The Flash – Reckless review S8 E10

At times it feels like a lot of my frustration with The Flash would be solved if the writers just put Barry and Caitlin together. That way all of the questionable screen time ratio of Iris vs. Caitlin/Frost would make sense.

Instead, Iris gets yet another sidelining subplot — this is after spending so much time in the Mirrorverse — while Caitlin/Frost get so much unnecessary attention.

Iris is causing time to fracture around her. This is excellent as The Flash’s supporting cast is now almost entirely comprised of metas. It was either Joe, Chuck or Iris (hmmm) that needed some abilities.

These shows do a crap job of making the regular people without powers interesting and the go-to crutch move is to just give them powers. This is akin to comic book writers whose main tool to drum up interest is to kill off beloved characters.

Deon tells Iris and Barry it’s best that she stay in Coast City for now. That is absurd. Barry could take Iris back to Central City in seconds. How would that possibly disrupt anything? On the “plus side” this should allow for more time for Frost and Caitlin.

And what a coincidence! The mysterious black fire is now going after Frost. What grief does she have? Besides whatever is driving her to create those paintings?

Ah, Team Flash deduces the black fire is not just going after people with extreme grief. That makes sense as Chuck didn’t have this lingering grief issue over his dad’s death. It is kinda nice that the heroes can have a theory one week that’s proven incorrect the next. That actually feels like they’re scientists.

Frost asks her mother, Carla, to help use her as bait. Barry’s not down for the plan, but after a 30 second convo, he’s on board. That felt pointless.

Still, not really here for the Caitlin/Frost/mother strife. Caitlin has become a massive wet blanket this season. Clearly, she needed Cisco to help balance out her mother hen attitude towards Frost.

Turns out Carla discovered she also has latent meta powers. See, what I mean? Barry is all too happy to add another apprentice. What happened to him teaching Kramer? That was literally mentioned in one episode and we haven’t seen Kramer or her mimic powers since. Now apparently we’ve moved on to Tinya and Carla. Did someone at casting forget to check someone’s social media accounts again?

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Despite never using her abilities before, Carla amazingly gets the hang of focusing her powers like Frost as they try to snare black fire in a containment trap. It’s too much for them though and black fire gets away. Stantz and Spengler probably could have helped with containing spirits in a trap. Just saying…

At Coast City, Tinya tries to find her mother with Iris and Sue’s help. It seemed like Sue was doing some serious conniving to get the adoption agency worker to hand over the files, but there was no payoff. And when the employee returns, most of the objects in the office are gone. That doesn’t seem like Iris’ powers at play.

Iris and Sue find Tinya’s mother. This leads to a genuinely emotion-free moment with Tinya and her mom. We don’t know Tinya’s mom and we barely care about Tinya. This doesn’t resonate. For her next trick, Iris makes Tinya’s mom disappear. That’s a decent cliffhanger, but let’s go to the main character we care about gang.

Yep, the “post credit” scene is all about Caitlin who gets a visit from black fire. And it says something Ronnie once told her making Caitlin thinks her long-lost dead husband is magically back. If the writers hadn’t just done this with Chuck it would have had more impact. At least we know Caitlin instead of Frost will be the focus next week.

No level up reference this week. That would require Barry to do anything this episode. It’s not a tough formula to crack. When The Flash is featured, The Flash tends to be good. If he’s not, it’s very dicey. This week was definitely the latter.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Photo Credit: The CW 

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