The Flash, Season 5, Episode 21: The Girl With The Red Lightning
The fifth season of The Flash has been... inconsistent. It's got its own problems, of course -- the supporting characters' plot being uninteresting; the season focuses way too much on Nora; the pacing is weird; some characters disappear and reappear between episodes... but most divisive is the sheer amount of focus on Cicada, whose storyline is stretched out unbelievably long, longer than other poorly-received CW villains like Vandal Savage, Thinker, Savitar or Ra's al Ghul. Maybe not Ricardo Diaz. But Cicada is definitely the one with the least depth among CW's stinker villains, and even the replacement of Orlin Dwyer with his future time-traveling daughter isn't that much of an improvement.
The fact that the pacing of the episodes tended to be more concerned about their own episode-of-the-week story instead of building up Cicada beyond some brief "bwaaa I'm here to do main villain stuff" hurts things even more, which is why this episode, "The Girl With The Red Lightning", has the unenviable job of not just setting up the final Cicada plot points, but also to deal with the whole Nora/Reverse-Flash storyline, because, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Reverse-Flash actually is evil all along and isn't being a nice elderly mentor for Nora. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about how they handle this. I feel the show doesn't really do enough in making Eobard feel like he genuinely cares for Nora as a daughter or anything akin to that -- he's always felt manipulative and dickish in all his scenes, which plays a lot in how I honestly just shrug at the episode seemingly treating this as a huge moment. Instead, it makes Nora look like an idiot.
Reverse-Flash himself really doesn't do a whole ton this episode, mind you. He just smirks on his dumb chair even while the evil warden tortures him by zapping him, and ends up leading him to 2049's version of the electric chair, which is... pretty literal. We really don't see a lot on this end, but, of course, revelations in the present day would tell us that this smug look is basically because Eobard Thawne is a man with a plan. Oh, and one of the final shots show that he's got Cicada's lightning-bolt dagger strapped to his chest as either his power-dampener or the method to execute him.
In the present day, of course, Cicada is being super-crazy, using the random plot devices collected over the course of the past three or four episodes (I geniunely don't remember any of them other than the cryo-atomizer) to kill all metahumans in Central City in one go. Meanwhile, Team Flash has their own super-weapon, which is the Mirror Gun they want to use to get rid of the Cicada Dagger once and for all. After a sorta-pointless subplot where they investigate Cisco's old roommate's laboratory, the solution to stopping Cicada ends up being... the mental-link that Nora and Cicada has, which honestly doesn't earn much other than a shrug from me. All right.
We get yet another West-Allen family drama, as Barry and Iris forbid Nora from pursuing this because any time she channels Grace, she ends up also channeling her anger and that's bad because it connects her to the Negative Force. Which... yeah, it's kind of a weird plot point. And, of course, thanks to Grace being all crazy and stuff, Nora ends up unleashing red lightning everywhere and we get yet another lecture from Barry and Iris. This... this would actually elicit some sort of response from me if we hadn't heard what's essentially the same thing like a dozen times over this season's run already, and at this point I've grown pretty numb to this. Nora makes an argument that she's grown and matured (HA!) and the parents relent, and... I guess this is our resolution? Not particularly convincing, but all right.
As this is going on, other things happen -- Ralph tries to convince the rest of Team Flash of his own huge conspiracy board that Eobard Thawne might be planning for something and talks about alternate timelines and shit, but everyone sort of ignores him because they want to deal with one threat at a time. Joe West gets some genuine spotlight scene instead of just being Dad Joe and ends up getting absolutely overwhelmed when he is put in charge of STAR Labs and CCPD working together and delivering the metahuman cure to anyone who might want it, and a pep talk from Cecile ends up talking him down. Sherloque gets a brief sub-plot of talking to Renee and after insensitively thinking that the best way to be safe is to take the cure (and after a brief action scene against Cicada), he ends up realizing that Renee wants to be a metahuman and sends her off to hide in another Earth until the crisis is over. Honestly, the Renee plot has been kind of uninspiring, and after H.R. Wells' girlfriend just sort of disappeared after her season is over, I'm not surprised if we never hear from Renee Adler again.
Also, Sherloque has this little device to open up warp-holes, why not use that and the dagger? If Vibe's powers won't work out because they're canceled out, why not use technology?
Whatever the case, though, Nora uses her mental connection thing and warns everyone that Cicada is attacking the CCPD building, which... no shit, Sherlock. Frankly, with a bunch of scientists, people who deal with metahuman terrorists every day and the self-proclaimed best detective in the multiverse, it's honestly a bit of a dumb move on everyone's part not to realize this from, like, the minute they distribute the cure at the CCPD. Cicada uses the metahumans as a dark-matter battery for the device (which is kind of random?) and we get a bit of a tense drama as the Flash, Killer Frost and Elongated Man (with Terminator blade-arms!) try their damn best to slow down Cicada and her metahuman powers which are energy rope-things, while Cisco tries to defuse the doomsday device. The episode ends in a bit of a cliffhanger as Flash shoots Cicada's dagger with the mirror gun, and Ralph jumps in the way of it.
And... and it's an all right pre-finale episode, I suppose, for a season that frankly doesn't rank too highly on my Flash season totem pole. I'm not ready to call it worse than the pretty poopy season two and four yet, but it's not been particularly awesome. We did get some last-minute attempt at characterization for Cicada II, with her little rant about how she comes from a time overwhelmed by destructive metahumans (presumably this is before the ARGUS crackdown in the future that Legends of Tomorrow's Zari comes from, but who knows with Arrowverse future timelines?) and we get to see hallucination Orlin Dwyer a bit more, but... I dunno. It's just not enough, I guess, and the fact taht it's pretty obvious that Eobard's going to be the final villain this week honestly probably means that Cicada II's going to be dealt with pretty early on next episode.
Not the worst episode out there, a bunch of fun moments, but I am pretty much 100% done with the Nora/parents drama, and Cicada is... she's just going to be there as kind of a generic superhero show villain, I suppose.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Mostly continuity-related, but the Fallout episode and the dead Earth that Cisco sent the nuclear energy to is brought up; and Renee has a call-back to the fight between King Shark and Gorilla Grodd; Nora uses the mental enhancer from the various Killer Frost/Caitlin episodes in the past to connect with Grace; Flash recalls how he trapped Thawne in the speed-containment cell in the first season.
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