The Flash - 'Monster'

This week's theme: "Hi Mom" reveals.

It's all go at STAR Labs, as the team struggles to settle new arrival 'HR' Wells, and Cisco adapts to having Barry as his temporary roomie.

Caitlin meanwhile goes out of town to ask her estranged mother, Dr Carla Tannhauser, for help in managing her Killer Frost 'condition'. Tannhauser runs some tests while mother and daughter rub each other the wrong way, until Tannhauser's lab assistant Nigel decides to try to hold Caitlin against her will in an attempt to make a name for himself. This goes about as well as any plan which has 'hold dangerously powerful metahuman against her will' as step one could be expected to go, but in talking her out of literal cold-blooded murder, Tannhauser reignites that mother-daughter bond. Unfortunately, her research shows that the more Caitlin uses her powers, the harder they will be to control or remove.

"So... kaiju."

Back in Central City, they're having the worst kind of trouble; Kaiju trouble. A huge and yet elusive monster is stomping around town making a nuisance of himself. Barry tries to work with Julian to crack the case in order to break the ice between them, but his Flash-related absences and pro-meta stance anger Julian, a former military man(1) who despises metas because so many of them choose to use their incredible gifts for small-minded, selfish ends, while even good ones like the Flash make human authorities complacent.

They do manage to work out that the monster seems to be controlled from a central point, but it's only when the Flash tries to Empire Strikes Back it that they discover there is no monster; it's just a hologram. The Flash races to the control station in time to prevent Julian shooting the 'meta', who is just a disaffected kid with a lot of tech. This incident cracks Julian's surety and he and Barry start to bond. Aww. At STAR Labs, the team realise that HR isn't a scientist at all; he's an author of 'scientific romance' and self-proclaimed muse, who worked with a partner in his own universe, and kinda sorta fled because people worked out that he was taking credit for someone else's work. The team nonetheless keep him on because Tom Cavanagh's contract game is on point.

Much like Supergirl's 'Crossfire', 'Monster' uses a slight A-plot to support an episode of strong character work, and overall the A-plot itself was strongest. HR is still very annoying, but maybe he'll get better now, and the settling of the dynamic between Barry and Julian hints at a more interesting and nuanced progression than was threatened. I'm not as keen on the push to turn Caitlin into a villain, in part because, power tends to corrupt aside, I've never been a fan of morality-defining superpowers (except in the case of Brandon Sanderson's epics, since in that case it's kind of the point of the entire thing,) and if you can have good or bad speedsters, why not good or bad cryokinetics? After all, working out his Vibe powers didn't turn Cisco into Reverb.

(1) With, one hopes, an appropriately tortured backstory.