The Flash S02E22 Review: Flash vs Metahuman Army... sorta.

The Flash, Season 2, Episode 22: Invincible

Oh, so that's why they showed all the Barry moving on from his mother last episode. Because Zoom comes in to kill Henry Allen to give Barry that anguish-filled power-up. It would have been a lot more dramatic if Zoom has actually had his comic-book-counterpart's obsession of making the Flash experience personal tragedy, but CW's Zoom has none of that. It would've been a lot more dramatic if Barry had actually, y'know, been struggling with moving on from his mother, like I said last review. But, hey, there are some nice things about this episode. Kind of. I really wished it aired, like, not as the penultimate episode of the season, because as far as it goes, it's pretty underwhelming. 

Yeah, we get a large army of metahumans fighting the police force at the beginning, and it was pretty awesome! A bunch of Hawk-people, a dude that shoots flames, a dude that turns into mist, a dude that shoots lightning... Singh and Joe pinned down... and then Barry just one-shots all of them in like two seconds. I mean, yes, there's that one dude that Wally ran over after he stole some random woman's bag, but overall Zoom's big metahuman army felt pretty m'eh.

The main villain episode of this episode is Black Siren, Laurel Lance's Earth-2 doppelganger, which is a fun, hammy villain with the ability to scream so loud it can collapse a building, but ultimately Black Siren ends up being nothing but a filler. She's fun to have around, questioning Zoom, and Caitlin and Cisco dressing up as their Earth-2 counterparts and Cisco finally learning some Vibe-shockwave powers is cool, but ultimately it felt really fillery as Barry zooming around the city to send every metahuman into a dizzy loop felt way too easy and convenient of a way to deal with an offscreen crisis. 

I wouldn't mind the episode focusing only on a villain or two, since budget reasons and all, but last season's penultimate episode was a Justice League versus Reverse-Flash battle, and the two episodes that built up to that starred Gorilla Grodd and the Rogues respectively. Here? We have a trio of episodes starring Rupture, Zombie Girder and Black Siren, which all embody underwhelming filler supervillains. Maybe the show really should've kept Killer Frost and Reverb around so they can be the pre-final minibosses. And really, there was no reason for Zoom to just stand there lurking and watching Barry beat up his metahuman army other than WAIT FOR THE FINALE DAMN IT.

There were some subplots running through it, subplots that really should've played out in an earlier episode or throughout the season with Barry Allen suddenly being cocky as fuck thanks to random Speed Force revelations, and him randomly mouthing off to Henry for utterly unjustifiable reasons. There was Joe trying to get Flash to try and stop Wally from being a glory-hound intend on making good of his 'second chance' promise... why not bring Wally into the fold and have him be part of the Team Flash in STAR Labs? Dr McGee returns after like a season-long absence, and she apparently knows of Barry's identity... but not even that can really inject an iota of interest into this episode. 

Barry's character development throughout this episode really felt randomly forced upon him. And seriously, you would think Zoom would come in and actually, y'know, attack Barry and put a stop to his overconfidence. But, nah, let Black Siren go around blowing up buildings for no good reason. And the random character buildup seems to try to get Barry into racking up as much guilt as possible before Henry Allen died... and really, with the chemistry behind Barry and Henry that we already had throughout all their previous interactions, you didn't really need it. The random argument felt forced and really only served to telegraph that Henry Allen's only back to die. Barry being astoundingly arrogant initially seemed to be played up to him knowing something about the Speed Force that none of us knew, but after so many humbling lessons throughout his journey throughout two seasons, it turns out that, hey, an apple is just an apple, and Barry is just that cocksure.

Though it is cool to finally have him behave like a mature superhero who isn't wishy-washy and asks every other member of the cast for opinions for every crisis. Doesn't really excuse him being kind of a dick to Henry, but hey. 

Of course, it's also kind of painfully obvious that either or both the Man in the Iron Mask or the real Jay Garrick is Earth-2 Henry Allen, and that would have me ramble off into a long, long rant in how the show underutilized Jay Garrick as a mentor or a double-agent figure and how this season's overall plotting is utterly messy. 

Oh, and Cisco vibes that Earth-2 is being torn apart by giant rifts. I'm not sure I care that much at all about Earth-2, considering we know scant little about the characters there, and hell, even our heroes don't seem to particularly care what's going on in Earth-2, happy to lob Zoom and Grodd there and just close the rift and say 'fuck you'. Oh, and Wally knows Barry's identity. I don't care. 

So, yeah. The big Metapocalypse ended up amounting to nothing -- we really could've had a couple more random set pieces being trashed or news reports of even more metahumans trashing other places instead of that one group Barry cleared and that one pickpocketer. Black Siren was fun but ultimately kind of meaningless and random, Barry's overconfidence is kind of shit and, well, I don't really see how the final episode can salvage this mess of a season. And Flash's first season was actually so good, too! This? This is just messy. I mean, it's not entirely unwatchable, but damn if it isn't pulled in all directions at once. 

DC Easter Eggs:

• There's enough of this that I would rather talk about, which is kind of testament to how much this episode failed to hold my attention. Black Siren is not from DC Comics per se, but rather from the DC Animated Universe. She was an evil Black Canary doppelganger there, too, but to my knowledge Black Siren hadn't made the jump from cartoon to comic the way that other characters like Harley Quinn had. 
• Iris quotes 'in blackest night', which, naturally, is a nod to the phrase in the Green Lantern oath.
• While a lot of the villains seem to just be generic ones with generic powers (you could easily make an argument that Green-Flame dude was a Green Lantern or Blight or Dr Phosphorus or a genderswapped Starfire), at least a pair of winged metahumans flew over the streets, which may or may not be Earth-2 versions of Hawkman and Hawkgirl. I don't care enough either way. 
• Henry (who played Barry in the 90's series) and dr. McGee kind of strike it up a bit before Zoom zooms him, which is a reference to how in the 90's series Barry Allen and McGee had a romance going on. 
• The idea of a Dimensional Tuning Fork is a plot point in the Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis mega-storylines in the comics, though they functioned quite differently than how this show used them.
• Reverb was actually left-handed in his short-lived appearance! Now if the show actually paid this much attention to detail in, y'know, the actual story...