An episode can’t just deal with the drama, new viewers will be confused and most viewers will be bored, so there needs to be a villain-of-the-week. That is, n individual episode can’t just be about the season arch, it needs to have a stand-alone story.
IMHO, Flash actually has a lot of silly villains, from intelligent gorillas to very slow pokes. not to mention their take on the tar-baby.
Do we know that Jay is really dead? I mean, Xoom’s hand reached right through him, which would probably be pretty much fatal, but it is comic-book land – a hand reaching through the hole in space-time continuum but not yet all the way through might have just knocked him unconscious?
If dead Jay (if he is dead) is Everyman2, that would explain how he was supporting himself on this side. He was stealing, but keeping it low level enough that he didn’t get caught.
It might be interesting to have Flash run into someone who has powers because of the accident who is keeping a low profile because he/she doesn’t want to get involved. Spider Man once met someone who’d been bitten by a radioactive rabbit and refused to become a hero, although he had power enough to. Alternately, maybe there’s a low level crook who’s noticed the ones who openly challenge the Flash tend to disappear, and keeps things under the radar for that reason.
I would have been happy with just a metahuman of the week. In fact, after visiting Earth-2, I was fully expecting a simple standalone story of the metahuman of the week. King Shark was an ideal metahuman of the week, especially with Lyla and Diggle visiting Central City. Instead, the story of the metahuman of the week was diluted with Jay Garrick/Caitlin Snow drama due to Jay getting himself offed the previous week.
Truth. And the same is true in print. Some years back I decided to add the JSA (Justice Society of America) title to my comic pull list. I apparently came into the story as they team was dealing with the aftermath/fallout from some major storyline - lots of interpersonal/relationship drama. After a full year, they were still dealing with this stuff, and I suddenly realized that, after 12 issues, I still couldn’t remember the names of most of the characters and had only the vaguest notion of what powers each person had. I dropped the title.
I don’t watch The Flash. But I wanted to pop in because whatever algorithm drives Hulu is DESPERATELY invested in getting me to watch this particular episode of the show. It seems like every other time I’m finished with an episode of something else, Hulu will automatically put this episode up in the queue next. I can’t explain it.