The Flash, Season 2, Episode 10: Potential Energy
Well that was a nice episode to start off the second half of The Flash's second season. It's mostly meant as a low-key episode dealing with a polarizing topic among fans: Patty Spivot. A character who you either love or loathe, and I'm honestly in the latter part most of the time. It's not that she's annoying, though that's a slight problem -- she's just badly handled. She's either shoved down our throats and given an obscenely large amount of screentime in favour of far more interesting and plot-relevant characters (Caitlin, Iris, and especially Jay Garrick), and the nonsensical Secret Identity Drama redux is just annoying.
And even in an episode that should be sending her off, Barry had three different occasions to tell Patty "hey by the way, my big secret is that I'm the Flash". When he first came into the apartment, when he saved Patty from the Turtle, and when Patty apparently just decides she's done with all this shit and decides to leave Central City. The thing is, Barry's already agonized about telling Patty and has resolved to do so during the art exhibition, something that the rest of the team points out is a bad idea because they were expecting trouble. But no, several chances for Barry to tell Patty about his identity and potentially avoid the big fallout that follows, and Barry just ignores it. It's just as well that Patty leaves the show, hopefully permanently, because all she represents in the show is more and more of exhaustive drama with no payoff whatsoever.
Other than my annoyance about the handling of Patty's character, I thought the episode was decent. Patty was given multiple chances to show that she's not just being bitchy, actually being pretty damn patient with Barry considering everything that's going on to her and the implosion of their relationship lies solely on Barry's head. Not that it's something that I will mourn, mind you, but it made a pretty decent focus for the majority of the episode, ending with Barry losing his love interest not because she got Zoom'd, but simply because, well, real life happened.
The main villain of the episode is the Turtle, one of the earliest villains for both the Jay Garrick and Barry Allen versions of the Flash. Originally in the comics he's just a supervillain (dressed in a turtle suit, naturally) who's dangerous because of how slowly he operates, until writers realized this doesn't make a lick of sense and gave him speed-stealing powers. And, well the Turtle in this series does have the speed-stealing powers. He's a nice little villain and we get a nice running gag that most of the cast already know the Turtle as someone Cisco has been keeping tabs on while the crew is preoccupied with bigger threats like Zoom and Grodd. The fact that the Turtle, despite his utterly game-breaking powers, is only interested in stealing stuff and keeping them preserved makes him pretty low in the villain hierarchy as compared to people like Zoom.
Also, the Turtle shares his origin with most of the Season 1 villains -- changed by the particle accelerator, as opposed to Season 2's "Earth-2 immigrant forcibly recruited by Zoom" origin. Well I guess the Turtle's just that slow.
But the episode quickly found some momentum as the Turtle turned out to not just be a harmless dude in a hood who wants to steal stuff. He quickly establishes how basically stopping time (well, absorbing kinetic energy from everyone around him) is an awesome power, and while Barry does manage to beat the Turtle eventually, the scene where he's ready to go all Dollmaker on Patty simply because the Flash cares for her is just flat-out insane and terrifying, something that I would not expect from the freaking Turtle of all people. And they manage to do this without resorting to excessive gore or violence. Good show, there.
Meanwhile there's a nice little B-plot running along that deals with Wally West. He skirts the line between being a stereotypical black punk and being, well, non-stereotypical. He does things like race in Fast-&-Furious races, but he does it to earn money for his sick mother and his daddy issues haven't really annoyed me yet. I honestly wished that they just forego the amount of drama that the estranged relationship got, but it didn't quite grate as hard as it could, and Joe and Wally reconcile at the end of the episode. Wally did say a couple of hurtful things in this episode to Joe, but on the other hand, well, despite his aloof attitude it's clear that Wally's more than a little pissed off that Joe left him... even if it's no fault of Joe's and really Francine's the horrible parent in all this. Honestly the brilliant acting from Joe's actor is the only thing that made me forgive this relatively needless drama.
Meanwhile, Harrison and Cisco bond over a story about Zoom's horrendous atrocities, and Cisco very nicely offers to 'vibe' Harrison if he ever needed to make sure his daughter's alive. Of course, Harrison knows that Jesse Quick is alive as long as Zoom needs Harrison to help make Barry faster, and a good chunk of his scant screentime in this episode is him trying and getting frustrated at trying to achieve his end of the deal... but evidently Cisco's speech at fighting Zoom and slowing him down at the beginning of the episode got to Zoom because at the end of the episode Harrison goes into the Pipeline cells, either kills or seriously injures the Turtle when he took the tissue sample... all in the name of beating Zoom, while he delivers an awesome narration about how he lost Jesse at a planetarium one time and how he swore he would do anything to get her back.
The Stinger in this episode is freaking Reverse-Flash running around, vibrating and being scary, a little fake-out that Earth-2 Harrison Wells has also became Reverse-Flash... except that this is Eobard Thawne, in his original blonde form, apparently having traveled into the past for the first time, because he has no idea what's going on. That was fucking unexpected, and I suspect Reverse-Flash might be a far more entertaining villain than 'I wanna steal speed' Zoom.
(Gideon calls Eobard Thawne 'professor' as a nice in-joke to the character's original lengthy name of "Professor Zoom, the Reverse-Flash")
There's also a couple of scenes between Caitlin and Jay, which explores that Jay is apparently dying and, uh, the only way for them to stop that is to get Jay his speed back which can only be done by beating Zoom. As if we need any more inclination to beat Zoom. It's just fuel for more drama, which by this point just seems overkill.
But honestly, as much as I harp on and on about CW's insistence at adding more drama than needed, I honestly quite enjoyed this episode. Turtle, Joe and Harrison were definitely the high points of the episode and for such a Patty-centric one it doesn't annoy me as much as I thought it would. With both the Patty and Wally dramas taken out of the picture, maybe we can get some proper story in the next episode? Please?
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