+1
Despite all my predictions being completely incorrect I largely enjoyed this episode…except one or two things:
- Gideon, as mentioned above–while it’s convienient to forget him, I doubt everyone would
- Why in the world would they let Thawn go? Barry disappears into the past and you push the button to close Thawn’s cell. He murdered Barry’s mom, he murdered Wells, he murdered all those people who died in the accelerator’s explosion…it’s ok to lie to him.
I did like the fact that Present Barry was smart enough to take Future Barry’s “no, don’t” and accept it. That was really a pleasant trope-breaker.
I didn’t like Dad’s “Everything is the way it’s supposed to be” fatalism: So…it’s ok if the bad-guy breaks the timeline, but it’s not ok for the good guy to fix it?*
*That said, reasoning aside, Dad was right. The key rule to time travel is “Leave well enough alone”.
Your future self is like Dr. Science. He knows more than you do.
(But what about Dr. Science’s future self? The mind boggles.)
He’s not really a doctor.
I really like the little touches, like Reverse Flash’s lightning bolt, Eobard Thawne eating a Big Belly Burger, and the aforementioned helmet coming out of the wormhole. If you’ve been following the development of Legends of Tomorrow, you’ll also see future Hawkgirl at the end.
It was previously made clear that what we’ve been viewing is already an altered timeline. In the original timeline, The Flash appeared much later, so when Reverse Flash found himself stuck in the past he took over Harrison Wells in an effort to hasten Flash’s development. My question is, when our Barry saw future Barry in the past, was that the Barry from the original timeline?
I forgot to mention the most unbelievable part of the episode: Dr Caitlin Snow doesn’t know what a singularity is.
The world will end in 1 minute, 52 seconds, cute.
Yeah, that jumped out at me.
My husband (who is Andy L) said that it would have been cooler if
Jay Garrick had appeared and knocked out Reverse Flash with one punch. Oh, and Jay Garrick should have been played by Buzz Aldrin. I think that’s fun, and it occurs to me that if they want to keep a “mentor” type around for Barry, Jay would be a good choice.
Also, a great moment was when Eobard “apologized” to Cisco. “Cisco, I’m sorry. Not for killing you, I’m sure I had a good reason…”
I really enjoy this show. I liked the finale but was surprised that:
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It ended on such a cliff hanging cliff hanger. I expected there to be open plot threads and some sort of cliff hanger but I didn’t expect to end with the world in imminent danger.
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That it it didn’t end in a way that would keep Tom Cavanaugh in the series. I was sure they were going to rescue the real Wells form the past. Actually, thinking about it, since Thrawne is erased from history, it’s possible the real Wells is still alive now so maybe he will be back.
F’n called it! I almost had an accident in my pants when the helmet came flying out.
Second most amazing: The first-most is that nobody–Stein, Cisco, Future-Thawn, Barry, Caitlin, etc…nobody realizes that you need a vacuum/near vacuum in a particle accelerator for it to work. Without evacuating the air, barry is bumping into zillions of helium(hydrogen?) particles every millisecond.
Really, I want to like that… But I don’t think I can comic-book away all the plotholes and inconsistencies. If Eobard Thawne is never born, that means of course that he never went back through time to kill Nora Allen, create the particle accelerator, and hence, the Flash… And so on.
Nobody is going to mention the brief flash of Caitlin as Killer Frost? also what looked like a shot from the legends show. Also, i can’t be the only one to think Barry was downright evil in risking so much just to save his mom.
Every time travel story ever written falls apart if one starts to over think it. At best, one can hope for an internal consistency, but even that often goes away in order to tell the story in the allotted time.
Another moment I enjoyed: when Joe was leaving and Barry called out his name, and Joe waited for Barry to catch up. Because yeah, Barry needed him to wait.
I completely missed that; the only thing I got was that apparently, Cisco is some kind of metahuman, capable of sensing alternate timelines or something like that.
No, I thought the same thing. The whole endeavour was questionable (and portrayed as such) even without the prospect of destroying the Earth, but with it, there shouldn’t have even been a second thought about doing the time travel.
You’re so right. I’m writing one now and I keep running into that.
Can you elaborate on the Killer Frost thing because I completely missed it.
Re: Barry. It struct me strange as well that they seemed to dismiss the fact hat he would change reality for everyone else so cavalierly to the point where I started to assume that the idea was there would be two time lines, theirs and a new one where the mom lived. Otherwise it seemed strange that everyone was like “Barry, you do what you think is right.”
Yeah. Fundamentally, that’s what super bothered me about the ending to this episode.
Ok, time travel stories where when you go back in time, it resets the universe to the point you traveled back to do work. They are logically consistent and there are no paradoxes. (kind of a dick move to basically be resetting the whole universe, in a way you are killing an unfathomably vast number of sentient beings and replacing them with slightly different versions of themselves, but whatever)
So, if that was how The Flash was going to handle it, Eddie shooting himself would have done nothing. Really, if you think about it…Eddie could have just shot himself in the balls and accomplished the same thing. I mean, seriously, it would suck to be missing them but it’s better than being dead.
Anyways, what was maddening was I was like : so if Eddie kills himself, and the reverse flash never exists, then that particle accelerator would never exist, Barry’s mom wouldn’t have died, etc etc etc. It was kinda silly and absurd in that way - just like that scene in Looper, where the younger Bruce Willis killing himself should have made the entire scene where that happened not even happen at all.
I guess that unstable wormhole sucking up the planet as a way of balancing the books in the face of temporal paradoxes does sorta make sense…
Anyways, the Flash rocks. The thing is, I feel like there’s an inverse relationship between the episode number and how good the episode was. I didn’t like the pilot, or the early episodes. This show seems to have gotten better with every episode. It’s all these big reveals, these surprising elements that make it so good.