The Flash S06E03 Review: Stunted Emotions

The Flash, Season 6, Episode 3: Dead Man Running

We're going to do these a bit faster so that I can get to the gosh-darned Crisis on Infinite Earth episodes, because I'm so so behind on stuff. This one is... this is a bit of a relatively tame episode which doesn't really do a whole ton. The main storyline mostly revolves around the crew trying to deal with the metahuman-of-the-week, dark matter fueled zombie-man Mitch Romero, who the audience knows is brought to life by Dr. Ramsey Rosso's wacky experimentations. The episode also brings Ramsey into contact with Barry Allen for the first time, and... and there's some of Flash's typical heavy-handed theme of "a man who knows he's dead but still continues to move". The main villain's a literal zombie; there's the constant theme of being afraid of a terminal disease in Ramsey's story; there's Barry knowing he's going to have to sacrifice himself in the future; there's Killer Frost's absolute panic at finally accepting that she is allowed to have a life just as she's told that she might die very close in the future.... and it's all well and good, and the acting's great as usual. It just feels sort of muted, and the episode mostly feels like it's just obviously there to buy time until we reach either the inevitable clash with Ramsey Rosso's Bloodwork persona, or with the Crisis, whichever comes first. 

Ramsey's an interesting and well-acted antagonist, at least, skirting the line between understandable desperation and general dickishness, and it does play off pretty well with Barry's more self-sacrificing mentality, but I don't think we explored it enough nor is it strong enough to really last for more than a couple of episodes, and I pray we don't stretch this out the way we did the Cicada or Thinker nonsense over the past couple of seasons. I do like how everyone just thinks that Ramsey's a desperate man trying to steal dark matter, though, when in reality he's experimenting with far, far more dangerous stuff like the dark matter goop reanimating Mitch Romero's corpse. Flash and Killer Frost manage to use a generic "overload the bad guy to take him out" method to take out Romero the zombieman, but clearly Ramsay's learning from this to presumably control his own new metahuman powers. 

The Killer Frost/Barry dynamic is pretty neat, in that Barry's a bit too desperate to get Frost to quickly mature as a superhero and stuff, but it feels so much like a retread of "Barry trains Iris" that we saw so much in the previous season, as well as "look at that crazy Killer Frost" moments we've had so much of in the previous season. None of the scenes are bad by themselves and both Grant Gustin and Danielle Panabaker are great in this episode, but I just had a feeling of "been here, watched that" throughout this episode.

The B-plots in this episode is, again, well-acted but not especially exciting. Ralph's mom Debby shows up out of nowhere, and we get a lot of fun hijinks and Hartley Sawyer is as fun as ever. Pairing him up with Cecile is neat, but ultimately the B-plot randomly explores a facet of Ralph that feels shoehorned in (he has abandonment issues because his daddy left him and his mom has made up the fact that every other boyfriend has 'died' to spare him the grief or whatever?). Which is neat but not especially notable. We also get a new Harrison Wells, and at this point even the characters in-universe knows that we're just going to do this every dang season. Cisco sort of echoes my own opinion on this, and Harrison "Nash" Wells is sort of an interdimensional Indiana Jones expy who's looking for something called Eternium or whatever, and presumably he's going to factor in somehow to the Crisis. He's not especially impressive, I feel.  

Anyway, despite my relatively shorter review, this one's not terrible. It just feels like it's just building up and killing time until we can get through to the huge Crisis story that the CW team really wants to tell. A solid episode, but not a noteworthy one. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Marv Perez, Ralph's mom's boyfriend, is named after Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the writer and primary artist for the comic-book version of Crisis on Infinite Earths. 
• A Marvel comics shout-out as Ralph calls the Monitor as an "Asgardian cosplayer". 
• They've both shown up as cameos a couple of times in previous CW episodes, but Nash Wells appears outside of McCulloch Technologies, a reference to Evan McCulloch (Mirror Master II); whereas Ramsay got his Dark Matter from Ted Kord, a millionaire and the second Blue Beetle in the comics. Kord Industries has been a recurring background presence in both Arrow and Flash.
• It's likely that it's a coincidence, but in the DC comics, Eternium is the shards of the Rock of Eternity, dwelling place of the wizard Shazam, which was spread all over the universe in the 30th Century. A Legion of Super-Heroes arc focuses on them trying to collect Eternium to rebuild the Rock of Eternity.