  It’s to destroy
Earth-2, we’re back into comics territory.
Caitlin is
there to back up Wells’ theory by mentioning that Zoom no longer wishes to
measure success by the number of his victims but by the number of conquered
Earths in his wake which makes it sound like even Wells wasn’t thinking big
enough. *Insert Crisis on Infinite Earths joke here.*
Barry hears
this and since he’s thinking clearly he knows when the villain is out to
destroy Universe… You give him the opportunity. 
Absolutely rational and not at all reckless behavior brought on by
overwhelming grief.  Joe tries to call
Barry on it but Barry is not listening, in fact he’s gone all the way past
Eastwood on the “Cop on the Edge” scale and into Frank Castle territory.  But Joe has an ace up his sleeve. 
Betrayal!  Wells hits Barry with a tranq dart and Barry
goes night-night.  When he wakes up in a
cell he learns that the whole team was behind this and they’ve decided to take
out Zoom themselves.  Barry, your friends
are literally the worst.  You would have
better friends if you hung out with Thawne, Grodd and the Mardons.
So Team
Judas Joe and the Team-Killers, what’s your big plan?  It’s the classic “Go to the Villain’s hideout
and distract him with the girl he likes so you can drug him and send him
through a wormhole forever” plan.  Which
is pretty much the same plan they tried to use in “Enter Zoom” let’s hope it
turns out better.  But before they go,
Joe makes them promise that if anything goes wrong they stick to the plan.
While Wells
is gearing up, Jesse comes down and tells him that after they stop Zoom she’s
going back to Earth-2 but she thinks he should stay.  That’s nice and all, but Jesse if the plan
works you will have trapped Zoom on Earth-2 so… The Wells family everybody: Great
scientists, lousy planners.
That night
at Zoom’s lair they send Caitlin out to talk to draw him out and she starts talking
about being frightened and excited by the darkness he sees in her but when he
goes to give Caitlin her reward for betraying we learn it was the
hologram.  Joe shoots him with the “boot
gun” from episode one while Cisco opens a breach, Wells distracts Zoom with his
ray gun while Joe loads up the tranq gun but it jams.  So he improvises and gives Zoom the darts
directly so when Zoom is knocked through the breach he is able to take Joe with
him.
It gets
worse from there, Cisco can’t find Joe due to interference and Wells can’t turn
off Zoom’s doomsday device without blowing the planet to Hell and to top it off
Wally shows up.  See, while they were
plotting behind Barry’s back they were also plotting behind Wally’s back and he’s
not too keen on losing his father just when they were connecting.  So, Wally sneaks down to the Pipeline and
busts Barry out of jail.
Meanwhile,
back on Earth-2 Hunter has Joe locked up and it’s time for some monologue
action.  Hunter got his powers the same
way as Barry but it wasn’t enough for him. 
He developed Velocity 6 and as luck would have it he managed to breach
dimensions to another Earth and encountered their speedster.  He defeated and imprisoned him and even posed
as him acting as “The Flash of Earth-2” but he was dying.  Then the breach to Earth One opened and
Hunter came up with a plan to steal Barry’s speed to cure himself and the rest
is history.
Back at STAR
Labs, Barry is pissed.  Meanwhile, the
Team is trying to stand firm.  In a very
confrontational way.  Barry basically
tells them, he’s racing Zoom and they can either help or they can pound bricks.
Back at Zoom’s
Earth One lair, Hunter lays out the rules of the race.  Five hundred laps is enough to power his
machine so all Barry has to do is stop them before they reach five hundred
laps.  They start running and it looks
like Zoom is still faster but Barry’s learned Zoom’s duplication trick.  One of Barry’s doubles frees Joe and
distracts Zoom into fight him while the other keeps running to create another
pulse that stops Zoom’s pulse. 
Destroying himself in the process. 
Zoom is
distracted by his plan failing and Barry gets the better of him.  But all this time travel and dimension
hopping has piss off the time wraiths and they’re out for blood.  They’ll take hunters and just before being
dragged away he gets a cools makeover that we’ll discuss later.
That’s it
kids, the day is save.  All that’s left
is a quick trip over to Earth-2 to rescue the real Jay Garrick and for Barry to
explain what he did.  Wally speaks for
all of us when he recommends that they just move on.  Meanwhile, Cisco and Wells get the mask off
Taps-On-Glass and Jay Garrick looks really familiar.  Just like Henry, to be specific and Barry
cannot handle it.
Jay suits up
and takes the helmet Hunter used when he posed as Jay Garrick and decides the
best revenge is living well with a little taste of identity theft.  They it’s time for the Wells family and Jay
to say their goodbyes and go back to Earth-2 so they can get Jay back to his
home on Earth-3.
Back at the
West Home, everyone is celebrating but Barry’s feeling pretty distant.  Iris tries to reconnect with him even telling
him she loves him but Barry feels hollow inside and he can’t pursue a
relationship when he feels that way. 
Iris vows to wait for him but gives him his space for the moment. 
Which was probably
a mistake.  Barry takes off and runs back
in time to the night of Nora Allen’s murder and stops Thawne.  As the episode ends, the Barry from season
one watches on before he disappears and Barry comforts his mother.
If you ever
wonder why my reviews come later in the week it’s because I watch each episode
multiple times to try and dig in and find the meat.  This episode is an argument for why I do that
because if I’d only watched once I never would have seen the episode the way I
did.
Where to
start?  Well, on the surface I could
start with the slightly silly nature of Zoom’s plan.  I mean if he can split himself couldn’t two
Zooms power the machine?  Maybe it
requires distinct energy sources, or maybe Hunter worried that he would burn up
like we saw happen to Barry’s time remnant. 
I’m just not sure.
I could also
talk about the reveal of the real Jay Garrick and how interesting the road was
that they took to get there.  Back when
the Flash was in pre-production a lot of people (myself included) hoped that John Wesley Shipp
would be cast as Jay Garrick and they got their wish in the end.  I know some people were annoyed that it wasn’t
a surprise but here’s the thing.  Not all
stories need shocking twists, you don’t read comic book stories because of the
shocking twists, you read them because you want a story where the good guy
beats the bad guy and you want that story to be well told.  No, there wasn’t a surprise but how can you
argue that this:
Wasn’t
satisfying to see?
I could talk
about how much I’ll miss Wells and Jesse. 
That is, if they’re gone.  Which
brings up the heart of the episode and the actual story being told.  Perhaps the actual story being told by this
entire season.
The Race
between Zoom and Flash is only on the surface. 
The real story of this episode was boiling under the surface; after
watching the death of his Father and the seeming betrayal of everyone around
him Barry becomes so disconnected from his friends and life that he feels his
only solution is to undo the world by saving his mother.
Oh sure, we
had a mini-Crisis and Teddy Sears was doing his best full-throttle villain.  We could even talk about this image:
That’s the Black Flash.  What would this mean
for the future of the series but the story was how Barry can become so brokenhearted and disillusioned with the world that he would save his mother even
knowing all the dominoes he would knock over in the process.
What would
it take to do the unthinkable?  How lost
do you have to feel to undo your life and the lives of others in the feeble
hope that it will be better?  That’s the
real question of any time travel story. 
There’s a reason the future in the Terminator or Days of Future Past is
post-apocalyptic, happy people wouldn’t gamble this way.
At the start
of the season, Barry had pushed people away because he felt he’d cost them too
much.  On the porch with Iris, he’d come
full circle only this time he’s lost the most of all.  Orphaned three time and stung by the feeling
that his friends didn’t truly believe in him in the end Barry made the only
choice he probably felt he could.
This opens
so many lines of questions but they all start at the same place: What happens
next?  Which is where you want your season
finale to leave the audience.
Three Things We
Learned This Week:
1)     
Jay Garrick was the Flash of Earth-3.
2)     
The Time Wraiths don’t merely attack time
travelers but people manipulating the Speed Force.
3)     
Barry has undone the murder of Nora Allen.
Questions:
1)     
Will Jay Garrick get home?
2)     
Were they able to dismantle the device safely or
will that be hanging over their heads in the future?
3)     
Did what I think happened to Hunter happen?
4)     
If so, will he return?
5)     
What has Barry done?
6)     
What happens next?

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