The Flash - 'Abra Kadabra'

"Gonna reach out and grab ya."

With Savatar on the loose and Iris’ life in the balance, it’s time for a meta of the week.

Actually, the fiendish illusionist Abra Kadabra is not a meta, and nor in this incarnation is he a magician. Instead, as in his original appearance, he is a dimension-hopping criminal from the far-flung future who uses some form of sufficiently advanced science to seem to wield magical powers. Despite this massive technological advantage, he’s stealing local tech, and although Team Flash soon capture him – with a little help from Gypsy, who has her own axe to grind with Abra Kadabra he has a trump card to play: Because he’s from the future, he knows who Savatar is and how to save Iris. He just won’t tell them unless they let him go instead of turning him over to Gypsy to be executed on her Earth. Amazingly, Barry doesn’t immediately make the executive decision to let him go, but Joe does.

The team realise that Abra is stealing the components for a time sphere, and that his capture and escape were part of an infiltration of STAR Labs to steal the power core of the Time Vault. Fortunately, this means that they can track the time sphere’s engines and Barry is able to phase Abra right out of his cockpit and deliver him back to Gypsy, he and Iris having chosen that he can not be allowed to bargain his way out of justice for the murders he has committed. Nonetheless, Barry appeals to his basic humanity, only to be told that the Flash is the hated arch enemy of generations of villains to come, and that denying him the information allows him to feel that he has hurt the Flash almost as much as Savatar did. So, you know, he’s a dick, and Barry ‘Master Planner’ Allen decides he’s going to run into the future and find out what’s what (because ignoring what Earth-3 Flash tells him has always worked out so well.)

Caitlin does the self-surgery thing from Ronin almost word for word.

During Abra’s initial attack on STAR Labs, Caitlin was injured and, despite directing Julian to operate her, she seizes in the stinger. To save her, Julian takes her power nullifying pendant so that her metahuman metabolism can heal her, which means that oops, now we have Killer Frost in the hizz-ouse.

While showy and flash, Abra Kadabra lacks an iconic power set, and his Derrin Brown get up lacks the flair of a more traditional magician’s costume. Consequently, and despite his knowledge of the future, he is a less-than stellar villain of the week. The set up for next week’s presumed conflict with Killer Frost is also a little ho-hum, because I have never been fond of the powers = evil plotline. If anything, surely Killer Frost’s powers are supposed to reflect the emotional cold inside her, which our Earth-1 Caitlin does not have? We’ve a three week wait now for what will surely be either a friendship is magic cul de sac which returns us to the status quo, or a complete downer ending which dismisses Danielle Panabaker from the show, which would kind of suck (although it would give Tom Felton a chance to look mightily woobie.)