Television

FLASH SPOILER Review: Episode 7×07- “Growing Pains”

The Flash (7×07)- “Growing Pains”

Written by:         Sam Chalsen & Jess Carson

Directed by:       Alexandra La Roche

Growing Pains! I love this show!

Anyway the episode opens with Barry returning home after dealing with a car fire and bringing home breakfast… Only to find Nora’s cooked breakfast, in fact she cooked a super breakfast complete with mimosas for day drinking. Which is a possible reason for Barry getting the shakes.

Or maybe it’s that the physical embodiment of Barry’s powers looks like his mother and her cooking him breakfast is a whole new level of weird for Barry.  They recap everything that’s been going on and Nora points out that she’s been boosting Barry’s powers and that’s why he’s feeling weird.  Luckily for him he gets a call to a crime scene.

Over at STAR Labs, Cecile is helping to recap everything Frost has done to warrant police attention. Frost shows a bit of a lack of situational awareness by threatening to go after Kramer but the others convince her to lay low while they try to throw Kramer off the scent. Chester breaks things up when he too is called to a crime scene.

Chester finds that a driver for Ivo labs has been murdered by some sort of Ice attack and it looks a lot like it was Frost.  Especially to Kramer when she shows up, however when they start digging into the details things start looking weird but Kramer doesn’t care. Ice attack means Killer Frost and she’s going to order the Governor’s Office to issue a warrant for Frost’s arrest.

Chester returns to STAR Labs to tell Frost and make things awkward before he leaves to work on the situation from the tech end meanwhile Allegra figures out Frost is going to work on the situation from the criminal underworld end and offers to help but much like she blew Chester’s help off Frost blows her offer of help off.  That’s called karma, Allegra. 

Back at the Crime Scene, Kramer is hovering over Barry’s shoulder and even though she seems to be offering him praise it’s probably making him feel a bit awkward, so it’s probably a good thing when she leaves that Nora shows up to make that even more of an issue…

Did I say a good thing? I think I meant something else.

Nora does agree that something’s weird with the ice but her mere presence is boosting powers so he has to run off some excess speed and ends up looking weird in front of Kramer before he heads back to the police station to analyze the data.

Frost shows up at the bar she used to work at and meets a hunky bartender.  A hunky bartender that knows about hydro-dynamics and Frost’s past… He’s either a new love interest or he’s this week’s villain. While she’s trying to shake off hunky bartender’s charms Kramer shows up on television offering a hundred thousand dollar bounty for Frost.

Well, before these guys…

Or even just this guy…

See the source image

…can show up, the toughs at the bar decide to cash in and catch a beating from Frost.  Once they’re out of commission, HBT offers up the rumored location of the new Ice meta’s hideout.  Like I said, HBT is either a new love interest or he’s this week’s villain, no chance of anything else. On the Brightside, HBT has a name and it’s Mark.

Better hurry Frost. Mando’s not babysitting anymore!

At the Police Station, Chester and Barry are crunching data but it’s going to take all night.  Nora shows up and Chester’s very gung ho by asking her to cook the data in an instant but remember how Nora’s overcharging Barry’s powers.  This time when he burns off speed he nukes the computers and gets mad at Nora and chases her off.  They then notices a swat team on the move. Someone tipped off Kramer to Frost’s location. Chester tries to call Frost but she doesn’t answer so he calls Allegra and she lies about her being there.

Frost doesn’t answer because she’s at the Meta’s warehouse and the place is empty.  Meanwhile, the cops have shown up at Caitlin’s place to arrest her for being Killer Frost.  Things are going super, just super. At the Police Station, Cecile finds out that Kramer had nothing other than an anonymous tip.  Even after searching her place.  She’s about to have something though since Frost is planning to bust Caitlin out… Frost really needs to work of her situational awareness. Caitlin does manage to talk her other half down however she only gets Frost down to chasing after the real criminal from jail break.

Back at Barry and Iris’ place, Iris asks Barry why he’s being so weird. (As though she didn’t figure it out last week when she was talking to Nora.) She tries to help talk him through his issues and she compares it to coming back home to live with her father after freshman year of college.  The metaphor works well enough, his relationship with the Speed Force has changed and they’re going to have to work that out over time.  But first, Chester has some info on this week’s villain.

Barry returns to STAR Labs and Chester tells them that he’s learned that the killer is powering his ice attack with artificial Dark Matter.  So whoever it is, is using tech to simulate Frost’s powers.  Too bad she’s off to confront said killer and yeah, it’s Mark the Hunky Bartender.  Mark was a cryo-geneticist at Ivo labs with some ethical problems. Ethical problems bad enough for his former employers at Ivo labs try to get him arrested which is one reason he’s after the chip they were transporting.  The other reason is along with the scan he took of Frost at the abandoned warehouse he sent her to he can now perfectly replicate her powers using tech.

It seems that Mark fell into a frozen lake as a boy and suffered near-fatal hypothermia and developed an obsession with ice as a result and just to make sure that we know this is a supervillain’s origin he even has a name he thought up for himself.  Unfortunately, Captain Cold, Iceman and Killer Frost were already taken so he had to go with Chillblaine.

As always, by telling Frost his evil origin he has to kill her so the fight is on. It’s tradition. They have a fight and despite Frost getting the better of him Chillblaine manages to blind her and makes the classic mistake of monologuing allowing her to take him down just before Flash and Allegra arrived.

Unfortunately, Kramer shows up with the cops… Isn’t this bar in Keystone? A separate city?

That’s not important right now, what is important is that she has them surrounded.  Frost finally shows situational awareness and realizes her good deeds don’t negate her bad ones and she decides to turn herself in instead of running. This action is definitely Stannis-approved, Frost.

https://pa1.narvii.com/6486/194847e559cc91c72d3f0274372bc3089f723f75_hq.gif

Good work.

The next morning, Barry and Iris are at home re-capping what happened. Frost has turned herself and plead guilty to all the charges she faced.  Nora shows up and Iris gives the pair a moment and Barry promises to help work out a new normal (Ugh… I hate that phrase) with Nora and that means it’s time for them to work on stopping those other forces, together.

Pretty good episode this week, it’s starting to feel like they finally have a handle on how to use the large cast now.  Sure it probably helps that Ralph, Sue and Wells have all been written off but still they’re doing a better job of keeping all the plate spinning. 

This episode also felt mostly like a little housekeeping, they’ve introduced a lot of plots the last three weeks so it was probably a good time to recap them before moving forward. 

I’m interested to see where they’re going with taking Frost off the board like this, is this a reset of Caitlin’s character or is this the start of a new plot? I guess we’ll see.

Kramer’s still a problem for the team, but it remains to be seen if she becomes an antagonist or villain because she’s definitely giving off some mixed signals and I mean that in a good way.

As for Chillblaine… He was fine, I guess. The character is little more than a name used by several of Golden Glider’s henchmen in the comics so it’s not like they had a lot to work with.

Like I said, it was pretty good, not great. Not much to complain about, not a lot to praise so let’s move on.

Things We Learned:

  1. Nora is boosting Barry’s powers while she recovers so Barry has some excess energy.
  2. Frost has turned herself into to face sentencing for her crimes in previous seasons.
  3. Kramer is starting to override Joe’s authority on behalf of the Governor to bring the City’s Metahuman problem to heel.
  4. It is apparently possible to artificial reproduce dark matter in the DC/CW-Verse.

Questions:

  1. Like I mentioned earlier, Frost turned herself in while in Keystone City? Will that affect Kramer’s authority?
  2. Will Chillblaine’s ability to fake meta’s abilities be reproduced to frame other metas?
  3. Barry seems to have regained control of his abilities by the end of the episode but is Nora done expanding them?
  4. How long will Frost be put away for and will this cause problems for her and Caitlin beyond the emotional?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu7ymQJiMoc

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