Television

FLASH SPOILER Review: Episode 6×11- “Love is a Battlefield”

The Flash (6×11)- “Love is a Battlefield”

Written by:         Kelly Wheeler & Jeff Hersh

Directed by:       Sudz Sutherland

The Valentine’s Day episode! And breaking with Flash tradition it’s not either weeks before or weeks after the holiday this time!

Anyway… We pick up about where we left off last week. Iris has been spit of the mirror and then it’s the title sequence (I miss the precap, how am I supposed to know what’s going on if I don’t even know if his name is Barry Allen and he is the Flash?) but after that Iris surprises Barry the next morning with a pancake breakfast.

Which if you’ll recall Iris’ last pancake breakfast it’s a suspiciously large improvement. Nothing says “Evil mirror clone of Iris West” like fluffy pancakes that aren’t crunchy.  Barry, Iris and Alexa (Better hope there’s no surveillance state on Earth Prime, Barry)

plan their Valentine’s dinner and from there it’s time to get this episode going.

By going, I mean to the Citizen for our B-plot where Frost plays cupid for Allegra.  She tries to get Allegra to hook up with a guy named Emmerson Fairweather.  A name so weird I had to check to see if he’s some obscure character but no, just a hipster and this subplot is just going to be pretty paint by the numbers so we’ll let them go on their way.

Back with Barry and Iris, they’re in the middle of the date when some weird things start happening. First, Iris knows Italian now. (She claims she picked up a couple phrases but unless those phrases were pick up in a restaurant it’s pretty suspicious that she was able to order effectively) Second, Amunet Black is back and stealing stuff!  Now normally, I’d imagine Barry could have this cleaned up before you could say literally anything but there’s a trick. Amunet knows Barry’s secret identity and she’s not afraid to leverage that into her easy escape with some sort of high tech gizmo.

Pretty smart lady, that Amunet Black.

So Barry and Iris are now on the case but with Amunet promising to blab if she sees a red suit it’s up to Iris to get the information.  She walks into one of the bars that Amunet’s known to hang out in and assaults the bouncer which earns her Amunet’s next heist location.

But since it can’t be that simple this early in the episode Goldface shows up and he and Amunet have a pretty post-breakup argument that turns into a supervillain fight that injures a security guard.  While the villains fight and Barry saves the guard Iris steals the tech from Amunet.

The next day, Iris has figured out that the tech can be combined to store a plant of some sort but since they don’t know what that plant would be she wants to give the piece they stole back to Amunet.  Since this is what most people would classify as a reckless idea Barry is a bit concerned.  However, Iris turns it back on him by accusing of him not trusting her.  They have a pretty nasty argument before Iris storms off to give the tech to Amunet.

This kind of insane would only work in the CW-Verse but since that’s where we are Amunet tells Iris everything.  She’s going to use the tech she’s been stealing to steal a rare flower that blooms once every twenty five years and even better has mind-control pollen and since Doctor Pamela Isley seems nowhere to be found…

That’s a pretty rare thing that’s definitely worth stealing.  The problem is, Amunet’s been planning this heist for years. With Goldface. So now that they’re broken up they’re causing all sorts of problems for each other.

Kind of like how Barry and Iris are having all sorts of problems with each other right now.  To the point where they both think they’re growing apart from each other so Iris claims that’s what she wants to use the plant for.

Barry takes the more traditional approach to problems. He seeks out a Joe speech and Joe is all too happy to provide.

It’s a pretty solid Joe Speech too…

You can figure out where this is going after five and half seasons and it’s pretty clear this was meant to be a filler episode so why am I still going?  Well there’s some cool piece to take stock of for upcoming episodes so here they are:

First and foremost, by the end of the episode it is in confirmed that the Iris we’ve seen this week was some sort of evil mirror clone or someone pretending to be Iris or something.  I’m leaning towards mirror clone of some sort.  It’s clear she’s not faking things and it’s clear the problems she’s having with Barry aren’t merely to throw him off the sent so in some fashion or another she has to be Iris.  Which could lead to something once Iris returns.

Then there’s the Allegra plot and how it connects to Nash.  It’s pretty clear she’s the double of Nash’s double, but this brings us to Nash’s storyline.  At the end of the episode he’s seems Harry for a moment which means something.  Either Harry is still alive or there’s a remnant of him still out there.  Both options point to the Multiverse still being accessible and that might be what Cisco will learn while he’s away.

So while there’s some interesting pieces for future episodes and Katee Sackhoff chewing the scenery is fun in the end this was a filler/set-up episode so it can only be so good.

Things We Learned:

  1. Iris has been replaced by someone or something in the mirror at McCulloch Tech.
  2. Nash has seen Harry.
  3. Goldface went to Yale.

Questions:

  1. Who or what is Mirror Iris and what is going on with the mirror she came from?
  2. Is the Multiverse still accessible from Earth Prime?
  3. How can they get Iris out of the mirror dimension?

Just another guy on the internet.