Television

FLASH SPOILER Review: Episode 7×14- “Rayo de Luz”

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The Flash (7×14)- “Rayo de Luz”

Written by:         (Teleplay by) Jonathan Butler & Gabriel Garza (Story by) Jess Carson

Directed by:       Danielle Panabaker

Episode directed by a member of the cast… Let’s see how this goes, because Tom Cavahagh directed an episode and made sure to include a scene of HR Wells nearly successfully negotiating a three-some.

Anyway the episode opens with Allegra taking a beating from Ultraviolet before flashing back twelve hours to Barry and Iris taking off to the middle of nowhere for a sex vacation cause they’re trying to have a baby. However, they still haven’t told the gang so he decides to make things awkward for Chester by making the trip Chester’s idea before leaving. Bye Barry!

Somehow this means Frost is in charge, so she gives them a day off so she can go “shopping” and now Frost is out of the episode. So is everyone being written out of this episode? Is this going to be the adventures of Police Office Number 2 and Jitter’s Counter Worker vs Random Henchmen? That could be ambitious, I suppose.

For the moment this leaves Chester and Allegra so Chester offers up to invite her to a game of D and D… Even if Chester seems more of a Magic: The Gathering type of nerd.  As nerdy a game as Dungeons and Dragons but with the added bonus of collecting stuff and Chester’s a well-established hoarder.  But saying D & D is probably royalty free.

Anyway… Allegra is about as interested as you’d expect.  Plus she’s been misusing the tip line for her newspaper to keep an eye out for Ultraviolet and she got a hit.

Over at Cecile’s law office Joe and Cecile are still working on Kramer’s mysterious past and with a recording of an interview Joe did with someone that served at the same base at her it looks an awful lot like Kramer made some sort of deal the night before the mission that got her squad wiped out.

Well, this seems pretty open and shut. Time to go to Singh, right? Wrong! This is TV so Joe has to confront her first.  Good plan, Joe! Because if she did do what it looks like she did, there’s no way you’ll suddenly have an enemy that’s in charge of the city’s Police Force. I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong!

Speaking of pointed ears, Chester shows up at Jitter’s with a set of pointed ears to meet up with Allegra. She explains her effort to track down Ultraviolet and her hopes to get through to her.  I don’t think it’s going to work because Ultraviolet shows up, trashes the place, beats up Chester and makes just as short work out of Allegra. However before she can get make the kill, Sue shows up but before they can fight they hear cop sirens approaching so Ultraviolet uses her powers to escape.

Back at STAR Labs, Sue reads Allegra and Chester the riot act for trying to chase down a trained assassin (and make a metric ton of weird faces that we’re going to have to discuss) but the general consensus between Allegra, Chester and Caitlin is they have to stop her. They use the satellite tracking and what Sue knows about Black Hole SOP to track Ultraviolet to a clinic where she’s about to kill some doctor.

They use some gadget Sue had acquired just for the occasion of taking care of Ultraviolet and bring her in for a nice stay in the Pipeline.

Once there, Ultraviolet explains that the man who she was after was the man that weaponized her powers for Black Hole via medical experimentation. Now that Team Flash has shattered the organization he’s pretty much a work for hire kind of guy and she was trying to put a stop to it.

Sue takes the very, very reasonable stance of saying “Too Bad, So Sad” but Allegra is very much out to prove that she can turn her cousin back from evil just like Barry always does (you weren’t around in season one, Allegra so I won’t laugh at you too hard) and lets her out of her cell. I may never forgive this episode for making Sue the voice of reason.

Joe arrives at Kramer’s office and shows her the Operation Griffin file and asks for her side of the story. She responds by throwing him out of her office after threatening him with arrest.  Not at all incriminating.

Back at STAR Labs, Ultraviolet tries to show Allegra how to use her powers but it doesn’t go that well. Sue shows up and things go from bad to worse, so much worse that Chester almost gets a hole burned through his chest before Ultraviolet bails out again.

In the infirmary, Caitlin patches Chester up and the fight between Sue and Allegra continues. Allegra storms off and Sue asks Chester for help before she leaves but an offhand remark about Allegra’s tattoo gives him an idea.

Joe’s back at Cecile’s office (Good idea to talk to a lawyer, Joe. You were threatened with arrest, after all.) and he explains what happened.  He’s still not sure what to think since all the evidence points to one thing but his instincts are telling him the opposite.  Kramer texts him to ask to meet…

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That’s entirely possible, Admiral but let’s see what Cecile thinks.  She tells Joe to trust his instincts.

Later, Sue tries to talk to Allegra about Ultraviolet.  Allegra gets angry because Sue tried to take Black Hole down to save her parents but won’t help her.  Sue explains that by the time she was able to get to her parents they were in too deep to be saved.  Allegra storms out again, this time she finds Chester has hit on the idea of using Allegra’s powers to track Ultraviolet.

They track her to Olsen’s mad scientist lair, where Ultraviolet has confronted Olsen but before she can kill him he has another trump card up his sleeve.  Allegra arrives at Olsen’s hideout and with some help from Chester in the STAR Labs van and Sue doing her Black Widow imitation she makes it past the guards.  Unfortunately, Olsen’s trump card is a really great one. He’ll repair what he did to Ultraviolet if she kills everyone that knows about him.  Namely, Team Flash.

The pair fight while Olsen monologues and since they have identical powers they end up in the power stand-off that people with beam powers always end up in.  You know the one:

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Always pick Samara… ALWAYS!

Which is when Allegra realizes the true power was in her all along and she goes a little Jean Grey Phoenix and defeats Ultraviolet!

The day is saved!

After a recap at STAR Labs where we learn that Olsen’s been arrested and Caitlin can use his files to help repair what he did to Ultraviolet and a little Shippy moment between Chester and Allegra that’s pretty much all there is to see for the team.

Across town Joe meets up with Kramer and it turns out it wasn’t a trap… At least not yet. Kramer explains that the man she met with, Adam Creyke, was a childhood friend that was like a brother to her.  He betrayed their unit and that meeting was him trying to talk her out of going so she wouldn’t get hurt in the ambush.  She’s been trying to track him down and bring him to justice and she wants Joe’s help to do it.

But wait! There’s more!  Not much more but more! Frost’s “shopping” was apparently her tracking down Hunky Bartender/Ice Powered Criminal, Mark after he broke out of prison.  Well, not so much broke out as he cut a deal for a release in exchange for turning State’s evidence. So there’s that now.

This was pretty much a textbook filler episode, but at least they had to good manners to make that clear right from the start. If your show has a title character and they bail out for the episode that’s all the warning needed.

Also we definitely have a theme for this arc, don’t we? This is going to be about people trying to bring loved ones back from the brink. I suppose it’s only fair since that’s what Barry and Iris did with Nora and the other forces but this was a clunky start.  We’re still only really getting to know Allegra and our first real look at her is her tilting at windmills to try and save her assassin cousin. (She was only really a plot device for Nash Wells up to this point.)  Putting her in conflict with another character that was little more than a plot device for a now departed member of the cast didn’t help. (Let’s be honest here, Sue’s never been a helpful character and she was especially abrasive this week. Especially with all the condescending facial expressions and head tilts. Please stop doing that!)

At least the Joe and Kramer stuff was intriguing.  But in the end, I’m still waiting for them to right the ship.

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Things We Learned:

  1. Kramer and her unit were betrayed by her close friend. A man named Adam Creyke. She’s enlisted
  2. Allegra’s learned she is more powerful than she previously thought.
  3. Chillblaine has been released from prison to testify for the State.
  4. Sue is going to stay in Central City.

Questions:

  1. Will Allegra going to be able to control her growing powers or will they grow out of her control?
  2. Will Ultraviolet be able to be rehabilitated? Not just physically but emotionally?
  3. What did Adam do? Why did he betray his unit and where is he now?
  4. Who is Chillblaine testifying against?
  5. Hey Sue! You planning on telling Ralph you’re just bailing out on him?

Just another guy on the internet.