Television

FLASH SPOILER Review: Episode 8×11- “Resurrection”

The Flash (08×11)- “Resurrection”

Written by:         Emily Palizzi

Directed by:       Greg Beeman

We start this week with a flashback to before the Particle Accelerator explosion where we see the first time Caitlin and Ronnie meet at STAR Labs in what would become the infirmary.  The pair do a little flirting while she bandages him up.

Returning to the present we see Caitlin is still with the flame and it’s asking her for help to “Make us whole.” The last time I saw a big monster wanting to be made “Whole” it was on the USG Ishimura and that didn’t go well for anyone.

On the bright side, there is a Dead Space remake coming maybe we can get a Caitlin Snow DLC now… But probably not.

Over to Coast City where iris just wiped Tinya’s mom out of existence and it should come as no shock that the young woman thinks Iris just killed her mom because people generally don’t survive exploding into light particles. Unless their William Shatner and there’s a man named Scotty involved. So Tinya bails out before they can either explain or wipe her out of existence too. Probably a wise move since when Sue tries to call Barry for help Iris deletes her phone too.

Over to STAR Labs where the rest of the team has learned that the Black Flame has been operating much longer than they expected.  On the (non-sarcastic) bright side, Chester has finished modifying the fusion sphere so it’s not only strong enough to capture the Flame but he’s made it mobile as well.

Caitlin arrives and tells the team what happened in her apartment and they’re understandably skeptical after the way it tricked Chester into thinking it was his dead father just a few days ago.  On the other hand, Caitlin figures out that the people the Flame has attacked all are connected to Caitlin in some fashion or another.

To press her point, Caitlin shows the team that she analyzed the radiation left behind by the Flame and shows that it’s comparable to the radiation within a black hole. A black hole like the kind Ronnie died collapsing way back in Season One.  Caitlin believes that Ronnie isn’t in control of whatever is going on but she has a theory to if they use the Quantum Splicer that they used help Ronnie and Stein back then to help him now.

The team starts to work on Caitlin’s plan but Barry has the proverbial bad feeling about this and he isn’t sure why so he’s hesitant to go forward with this plan.  During their discussion, Caitlin remembers that she has a boyfriend. (Well at least she remembered before she brought her husband back from the dead, I guess.) So she meets with Marcus at Jitters and breaks things off with him.

Frost finds Barry down in the Speed Lab and she and Barry talk about Barry’s doubts.  He still can’t put his doubts into words so when he asks Frost if she’s sure she says that she isn’t but even so that won’t stop her from helping because they do owe it to Caitlin to at least try to make her plan work.

Meanwhile, Chester’s on Twitch show the whole world his modifications for the Quantum Splicer.  Allegra finds him and someone finally points out exactly how bad of an idea it is for Chester to be putting highly experimental technology and the ways to use it on Twitch live.  You could have at least made this a “Subscriber’s Only” stream Chester. 

Chester even tries to joke that he doubts some villain is watching his stream for tech tips but Chester that really is the kind of thing a villain would do. Take someone else’s idea and turn it evil.  You need only look at the careers of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos cause that’s what they did.  Come on, Chester! You’re a dork, this is the exact lesson of Jurassic Park!

Somewhere else in STAR Labs, Cecile has a psychic encounter with the Flame and while she’s not convinced either way on the Ronnie question she’s is sure that whatever happened to the Flames she believes that he doesn’t want resurrection he wants to be released.  They go to Caitlin but she’s very much not interested in killing Ronnie for the third time.  Caitlin also points out that when it was Iris and Joe that Barry literally rewrote time to get them back.

Barry counters that when he went back in time to save his mother it destroyed everything even after he undid it.  Finally Caitlin lays down the law; they can either help or they stand aside.

Time to check back in on Iris and Sue in Coast City, Iris is finally recovering from whatever happened to her in Renee’s apartment.  Sue wants to take Iris back to Central City to get help from Barry but Iris refuses, so now is the “perfect” time for Tinya to show back up. Tinya agrees and she goes one step further by grabbing hold of Iris and wiping her from existence.  Not so cool when the shoe’s on the other foot is it?

Back at STAR Labs, Cecile is catching up Allegra, Frost and Chester up on what she felt when she made contact with the Flame.  Meanwhile, Barry’s thought about Caitlin’s ultimatum and he’s decided on option three. He uses the fusion device to stop Ronnie and hopefully end his pain.  Cecile is definitely on board but the other three are varying degrees of conflicted but they agree that at the very least, Barry’s plan is more likely to work than Caitlin’s and Frost decides it should be her to tell Caitlin.

Like the others Frost is worried, but unlike them she’s not worried that Caitlin is wrong about Ronnie she’s worried about what this will do to Caitlin which is why she took the Splicer to help him.  They set out to find Ronnie, which means now is a good time to bring up the flashbacks Caitlin has been having to when Ronnie was still alive.  The paid traveled up to the mountains to have a romantic getaway and got stuck in the snow outside a state park and that’s where they decided to get married.

Caitlin had been remember this because the Flames had said “Memories in the Snow” so Caitlin believes Ronnie is asking her to come find him in that park. 

At the park in question the Flames attack a group of campers and gives off enough energy to draw the attention of Team Flash which brings Barry, Allegra and Cecile with Chester’s fusion sphere.  That’s when Caitlin and Frost show up and they stop Barry to try their plan, breaking the Sphere in the process.  Caitlin uses the Splicer and… it actually works. Team Flash has gotten pretty good at bringing people back from the dead, they didn’t even have to break Time to do it this time!

The next morning at STAR Labs, the team gathers to recap. Caitlin tells that despite some unusual brain activity Ronnie seems back to normal and Chester tells them that after they fixed Ronnie the signs of the Flame attacks have stopped.  So all is well that ends well, and the team can put the arguments they had about this aside.

Barry goes home and tries to call Iris but gets shunted off to voicemail apparently for the not the first time which is when Sue arrives to tell him what happened to Iris.

After the end episode title card, we go back to Caitlin at Star Labs and find Caitlin alone still worrying over Ronnie’s medical charts.  She finds that Ronnie’s left the infirmary and even worse someone has reset the STAR Labs lighting scheme to the “Ominous Revelation” setting. All that’s missing is a creepy girl singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”

The ominous lighting leads Caitlin up to the lounge where she finds Ronnie. But it turns out he’s not really Ronnie anymore he’s something and someone else.  But just in case Ronnie having all black eyes and a modulated voice wasn’t enough to convince Caitlin, Ronnie transform into Deathstorm.

This was a well-constructed episode.  I liked it especially because it brought the Team in to conflict not because Barry or Caitlin were wrong to believe what they believe or didn’t care about what the other thought and bullied the rest of the team into their way of thinking. No one was right and no one was wrong and they all believed they were approaching a way to stop the Flames and help Ronnie in the most compassionate way.  It would have been easy to do it the other way but building the conflict this way was far more satisfying.

Especially when it turns out that not only were Caitlin and Barry both right, they were both wrong and they now have to deal with Deathstorm as a result.  He looks pretty good too.

As for the Iris plot, she’s really got to stop being wiped out of existence. Barry’s going to start taking it personally because this was never a problem before they got married.  Not a lot to talk about here since most of it was just the scene where she disappeared so there isn’t that much to say.

I liked this episode and I hope it’s a sign that the arc is heating up and not just that they’re telling a story that could be something but is just not delivering.

Things We Learned:

  1. Ronnie was the Black Flame.
  2. The Team has successfully “Cured” Ronnie of being the Black Flame and he has revealed himself to Caitlin to be “Deathstorm.”
  3. Tinya has made Iris disappear somehow.
  4. Chester has been sharing STAR Labs technology and how to build it freely online?

Questions:

  1. How soon before one of the technologies Chester’s been sharing online comes back to haunt the Team?
  2. Is there anything of Ronnie left within Deathstorm?”
  3. Has Tinya made Iris’ condition worse?
  4. What does Deathstorm intend to do?

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