Previously on THE FLASH…
Everything about the show’s fifth season has been building to this episode, and it’s official here. The big bad, the final boss Team Flash will need to take down this time around isn’t Cicada or his niece, Cicada II. No, we’re going back to the beginning here as Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash, has manipulated everyone on Team Flash to do his bidding and help him escape death row in 2049.
The episode’s final moments reveal that Thawne is being kept in check at the prison by Cicada’s power-dampening dagger. The only way to escape, is to get rid of the dagger, so he chooses the most convoluted way possible to do it: he sends Nora West-Allen into the past to A) change the fate of Cicada on Earth-1 so someone else takes the mantle and B) make it easier for Team Flash to take down the bad guy and destroy the dagger, ending the threat much sooner than they’re supposed to. And, of course, if The Flash destroys the dagger in 2019, there’s no dagger to keep Thawne powerless in 2049.
As Ralph Dibny points out as he finally begins to put everything together, “Man, Thawne’s plans got plans.”
Have I mentioned that TIME TRAVEL stories make my brain hurt?
I legitimately loved this episode, as everyone on the team contributed, everyone was getting along and we got a great battle scene between Team Flash and Cicada II. But the main reason that I loved this episode was Dibny. In the comics, Elongated Man is one of the premiere detectives on the planet, he can smell a mystery from a mile away and he always finds a way to close his case. Hartley Sawyer’s ARROWVERSE incarnation was originally just played for laughs, but he’s become more and more comics-accurate as this season has progressed. And here, I think, we have Ralph Dibny’s breakthrough, finally putting together what Thawne’s whole plan was.
Unfortunately, it may have been too late to stop The Flash from destroying Cicada’s dagger. And let’s be honest: there’s one more episode. Of course, he was too late. But he got there much faster than anyone else did.