The Flash S03E21 Review: The Origin of Savitar

The Flash, Season 3, Episode 21: Cause and Effect

So, the episode gives us, in an opening scene, the origin of Future Barry Allen, or Savitar. It's a little convoluted, but both Savitar's monologues and Cisco's chalkboard diagram shows how it kind of makes sense. Savitar is one of the time remnants that Barry, after Iris's death, will create in order to try and stop Savitar, and when he fails, the time remnant that would be Savitar is met with scorn and rejection for not being the real Barry Allen, causing him to become Savitar and travel into the past and start the cult that Julian has been researching.

It's a little convoluted, but it makes sense, in a weird "time travel, do you expect consistency?" way.

Also, it's very strangely convoluted that apparently the message in the Waverider referred to Barry Allen's future doppelganger, despite the wording not really implying any of that at all. I really liked the wordplay between "I am the future, Flash" and "I am the Future Flash" bit, though, that was hilarious.

Honestly, I'm... I'm not quite impressed. It's a backstory, that's for sure, but like Zoom before him, I just really find Savitar really hard to be invested in personally. His backstory is a glorified infodump, and his personality boils down to 'sneering Barry Allen'. We did get a couple of cool action scenes between him and present-day Barry, though, and the robot armour moving on its own is a pretty cool and unintentionally absolutely hilarious scene.

Again, there were a lot of parts of season three that worked, but so much of it didn't and Savitar as an underwhelming main villain is the crux of all that. Zoom was flat and convoluted, sure, but at least he had a presence in the show where he actually did stuff, so we have an idea of who Zoom is even before he reveals the mask to show that he's actually (fake) Jay Garrick. Ditto for Reverse-Flash in the first season. Here, Savitar is... just... kinda there, popping in and out of the plot to be mysterious and creepy and spout "I KNOW YOUR FUTURE YOU WILL SUFFER FUCKERS!" threat-prophecies.

The fact that the episode quickly delves into a bizarre episode instead of embracing the 'Evil Future Barry' and exploring the aftermath of that revelation, though, we sift through the list of "obligatory episode variations in a TV show" and pick The Amnesia Episode. Which... which honestly felt bizarre. If this exact plot had happened earlier, or maybe if it didn't happen straight on the heels of such a huge impact revelation, I might probably like it more. On the other hand, it did, and where the show could've made an effort to make me actually understand more of Savitar as a person, he ends up getting removed from play and keeling over in pain while present-day Barry loses his emotions and gets put through, well, basically a wacky lose-memory episode. It's a fun romp, don't get me wrong, it just feels really weird after the series of relatively Savitar/main plot centric episodes, we end up having a well-and-truly filler episode where the heroes fuck up, try to fix their problem, and at the end of the episode all the pieces are back where they came from.

Sure, they try to inject some actually funny comedy -- the meta-joke of Barry referring to himself as 'Bart' is hilarious, and Iris's speech is kinda heartwarming, and the courtroom scene is pretty funny, and I giggled my ass off when Wally tells Barry that they're brothers and Barry looks at his hand and Wally just gives this sheepish grin and it's absolutely hilarious. But honestly, while I do appreciate the story having an emotional core of Iris acknowledging that Barry is so happy and whether they should take it away and return EmoBarry, it's a moot point and one that, again, felt out of place. Not when they've just dropped a crapton of Savitar bombs a couple of minutes ago. And obviously Barry needs his memory back to be the Flash, and we get the 'all the good and bad memories make up a person' moral. There are some nice Caitlin moments as she re-integrates herself to work with Cisco and Julian, but nothing really significant came out of that, I think, beyond re-establishing some of the scenes we've seen before -- basically, Caitlin is still down there, somewhere, and like how Killer Frost keeps pawing to get out earlier in the season, it's now Caitlin Snow that's threatening to consume Killer Frost. Not the most subtle of split personality portrayals, but I'll take it.

Oh, and we have a very exhausting H.R./Tracy romance going on, which I'll just mention that I really, really didn't care for it. Both characters are very charismatic, as are the actors (Tom especially so), but I just really didn't give a shit about a filler subplot within a filler episode.

Still, as much as I'm not a big fan of this episode, kudos, really, to Grant Gustin for playing three versions of Barry ('real' Barry, happy-go-lucky amnesiac Barry, and evil scarface Savitar Barry) at the same time in this episode. Add that to Emo Future Barry from a couple of episodes ago, and Earth-2 Megadork Barry, and we have a serious competitor between Grant Gustin and Tom Cavanagh as the character who's played the most alternate versions of himself.

Shit, if you wanted to make a filler episode, at least make it awesome. Like what the final scene of this episode promises... next week, we're going to steal some super-power core to power Tracy's Speed Force Bazooka... and guarding it is KING SHARK!

Savitar? Future Flash.

Overall, though, not an episode that really impressed, I'm afraid. At least we got Savitar's backstory, which is something.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Now with Savitar's origin in the open, it's clear which character he's actually based on. While the Savitar name and the god complex fits with the villain named Savitar from the comics, his visual appearance (jet-black with blue lightning) and his status as a future version of Barry Allen harkens more to the Future Flash from New 52, who is a version of Barry who travels to the present day to fix his mistakes of allowing Wally West to die... in a rampage that led him to attempt to kill all of the villains of Central City and do battle with the present-day versions of Barry and Wally. 
• The amnesiac Barry Allen insisting that his name be shortened to 'Bart' instead of 'Barry' is, of course, a reference to Bart Allen, a.k.a. Impulse, the great-grandson of Barry Allen who traveled to the present-day as the superhero Impulse, later training under Wally West to become the second Kid Flash, and later succeed Wally himself as the fourth Flash briefly. Bart and Barry, of course, have the exact same first name, Bartholomew, the former being named after the latter.
• It's also apparently a homage to a similar scene where Bart Allen appeared in the Smallville TV show, where he introduces himself with the fake ID's of Jay Garrick, Wally West and Barry Allen.
• Amnesiac Barry also suggests his superhero nickname as 'the Streak', which, in addition to be a name that he was briefly referred to early on in season one by the media, is also the name of a Jay Garrick Expy from the Justice League cartoon.