Television

FLASH SPOILER Review: Episode 5×13- “Goldfaced”

Goldfaced - cover image

The Flash (5×13)- “Goldfaced”

Written by:         Jonathan Butler & Gabriel Garza

Directed by:       Alexandra La Roche

“Goldface…”  Well there’s worse names that start with Gold.

Were you expecting someone else?

Let’s cut to the chase, we have ourselves a very interesting theme for this week’s episode:  Characters being manipulated into doing something ill-advised through the manipulation of their egos:

Even though the episode is named after another plotline, the big story of this week’s episode is that Sherloque is on the brink of discovering that Nora came back from the future to stop Cicada.  You’d think this would be fine with Barry, “Hey thanks Nora for stopping this serial killer that we were not going to catch otherwise!  As a treat, Iris and I are going to take you out of ice cream before you go back home!” Cue the Full House music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ4qeHwEvnw

There’s a problem though, this is what she’s working with Eobard to do.  Somehow I don’t think Barry will take this quite as well, in fact Eobard thinks Barry would most likely travel to the future just to kill him.  So, Nora has to throw Sherloque off the scent, that’s a problem since he’s probably just one slip up from Nora or one minor breakthrough with his translation of her Time Journal from putting it all together and from there either Sherloque tells everyone or Nora has to take “drastic” action.

That would call for different end credits:

Fortunately, Sherloque has a big old weak spot, he’s a romantic and he has a type. A really, really specific type.  So specific that it’s one woman in a sense.  Meet Renee Adler! Sherloque has traveled the multiverse marrying five different Renees seven times.  That’s something for sure! (Can’t say I blame him though…)

Nora spends the episode trying to manipulate Sherloque into pursuing Renee on Earth One.  She goes so far as convening his ex-wives to try to help.  (For the record, it didn’t.)  It works but not all that well when Sherloque learns that Renee is a possibly a meta so he resolves to investigate Cicada which could uncover Nora’s alliance with Eobard anyway.

On to our a-plot, where Barry’s getting a little tired of Cicada killing people but with Cisco and Caitlin so close to a meta-human cure and he wants to use it on Cicada to stop his meta-tech (not sure how that will work out) but to use it they’ll need some way to essentially keep Cicada from murdering them while the cure take effect. 

There’s some sort of new riot-suppression tech on the market they could use but it’s been stolen so Barry and Ralph go to the tech black market and from here, Barry’s lawful good nature and his just screws the mission from the start.  Sure he has a couple cool moments where he pretends to be a badass villain and he and Ralph do the John Woo thing pretty well in the climax. Also the Goldface fight was pretty cool (we’ll ignore that gold is an incredibly soft metal so it might not be all that great to be made of it) but really the episode is about Barry screwing the pooch.

Meanwhile, Iris took a bad review a little badly and now she’s out to track down Cicada all by herself and after leaning on the foreman at the plant Cicada worked at, she succeeds!  Good work Iris now as long you don’t go to his house in the middle of the night all by yourself without telling anyone and get trapped in his house you’ll be fine!

So Iris goes to his house in the middle of the night all by herself without telling anyone and gets trapped in his house.  Fan-tas-tic!  Iris managed to get out of the situation and she even gives Cicada a pretty good ass kicking but it doesn’t change the fact that one review of her newspaper caused her to charge head first into almost being killed.

In the end the episode is about partial victories.  Sherloque isn’t investigating Nora but he’s too close not for that to come out now.  Barry and Ralph beat Goldface but did little to damage the Central City Tech Black Marker and lost a potential weapon against Cicada. Lastly, Iris found out a lot about Cicada but he escaped and Iris probably just jumped to the top of his murder list.  It was definitely a sister-kisser for Team Flash.

That being said, this was a very enjoyable episode that moved the plot along so for the sake of my enjoyment Team Flash’s unhealthy egos are a good thing!

Things We Learned in “Goldfaced”:

  1. Sherloque’s five ex-wives are all multi-verse counterparts.  Which is pretty weird, even for a Harrison Wells.
  2. The meta-human cure is complete.
  3. Nora and Eobard are working to stop Cicada. (Presumably to save The Flash’s reputation, as was mentioned in Last Week’s episode.)
  4. There is a thriving Tech Black Market in Central City.

Questions from “Goldfaced”:

  1. Where did Cicada go?
  2. What’s Iris’ plan to stop Cicada?
  3. Is Renee a meta-human and what is her power?
  4. Why would the other Renee’s not try to warn their counterpart at this point? I’d like to think I’d warn my doubles about my bad breakups if I saw my ex pursuing them.

Just another guy on the internet.