The Flash S06E18 Review: Sonic Lightning

The Flash, Season 6, Episode 18: Pay the Piper

So I would've thought that the remaining three episodes of The Flash would basically be the show wrapping up its Mirror Master storyline. And... well, I guess they had to do with whatever episodes they've shot scenes for? Last episode is a huge Mirror-Iris-centric episode, and presumably next episode would be the huge climactic showdown between Team Flash and Mirror Master, but this one is a bit of an odd one as once more, Eva McCulloch slums it in the background while two guest stars end up being the primary focus of the show -- the return of the Pied Piper, as well as Godspeed.

Turns out that this whole Eva thing has to be put on hold because Godspeed randomly shows up to crash Central City, menacing the city and basically acting as a second-rate Zoom, demanding to want to eat Flash's speed and zipping around and just looking cool without any sort of real motivation. Turns out he's, uh, an android at the end of the episode, so it's just sort of foreshadowing for what's going to be the Real Godspeed next season, I suppose. Godspeed's kind of a weird dude in that he's shown up randomly over the course of this season and the previous one as this guy that's sort of built up as a super-scary new speedster, but honestly... we've had a lot of super-scary evil speedsters from Reverse-Flash to Zoom to Savitar, and all of them really are far more imposing than Godspeed. Who, at least, has a pretty kickass costume.

But Barry Allen being basically speed-less means that he doesn't have a lot of options to take down Godspeed, and the artificial Speed Force still isn't up yet. Plus, the Unwritten Rules of Crossover means that Barry can't call Kara and use her super-speed to help take down Godspeed. So after a bit of deliberation, Team Flash decides to call in Hartley Rathaway, who shows up post-Crisis briefly to remind the audience that, hey, after the showmakers forgot all about Pied Piper since season two, he's back here again! Honestly, I loved Pied Piper in the comics and the actor they picked for him plays him well, but man, Pied Piper has been such a non-entity in this show that making it out that this new post-Crisis iteration being a villain again when he's barely a reformed hero in the pre-Crisis timeline isn't something that ends up being all that emotional.

Turns out that this post-Crisis Pied Piper is super-duper angry for the Flash due to the specifics of their new, revised encounter. A combination of Flash's lightning spear slamming onto Pied Piper's sonic booms caused his right-hand man and boyfriend Roderick to be caught in a state of eternal agony, constantly vibrating in flux and stuff. The episode does have kind of a bizarre bit where it tries to make it feel like "oh my, Roderick is Hartley's boyfriend!" is a huge revelation when it's, um, already kind of obvious.

The episode plays out relatively obviously. Barry gives Hartley this long motivational speech about helping people and how he totally understands losing the love of his life and whatnot, and they team up and... to be fair, that actual showdown with Godspeed zipping around buildings and Flash and Piper combining their powers is pretty neat. But as an emotional piece it really ended up falling flat, mostly because, again, we know so little about Hartley and the episode establishes that Hartley is a Grade-A bastard (like his original season 1 portrayal) that the fact that he's suddenly turned into being decent-all-along is genuinely kind of clunky writing.

There's also a hilariously large amount of motivational speeches in this one -- Cecile tells Cisco that he's still a hero despite the lack of Vibe powers (the show really wants to hammer this point home; but Cisco was always cooler with Vibe powers); Barry's speech to Hartley; Ralph's speech to Frost; oh, and Kamilla and Iris give each other motivational pep-talks while they're trapped in the mirror-verse. Sure. There's the B-plots (Frost is going away but she feels like the third wheel; Iris has vague mirror-clairvoyance powers or some shit) which feel extra-clunky, too, but I'll chalk those up to the pandemic causing writing problems.

Honestly, again, it feels like this episode has a lot of potential but gets rushed to production probably because of the whole pandemic thing, and while it does feel kinda mean to blame the show for writing faults that are outside of its control, this episode does end up feeling like it could've been polished a lot more. Still, it's a pretty entertaining half-an-hour of superhero goodness, for sure.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Killer Frost reads one of Heatwave's "Rebecca Silver" novels from Legends of Tomorrow. 
• Cicada's dagger, which was zapped into the mirror dimension last season, makes a cameo as one of the items Kamilla has scavenged. 
• The original events portrayed here of Pied Piper's fight against the Flash with cars being thrown around took place in the first season of the Flash, whereas Barry knowing that Hartley is willing to work with the heroes happened in a different timeline shown in season two episode "Flash Back". A bit of a change is that Barry is lobbing lightning spears, something that (unless I'm mis-remembering) is a skill he didn't pick up until the second season. Ah, Crisis of Infinite Earths, the perfect handwave for any internal inconsistencies in this show's history!
• Once more, Atlantis is mentioned, although knowing what's going to happen in the next episode, it's likely something that they dropped out of the original iteration of the sixth season.