The Flash, Season 5, Episode 22: Legacy
And so the fifth season ends, and it... it sort of sputters to a landing? I've not been someone who really enjoyed a good chunk of the fifth season and I had put it into words at various points in the past, but it's definitely a neat enough season finale that I'm not complaining too hard about it.
Like, sure, it has the normal problem that all CW shows have with time-travel, something that's far, far more frequently used in Legends of Tomorrow but far more prominent in The Flash due to how time travel is only saved for huge dramatic moments instead of an episodic "haha, what a lark" manner. Which is probably one of the tropes I dislike the most in time-travel portrayal in media, where the change in the timeline (the destruction of Cicada's dagger) ends up only manifesting in the future at the same point in the episode that we're following the future scenes. In this case, this causes the dagger to dramatically disappear out of the timeline right before Eobard Thawne gets executed... when, honestly, it should've been erased retroactively, and Eobard wouldn't be power-dampened and kept in prison throughout however long he stayed there. And... and it's clear that the show doesn't really care all that much, letting Rule of Drama win over, but at the same it's always going to be a pet peeve for me.
This episode first deals very quickly with the Cicada storyline first, and resolves the cliffhanger. Ralph throws himself in the way of the mirror blast and the unique reaction he has with his body ends up completely fucking him up like a Looney Tunes cartoon, turned literally inside out. Cicada escapes, and the rest of the team stops to think of the reason why Ralph would do something so drastic. And... Sherloque quickly looks at Ralph's conspiracy board and figures out that Eobard Thawne, in the future, had wanted them to get rid of Cicada in the past because it's the thing that is used to dampen Thawne's powers in the future prison.
(Because apparently ARGUS's power-dampening cuffs... don't exist in the future? Or they don't work on the Reverse-Flash?)
This leaves Team Flash at a crossroads, as they ponder over whether to stop Cicada, or to stop Thawne... and it's not really a choice since they can't allow Cicada to murder thousands of people. You can probably, like, knock her out or zap her into another dimension or something, though I do appreciate the sentiment of "no one dies" expressed by Barry and company. Nora, meanwhile, comes up with a new plan, something that... well, we've sort of probably seen coming? They plan to use Nora's connection to convince young 2019-era Grace to take the metahuman cure, which will retroactively wipe out Future!Grace but leave the dagger intact. Which, again, Flash's weird time-travel rules also implies that despite Cicada II being wiped out, all of the events and motivations and plot developments she does are still intact or something? I don't know anymore at this point.
There's also a sub-plot about Cicada preparing to use the time-bubble machine to go back to 2014 and kill everyone during the night of the particle accelerator explosion, but that sort of goes nowhere. A pep-talk from Barry later about Nora being herself and we get a mind-meld scene where Nora is joined by EVIL!Orlin Dwyer and Fatherly!Orlin Dwyer and the good part wins out, with young small Grace waking up from her coma and consenting to using the cure. Because ethics! And... and this whole point ends up being completely useless, because the cure didn't work fully due to the dark matter material in Grace's injury or the dagger or something, but when Cicada is about to murder Nora, Barry ends up shooting the dagger with the mirror-gun, and when it vanishes, it sets loose a series of paradoxes that means that Future!Grace never comes to 2019 or something, and Future!Grace gets wiped out of existence. Time travel! It works however the hell plot needs it to work!
And I and fans everywhere breathe a sigh of relief as Cicada is OVER AND DEALT WITH. Because holy shit, both Cicadas really didn't have enough substance to carry them over the entire season, leading to honestly ridiculous moments of plot armour, and the whole crazy metahuman killer arc is honestly nowhere as exciting as it ended u9p to be. Honestly made me wish they had kept a bit of the whole cultist bit from Cicada's comic-book counterpart to at least give some nuance to him. Or her.
Cicada's death and the dagger's destruction ends up sending a ripple effect through time as in 2049, Reverse-Flash's execution is interrupted at the last second by the rules of time deciding to wipe out the dagger right before he is executed, leading to a pretty cool scene of Eobard zipping around and killing all the guards... and then the episode straight-up rewinds, because Nora uses her time-reversal ability to turn back time to before Eobard kills the guards, so she and Barry can zip them off to another room. Because, umm... that's more practical than just arriving like five minutes earlier? Or using the time-reversal to do something more permanent to ensure Eobard's incarceration? I dunno. This show's logic is less logical than Legends of Tomorrow, and that show has a sentient ghost puppet as a recurring character.
Plot holes and questionable sci-fi logic aside, things get thrown to the wayside as we get a genuinely cool scene of Reverse-Flash fighting against Flash and XS as they zip around future Central City, and I won't lie, that's fucking awesome. With Eobard splitting into two with the whole speed-clone thing, and a sequence where they run up a building and the two Reverse-Flashes cause the confusino and the clone to cause Flash and XS to slam into each other... it's pretty cool. Also cool (and hilarious!) is Team Flash arriving on the goddamn bubble time-machine, which Eobard just runs face-first onto with a CLONK.
The full might of Team Flash finally ends up assembled before Reverse-Flash, and we get a brief display of the team's powers... up until a point because Eobard reveals that thanks to the destruction of the dagger, this version of Nora West-Allen no longer exists. Because... uh... um... I dunno. You got me. I guess she would never have any reason to go back in time because there's no Cicada crime to solve? Eobard gives them an out, telling Team Flash that since he likes "Little Runner" and thinks of her like a twisted surrogate daughter, there's a way, which is to escape into the Negative Speed Force, making her immune to death-by-timeline-retcon. But Nora decides that, and she is particularly inspired by the words Barry and Iris tells her about legacy and whatnot earlier, that she will not spend the rest of her life tied to the Negative Speed Force, and chooses to instead die in the arms of her parents, and disintegrates into dust.
And... and I dunno. Part of me doesn't buy it and think that Nora'll probably be retconned back into existence in the next season, but if this is Nora's death...man, kind of a shaggy dog story, huh? Nora hasn't been written well and is more annoying than charming throughout the season, but writing her out like this is definitely a very effective gut-punch. It's a hell of a downer ending, with Nora wiped out from existence, and Reverse-Flash zipping around his merry way, happy to wreak havoc across time.
Other things that happen near the end... Sherloque goes and buggers off to his own Earth to spend time with Renee Adler. Singh ends up becoming police chief and promotes Joe to the captain of CCPD, while also basically telling Barry that he knew about the Flash all along. Cisco, after spending a couple of scenes with Kamilla in this episode, ends up taking the cure because... he doesn't want his superhero powers to define him? That's sort of a drastic move, but the season has honestly been hinting heavily at Carlos Valdez either leaving the show or becoming a guest cast, so I guess this is a way to write his character out? We get some other scenes with the other characters, but they're mostly fluff as everyone takes a breather after their sorta-hollow victory. Also, in yet another inconsistent bit of time-travel magic, while the dagger disappearing retroactively causes this version of Nora to disappear, her notebook... didn't. Kinda dumb.
All the CW shows are also leaving hints about the upcoming Crisis on Infinite Earths, and while the Monitor didn't show up in this particular finale, we get Thawne name-dropping "see you next Crisis!". And as the final shot of the episode, Gideon's newspaper detects an anomaly, and the date of Flash's death in the red-skies-crisis is moved up to 2019. Neat!
Overall... the episode certainly has a couple of awesome action scenes, and I do admit that some of the scenes are especially touching, particularly Nora's demise and the bit with Caitlin and Cisco. But the general confused and meandering pacing and writing that the season has in the past 22 episodes hasn't been kind, and the conclusion to this season feels more like an exhausted, relieved sigh more than anything. It's... it's a satisfying conclusion, but so riddled with inconsistencies and frankly a whole lot of logical headscratchers that more than any CW season (and I'm including Arrow and Legends in this statement) it's a season where I genuinely felt like the writers are just pulling plot developments out of their asses with "TIME TRAVEL IS INCONSISTENT" as a hand-wave. As an episode and a season finale, it's a sufficiently entertaining and bombastic episode, but as a whole the season hasn't been particularly good.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Ralph holds a folder with the name "Dearbon" on it in the final scenes of the episode. Dearbon refers to Susan "Sue" Dearbon, Ralph's love interest and eventual wife in the comics.
- It's probably a coincidence, but where the fifth season of The Flash ended with an episode titled "Legacy", a couple of years back the fifth season of Arrow started with an episode titled "Legacy.
- Eobard Thawne muses that Ralph Dibny "should be dead"... which is less of a death threat, but a reference to the first season where Ralph Dibny was listed as one of the dead people killed by the Particle Accelerator Explosion by Harrison Wells, but was presumably brought back to life when Barry caused Flashpoint.
- Thawne also references the time he killed Cisco in an altered timeline all the way back in the first season, and how he describes Nora -- "teaching him what it feels like to have a daughter", is also what he says to Cisco before he killed him.
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