The Flash, Season 1, Episode 15: Out of Time
That was a bit of an awesome episode now, wasn’t it? I didn’t expect this episode to be focusing on Mark Mardon, the Weather Wizard, nor was I expecting, well, everything else that happened! The trailers teased Reverse-Flash, and I expected that to happen, but definitely not in the way that it unfolded. There is just so much going on in this episode, so much unexpected shit that went down that it took me off guard every single time.
First off, the big reveal – Harrison Wells is, in fact, Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash of the future. Not a new character, not an alternate Barry Allen or Wally West or Jay Garrick or what-have-you from the future. That was one of the big guesses, but kudos to the makers of the show to keep someone who is relatively well-versed in DC lore still be on his toes.
Second, Cisco fucking dies. Wells-Thawne stabbed him straight through the chest with a vibrating arm, which took me truly off-guard. Because, well, holy shit! For one thing, I did not expect Cisco to get killed off this early on, especially with the prior knowledge that someone was cast as the actor for his brother. Cisco’s death really, really took me by surprise by that meta-knowledge alone. I mean, with the end of this episode there’s a highly likely chance that Barry will undo Cisco’s death, but man, the sudden stab really surprised me.
Thirdly, the fact that Barry just punched a hole through time… and I did not expect it to happen now, in this episode, while he’s fighting the fucking Weather Wizard. Yes, I expect Barry to travel to the past thanks to all the foreshadowing and buildup, but the build-up (and meta-knowledge) led me to thinking that Barry is going to do it with the Cosmic Treadmill and on… well, basically any other moment that isn’t “stopping a tsunami created by the Weather Wizard”.
Fourthly, Barry reveals his identity to Iris. Which is kind of tame compared to everything else that fucking went down in this episode, but that was kind of surprising too.
It’s really awesome that all these major twists – the Big Reveals of Barry and Wells’ identity, plus a major character’s death – happen in a seemingly innocuous episode. I mean, the bulk of the episode focused on yet another metahuman-of-the-week. Granted Mark Mardon is the Weather Wizard in the comics and one of Barry’s more prominent foes, and he’s got sufficient awesome powers and an actual backstory by proxy of his brother Clyde Mardon and a personal vendetta against Joe West, but he’s still just, y’know, a seemingly random villain.
But let’s talk about all that later, because Cisco and Wells’ interactions are the money shots of this episode. The reveal that Wells tricked everyone with a fucking hologram in the forcefield was something so mundane that I honestly did not think it was going to be the explanation. I expected two Reverse-Flashes, duplication powers, or something more… exciting, but this mundane explanation actually works pretty well because, hell, I didn’t even consider holograms!
Also, Wells kind of explains his backstory for a bit – traveled to the past to kill Barry (not Nora), accidentally strands himself in time for the past fifteen years. It’s kind of nice to hear it all said out loud, even if everything kind of clicks together for me the moment he reveals himself to be Eobard Thawne specifically. We also get to see him do a little Speed Mirage thing, which not only did we get a foreshadowing earlier in the episode (which turns out to be a red herring), it’s also a nice little explanation to how Wells was in two places at the same time back when he beat himself up with the Reverse-Flash encounter.
The fact that Wells is all about grooming Barry and making him into the Flash? Simply because he needs Barry's speed to return to his own time. Or maybe even ensure his own birth as the Reverse-Flash or something.
Also, I do like the tense moments where Wells seems to have an idea what’s going on while Caitlin brings him out to breakfast, and the sheer horror when Caitlin turns around and sees only Wells’ wheelchair. An awesome scene, I’d think.
The fact that Cisco was the one to discover that Wells is the Reverse-Flash and then gets fucking skewered with a vibrating hand is also a nice decision on the part of the authors. The relationship between Cisco and Wells handled really well throughout the season, as Wells himself pointed out -- Cisco felt like the ‘son he never had’. To hammer the point on home, Wells and Cisco even watch a movie together early in this episode. Wells has always been stern but not outright evil with Cisco, and even when he was about to kill Cisco he had the grace to actually sound sorry and be kind of sad, showing that despite bearing the mantle of the Reverse-Flash, one of DC’s cruelest villains, this particular incarnation of the character isn’t that heartless of a bastard.
We still have many questions, like why is he crippled speed-wise, but whatever the case (a battle with a time-travelling Barry?) that does explain why he can’t get back to his home time.
Also, the whole concept of Speed Mirages is a nice little thing to throw us off the ball. We see Barry meet… another Flash while he was running earlier this episode and I was like ‘oh cool it’s the Reverse-Flash let’s have Big Plot Stuff’, but no, it’s just clever foreshadowing of the Barry from the future travelling back in time.
The main villain of the episode is Mark Mardon, brother of Clyde Mardon, who has better control of his weather powers. We see him summon localized rain and thunderbolt, pull people out of buildings with wind, create little hail balls in between his hands and shoot it at people, create a fucking tsunami with wind… it’s a nicer, deadlier show of his powers than just giant typhoons and whatnot. Also the fact that he’s actually connected (and foreshadowed) to a previous minor villain is a cool factor in making him an effective villain too. I also find it really ironic that Mardon’s weakness in this continuity is a super-tech wand, when the Weather Wizard in the comics used a super-tech wand to control the weather.
Mark gets some cool lines acknowledging what a shit person his brother Clyde was, but he was still family. And 'if you can't protect your family, the least you can do is avenge them'. We do see how Mark was kind of a protective older brother to Clyde back in the short flashback too, which is cool.
Joe… Joe doesn’t really make sense this episode, though. And I think there’s a couple of pacing problems with the whole Joe/Mardon rivalry thing. First he doesn’t really recruit Barry to help him and expressly tells him to stay the fuck out several times even though Mark Mardon is, y’know, someone who can summon a goddamn thunderstorm. And when he goes up to hunt down Mardon with Eddie at the second half of the episode, does he bring the powers-cancelling wand? No he doesn’t. Plus Mark Mardon was totally hanging out behind Joe’s car before that one commercial break, so, what, he just drives off when his lightning only blew up Joe’s car? Barry didn’t carry Joe that far away.
We also get some relationship scenes which runs like how I feel about most of Bruce Wayne’s scenes in Gotham. I don’t like it at all, but it’s done pretty well so I don’t hate it. There are some nice little twists here and there, with Iris realizing he actually does have feelings for Barry and Linda calling her out on it. Again, it all really feels kind of creepy because multiple times have people pointed out that Iris is basically Barry’s sister – both Mason and Joe – and the BIG ‘I ACTUALLY LOVE YOU’ that happened? Really didn’t feel appropriate considering what’s going on all around them. Because when your father is being held prisoner by a weather-controlling maniac bent on killing you, you confess your love. There are some great scenes between Barry and Iris if you ignore the whole incestuous vibe, but the big kiss just feels kind of shoehorned in from another episode, is all.
Better than the big kiss is the big identity reveal, which was sufficiently dramatic.
Linda is still fun. I don’t particularly care for her, but I do like how she just shows up at all the worst times for Barry like when he and Iris are going off to rescue Joe. And I do like how she’s at least savvy enough to know about Barry and Iris… doesn’t really bode well for their relationship down the line. Thankfully for Barry, he’s probably going to get a do-over with it.
Eddie Thawne returns after being missing for several episodes, and I honestly thought that was going to be a clue to the fact that he’s going to play a big role in the whole Reverse-Flash thing. But no! Wells straight-up just cleared him off the board by calling him a distant relative which I’m going to take as ancestor. He also shows some kind of jealousy over the change in Iris and Barry’s dynamic – because that whole bowling thing was a definite attempt to get to Barry. I do like Eddie and the reveal that he’s most likely to be a good guy does keep my hopes up. He could be this universe’s incarnation of Hunter Zolomon (who’s a present-day cop that’s good buddies with a Flash), though. We haven’t ruled that possibility out.
Meanwhile, David Singh, the police chief, gets fucking electrocuted by Weather Wizard in the fight at the police station. He doesn’t die, but we do get some justification to why Joe wants to take the fight to the Weather Wizard alone. He gets crippled (Hunter Zolomon? I need to stop seeing Zolomon in everybody) and we see how heartbroken his fiancé is and how he possibly can’t return to the force and all that stuff. Man, poor Singh. At least Barry can undo things in the past.
Mason, Iris’… mentor? Boss? That douchebag from the news station, anyway. He’s a douchebag. Who goes up to someone and then goes all ‘hey I stalk your good friend and I am totally going to publish stuff saying he’s a murderer in paper’. I honestly don’t see Mason surviving really long in this show, especially if Harrison Wells/Eobard Thawne finds out. Maybe next week we’ll get Cisco back and Mason will be the one who ends up with a vibrating hand in his chest.
Shame that, y’know, all of this will get retconned out thanks to time travel, but be honest – who was expecting Cisco’s death, let alone time travel to happen? Plus Barry experiences the whole ‘Iris actually has feelings for him’ thing which will definitely impact Barry’s personality later in the retconned timeline… but for what it’s worth, we get strong performances from Cisco and Wells, and a shit-ton of truly excellent twists. The fact that time travel will undo everything is kind of cheap, but holy shit this was a roller coaster of an episode. 'What the actual fuck' was my reaction most of the time, and really the massive surprise factor in this episode really made me tense.
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