The Flash - 'The Race of His Life'

There really is only so much drama to be milked from a race too fast for the
audience to follow, and the episode wisely gives us more.

We cold open the season finale of The Flash on last week's bombshell, and because G+ shows the first few lines of the review and a lot of people aren't quite up to - forgive me - speed, I'll waffle a little before going further.

Henry Allen was dead, to begin with, and Barry goes berserk, utterly flattening Zoom in a fight only for Zoom to step in and once more kill 'himself'; another time remnant, and I'm increasingly sure that time travel doesn't, or at least shouldn't work that way.

Then Zoom crashes the wake and challenges Barry to a race - fastest speedster wins. Team Flash deduce that Zoom is using a device he stole from Mercury Labs to create a multiverse destroying megabomb, to be powered by the lightning of two racing speedsters, and Barry decides that the only solution is to race Zoom and win, because of course Zoom will. keep his word and stand down. Once more it bears repeating: Barry should not be allowed to make plans. Seriously; he should learn something from the fact that all of his friends would agree to tranquilise him and lock him in the pipeline rather than let him do his plan.

Team Flash (sans Flash) try to knock Zoom back into Earth-2, where he might be able to destroy that world, but only that world, but Joe is pulled through with him and when Wally finds out he releases Barry for an unearned bout of self-righteous glowering. Barry agrees to the race, but creates a time remnant of his own who frees Joe and then sacrifices his existence to counteract the destructive pulse. Of course he can't kill Zoom - although I would like to bring up once more the fact that he totally killed several Earth-2 metas in the early part of the season - but once more a deus ex machina takes out the big bad. This time, it is one that Barry sort of planned for, as his time shenanigans attracts a pair of Time Wraiths, but Zoom is way higher on their shit list than he is.

Geezer Flash.

They free the man in the iron mask, who is in fact the real Jay Garrick; the Flash of Earth-3 from whom Hunter Zolomon swiped his alias. He is also the Earth-3 duplicate of Henry Allen, which weirds the fuck out of Barry. Jay goes back to Earth-2 en route to his own world, but Barry remains shaken. He even shoots down the idea of making a go of it with Iris on the grounds that he's too broken to be any good for anyone.

And then he tries to fix things by saving his mother and kinda sorta invalidating his own existence (if I remember correctly, by capturing Thawne he should revert the timeline to one where the real Harrison Wells causes the accelerator meltdown in the 2020s.) Once more; Barry Allen is not to make plans, especially not when emotional.

After a strong start, Season 2 of The Flash has kind of ended up trapped in its own web, with a lot of mythology pouring out - the multiverse, time remnants, time wraiths - and never really surmounting the problem that after all of Oliver's coaching, and Harry's cautions, Joe's teaching, the deaths of Ronnie and Joseph West, and pretty much everyone telling him that, perhaps ironically, he really needs to slow down and think to get the best from his speed, he's still the same brash, reckless speedster he always was; just a little less chipper. He gets sadder, but no wiser, it seems, and as much as a speedster needs to be reined in, I would like to see him becoming less of a bad idea pileup.

Of course, Season 3 really ought to see him replaced by a version of himself who is 15 years older and likely never met Olly, so who knows how they're going to handle that. If he lets Thawne go knowing he's going to murder the real Harrison Wells, I call dick move.