The Flash S05E08 Review: A Journey Through Time

The Flash, Season 5, Episode 8: What's Past is Prologue

Whoo, we're mostly caught up, and right before Elseworlds, too! Anyway, just like Supergirl's episode 8, "What's Past is Prologue" acts as the mid-season finale for The Flash. It's also the 100th episode spectacular, which is the reason for the sudden continuity cavalcade bomb. And unlike Arrow's 100th episode which took place in the middle of a crossover, the Flash has an excuse to actually take the time to explore the entirety of the series... in its own unique way, which is a pretty complex plan to obtain various plot devices from different points in the series (a piece of Savitar's suit, a doohickey from the Zoom era, as well as Eobard Thawne's assistance in fixing the device) in order to plant a weapon in the hospital walls so that they can take Cicada.

And... and as a huge fan of the show, it's just a treat, you know? The actual Cicada parts of the episode didn't really appeal to me that much, with Cicada ending up being a pretty dang flat character with a single-minded grudge in the end. And for all the hubbub surrounding that magical power-cancelling dagger, that final confrontation really felt like a bit of a bust when Team Flash's huge plan didn't really manage to accomplish jack-all. Throw in some utterly hideously foreshadowed powers-ex-machina with Cicada gaining new powers as the plot demands, as well as bit of a stupid ball of them not just keeping the dagger next to the dagger-dampener, and it's just genuinely eye-rolling. I don't think Cicada is as bad as Thinker at his worst in the previous episode, but Thinker was at least an interesting concept that was poorly executed. Cicada's... Cicada's just there, we get a motivation that doesn't really matter, everyone insists he's this super-elusive being that can't be defeated or captured, but he just feels like Ricardo Diaz that even in the show's own history it's hard to take him seriously as a threat our heroes can't take down. And showcasing Cicada next to some of the show's scarier and more competent villains? Yeah.

No, the real treat is the time-jumping bit as Nora and Barry go to the past to take some items that won't matter in history, and that, of course, includes a lot of points in history in the timeline. Part of it is an extension of the season's "being the Flash is more dangerous and full of heartbreak than you think" story to Nora as she witnesses horrifying moments like Nora shooting Futurebarry or Zoom breaking Barry, but it's also a glorious excuse to visit some very important moments in the past and have some great cameos. It's also nice to see that for all the flak I've given The Flash for how utterly stupid it handles time-travel sometimes, when they do get someone competent to write the story, the time travel segment's definitely competently well done, with any interactions done in the past either handwaved by them being out-of-shot, Earth-2 Harry mistaking them for someone else in his grief, or Earth-1 Eobard Thawne-Wells just being a huge fan of keeping secrets and shit.

At first, things go pretty smoothly according to plan. Barry and Nora get to steal a chunk of Savitar's suit without any problems in the timeline other than a Time Wraith (and this was pre-Zoom Time Wraith, so not a huge threat) and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Time Wraith's all that's going to be bugging our heroes throughout time. The run into season two just has them talk a bit with Earth-2 Wells, with Barry apparently giving Harry Wells the idea to search for other-universe vibrations... but then we get into an altercation with Zoom and a hilarious "ANOTHER SPEEDSTER!" happy manic grin on his face. We do get a bizarre conclusion to this sequence when a Time Wraith attacks Zoom mid-chase, but I guess the Wraith just drags Zoom back to 2015 instead of killing him? That's weird.

But the altercation with Zoom causes them to fall into one of my favourite episodes of season two, "Flash Back", where season-two-Barry travels back to season-one to talk to Eobard-Thawne-disguised-as-Harrison-Wells. That's a pretty great concept and one of the best (if admittedly one of the only good) time travel stories in The Flash. It's... it's a bit hard to buy that this particular encounter didn't actually fuck up the timeline or create a Flashpoint 2.0, but it's probably just part and parcel of the insane snarl in the space-time continuum that's Reverse-Flash.

That confrontation with my hands-down favourite character played by Tom Cavanagh, is easily my favourite segment, and that's without the glorious dose of creepy foreshadowing for Nora! It's genuinely pretty interesting, and I do love the segment where Thawne suddenly flips and insists that he "gets to go home".

And then we return to the night where it all began, the night of the particle accelerator explosion, and it's a pretty damn nostalgic moment. It's been four years since The Flash began its run on the CW, and coincidentally, I started out this blog at around that time so it's very, very nice to get a neat little flashback to all these episodes I've watched and reviewed mostly in real-time. It's pretty great to see all the fun continuity nods. A pre-metaanimal Grodd, DeVoe and his stupid cap getting electrocuted, Barry in his lab, Cisco and Thawne's handshake, Ronnie and Professor Stein being fused together, the Weather Wizards getting blown out of the sky... it's a neat, neat nod to the long history of the show, and the many things that happened in that night, and I'm definitely a pretty huge fan.

Which is kind of a shame that the episode sorts of drops the ball pretty heavily when we return to present-day 2018, and the entire assembled force of Team Flash (including Ralph, who was MIA last episode), plus the Plot Device of Seasons Past, was unable to stop Cicada. Was there a reason that Cicada couldn't have been at least taken down in this episode? I really let out a long groan at the end of that sequence, because for all the posturing and epic buildup, to end with a fizzle like this -- Killer Frost's non-dark-matter powers driving off Cicada -- is just pretty damn lame. Just have them catch Cicada and have him break out after the winter break or something.

At least we might have a far more interesting potential big bad or antagonist of sorts for the second half of season five, though, because Sherloque is investigating Nora's time-language journal, and it appears that she's been feeding her journal entries to the enigmatic Gideon -- and is at least taking advice from a captured Thawne-as-Wells in a jail cell in 2046. This short, short scene, and the fact that Nora is writing stuff about how time is malleable and that she's working off of half-truths (a lot of stuff wasn't recorded by that dang Flash Museum, it seems) really means that even if she is well-intentioned and isn't actually secretly a villain, she might just be very well be manipulated by Eobard Thawne!

That scene where Nora went back to the past and witnesses her grandparents and having Barry go back and telling Nora how it takes a special kind of courage to, well, basically not to fuck time up and cause Flashpoint 2.0. I definitely was screaming internally for them to leave this night alone and not fuck it up even further, but thankfully all Nora and Barry did was look.

Anyway, pretty great concept and execution, even if the Cicada stuff really kind of irks me. This episode ends with the same Elseworlds teaser-trailer that Supergirl ended with, which definitely looks great!

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Gideon identifies XS as a member of the "rebooted" Legion of something, which is, of course, a reference to how XS is a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes (which received far, far more screentime in Supergirl). The Legion of Super-Heroes go through more reboots and revisions than any other property DC has, though, and XS was indeed introduced after one such reboot that attempted to tie in the Legion to the rest of the DC universe.
• Eobard initially calls Nora "Dawn", which, of course, is a reference to Dawn and Don Allen, Barry's children in the comics (Nora was his grandchild in the comics, and later the post-rebooted version) and Dawn was the most popular theory for Nora's identity when season 4 aired.



Danica Williams

• Presumably, Eobard was familiar with Dawn and Don Allen because in the original timeline before Eobard went back and killed Barry's mom, he didn't name his kid after his dead mother. 
• Among Eobard's other guesses for Nora's identity include:
• Jesse Chambers, who has appeared in the show as Jesse Quick
• Libby Lawrence, a.k.a. Liberty Belle, a war-time hero with enhanced strength and speed that drew her powers from Philadelphia's Liberty Bell. In the comics, after the war, she married fellow speedster Johnny Quick and gave birth to Jesse Quick. 
• Danica Williams is a surprisingly minor character, only appearing in a spinoff comic for the cartoon Batman Beyond as Flash's successor in that timeline. 
• The four episodes that Barry and Nora travel to are:
• Season three's season finale "Finish Line", where Team Flash engaged Savitar. 
• Season two's mid-season finale "Versus Zoom", where Zoom nearly killed Barry and drained his speed. This sequence also features a Time Wraith, which was first introduced in season two. 
• Season two's "Flash Back", one of the most critically-acclaimed episodes of the Flash, which involves Barry travelling back in time to season one to learn Speed Force tricks from the Eobard-Thawne-disguised-as-Harrison-Wells.
• The first episode's particle accelerator explosion, with some scenes being shown including season four's retcon that Thinker and Mechanic are among the crowd. It also shows the Mardon brothers' plane blowing up and Martin Stein being fused with the Firestorm Matrix, all of which was revealed in various parts of season one.
• In addition to all of that, Hartley (Pied Piper) and his contributions to STAR Labs is also briefly mentioned. We also get to see a pre-meta Grodd in his cage! 
• Thawne-Wells' handshake with Cisco in front of the Gideon chamber, is, of course, a homage to the way that Thawne-Wells killed Cisco halfway through the first season with a vibrating hand through the chest. 
• As noted by Cisco, Nora's time-language is the same thing that Barry was obsessed with at the beginning of season four.