The Flash, Season 2, Episode 23: The Race of His Life
Yeah, that's honestly an underwhelming finale, really, so much that I didn't feel like writing the review until like two weeks after the fact. The big fight against Zoom had a couple of cool scenes, but ultimately half the episode was spent having to set up the ridiculous premise that the two had to race to save the world. I really don't buy the 'you're angry, stay put' justification for the rest of the team to lock Barry in a cage and decide to go after Zoom themselves.
Really, why not repeat the same thing they did last episode? And honestly, is the population of Earth-2 so disposable that they can live with themselves throwing Zoom back there where he, no doubt, will terrorize the population as bad or even worse than he did on Earth-1? It's just such a moronic moment, and the fact that Zoom just doesn't kill Joe because of plot armour ends up being dumb. Zoom's big plan to create a chain reaction to destroy the Infinite Earths also ends up being whatever, and maybe it'll sound impressive if we actually got to know this like last episode or the episode before that, but when the show fails to make me care for Earth-2, which has characters we know on it... hell, the characters in the show don't even care for Earth-2, multiplying it by infinity just doesn't get me invested more.
Oh, and there's the big chase fight with time remnants that doesn't make sense but look cool, and some zappy-zap and speedy-speed moments. Can't fault the action standpoint of the episode, of course, which looks better than any Flash/Zoom fight before. But ultimately it felt quite cathartic, and only forced to end with Zoom being captured by the Time Wraiths (and probably turned into the Black Flash) because, hey, it's the last episode of the series.
Oh, like everyone guessed, the Man in the Iron Mask is Henry Allen. Except, wait, he's also Jay Garrick, he just has Henry's face. He's also the Flash. Of Earth-3. Yeah. I would've rather they not went with the 'Zoom is Jay but not really' twist and make something more sensible. Oh well, hopefully Jay will have a better showing next season.
And then, at the end of this episode, Barry decides to run all the way back to the moment when Eobard Thawne is about to kill Nora Allen, and rescue his mother, thus wiping out the entire reason why season one's ending is so good, wiping out season one's time-travelling Barry Allen, and wiping out the timeline for a mini-Flashpoint event. Of course, even if this is going to stick (Spoiler: it's not) I'm definitely not looking forward for a huge chunk of season three to just show how, oh, Cisco and Caitlin and Iris and Joe aren't nice to Barry because the events that happened didn't happen the way they did.
Overall it's as much as I expected. Messy and really only there to set up Season Three. Zoom is utterly ineffective as a villain, the Iron Mask Man twist ends up being just exactly as everyone predicted... why couldn't we have sprung RealJay last episode, so we actually have a reason to care about him, and have this episode be a big climatic showdown between Jay, Barry and Zoom? Bah. So much in this season has been kinda poorly executed, and this finale is definitely one of them.
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