The scarlet speedster is back and he has brought the multiverse into the mix. The Flash is back once again on The CW and its bringing back fan favorite speedsters Jay Garrick and Jesse Quick for a rather slow-moving real-time episode. This week’s edition of Flash Fix will cover season four episode fifteen “Enter Flashtime.”

Recap

Subject nine, Izzy Bowin, is the metahuman that came after number eight. Clifford DeVoe outmaneuvered Barry Allen’s past as Savitar’s words became meaningless. DeVoe continued to gain the powers of the deceased metahumans through his thinking cap. Izzy Bowin became the next casualty that Team Flash would mourn after the Iron Heights prison break. With another suspect dead, there are still three more for Barry to discover throughout the last few episodes in the latter half of the season.

Episode 4X15 Review “ENTER FLASHTIME”

“Enter Flashtime” set up DC Comics’ most fruitless batch of characters; the eco-terrorist. For years, DC has attempted to revive these diabolical world destroyers through the ideologies that spawned off from the Cold War, but these characters typically failed. Damien Darhk in season four of the Arrow was the first big victim to fall to what viewers claimed to be unoriginality. In a surprising turn of events, writers of The Flash decided to take a stab at the nuclear terrorist category. However, unlike the Arrow writers, The Flash writers were able to succeed by not only focusing on the villain themselves, but rather their weapons. “Enter Flashtime” sets up one of The Flash’s most unique one-time episode plots; a nuclear bomb detonated in Central City by eco-terrorist Veronica Dale, and Barry has seconds in speed force time to figure out how to close off the blast without the major help of any of his allies. Barry learned from his time with Cisco that he had just a few minutes to interact with anyone he pulls into his own pace, or as Cisco cleverly named it, flashtime.

The biggest problem that this episode had to offer was the fact that its conclusion is extraordinarily weak. The premise and execution were phenomenal, but the ending absolutely breaks all the momentum that the episode had built up. Using the speed force as an excuse for stopping the blast radius of the nuke was lazy writing. While I cannot think of a better solution to the problem, I do think that the speed force could have possibly been manipulated in a different way to draw a more exciting conclusion. The outcome also should have had consequences; not a single member of Team Flash had been injured in any way. When you are dealing with something as catastrophic as a nuke, you would expect something critical to form by the end.

Jesse Quick and Jay Garrick return.The two fan-favorite speedsters Jesse Quick and Jay Garrick returned for episode fifteen. These two characters were utilized perfectly in this episode. Barry could not rely on a superpowered trio to solve his nuclear crisis. It’s hard enough to not give your heroes an unhealthy amount of power when they can turn seconds into hours, but the writers created a clever way to solve this by explaining that Garrick and Quick could not move around as long as Barry because the two were not as fast. While I wish Jay had possibly received more screen time since we rarely get to see him, viewers will certainly be satisfied by just seeing the face of the character again during his yearly appearance. Jesse Quick, on the other hand, had some father-daughter time with Harrison Wells as the two began to cope with their past problems. These scenes help further give purpose as to why Harry has stuck around with Team Flash; something desperately needed for some time now.

The last scene continued to set up what could snowball into the biggest event of the next season. I will still stand my ground that Dawn Allen is indeed the waitress at Jitters. The character looks far too similar to that of Iris West and has the personality of season one Barry Allen. We know from Eobard Thawne that Barry lived a long and successful life with a larger family so it’s likely that the overestatic barista is indeed his future daughter. While I am looking forward to seeing her character in the near future, what I truly am dying to see is her son, Impulse, Bart Allen.

“Enter Flashtime” is by far one of the most impressive episodes that The CW has ever visually produced in their network’s history. Episode fifteen has attempted to achieve the sense of an adrenaline rush as Barry had seconds to figure out how to stop a nuclear bomb from destroying all of the central city that had already been detonated. Every second had stakes; each character was in a position of life or death. The camera movement and artificially computer-created effects were going fast to give off a sense of top speed and the limited amount of time each character had meant that Barry had a few minutes to utilize each of his friend’s unique skills in order to stop the blast. “Enter Flashtime” succeeded greatly because of this. This is one of the best episodes of the season. “Enter Flashtime” is an episode with such a powerful setup, but an extremely sloppy conclusion.


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