The Flash - 'King Shark'

There's something subtly weird about seeing the Flash with the Diggles.

Some time has passed since the Earth-2 fiasco, and everyone's feeling kind of down. Fortunately there isn't any more time to brood, as King Shark escapes from ARGUS custody and heads for Central City to complete his mission, with new ARGUS director Lyla Michaels-Diggle and her ever helpful hubbie-cum-sidekick on his fishy heels.

Wait; did they leave Sara with barely-recovered serial evil mercenary army joiner Andy? You know what, I'm not going to think about that.

The search for King Shark goes impressively badly, considering that they're looking for a twelve-foot tall shark man in a city of mostly sub-six foot ape descendants, so they tap the expertise of shark researcher Dr Lampton, the wife of the Earth-1 doppelganger of the man who became King Shark. Meanwhile, the man of the hour busts into chez West having scented the Flash and then kicks Barry around, which serves to add tension to the subplot of the week - the awkwardness of Barry and Wally - and provokes Barry to confess to Iris and Joe what happened to their doppelgangers.

Seriously, there are movies that could learn a lot from this series.

Back at STAR Labs, Caitlin confronts Cisco over his odd behaviour, which he admits is due to his fear that she will become cold and turn into Killer Frost. She assures him that she is simply keeping her emotions tightly in check for fear that they will spiral out of control. Later, she even manages to play a joke on Cisco by pretending to be going evil, which is kind of dark for Caitlin, but not evil dark.

Finally, the team create a Flash lure full of tranquilisers to bait King Shark. He takes the bait, but not the tranqs, and Barry leads him away from the squishy ARGUS agents by running on water, then trapping King Shark in a vortex while he builds up a lightning bolt.

Barry announces to the Team that he has come to a realisation: Since getting whupped by Zoom, he's been running away from things, reacting to problems, and it's time to run towards: He's not to blame for Jay's death, but he's taking responsibility, and he's not going to leave Earth-2 at Zoom's mercy. He's going to go back, somehow, and stop him.

And on Earth-2...

"What's a Nubian?"

Of course, since Zoom is Jay Garrick and Jay is Jay Garrick and I'm still calling that Johnnie Buckethead is Jay Garrick, I could just as easily have captioned that one 'Will the real Jay Garrick please stand up?'

'King Shark' is on the surface (if you will) a meta of the week episode with mild crossover, but actually it does a lot of legwork clearing the decks after the end of the first chapter of the Earth-2 story. It signals a sea change in Barry's attitude after his beat-down and hopefully the whole 'telling people about Earth-2' thing will signal the end of the stupid secret keeping phase which has been going on since Episode 1. Where we go from here with Zoom, who appears to have taken several months to get back to his lair after snatching Jay...? Who knows. I hope we've not seen the last of 'proper' Jay though.