This week on The Flash, we saw the return of Captain Cold and the introduction of new villain Heat Wave. As it has from the beginning, the show continues to highlight the rogues gallery of its comic book source material, which makes a lot of sense. The villains associated with The Flash may not as be as operatic and thematically resonant as those of, say, Batman, but their simple and easy-to-grasp concepts certainly make them eminently memorable.
Case in point, Captain Cold is called Captain Cold because he has a freeze gun. Heat Wave has a heat gun. And there you go, another fruitful day at the office.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that this episode focuses mainly on Barry and his personal struggles both as himself and as the Scarlet Speedster - and incidentally, I was delighted when Captain Cold referred to him by that epithet during their final confrontation of the episode.
In the last episode, Barry confessed his romantic feelings for his lifelong best friend, Iris, dispensing with what had long been a tedious ongoing source of forced tension in the show up to that point. The risk going forward, then, was that the show might merely replace the forced tension of romantic longing with the forced tension of awkward avoidance, but by the end of this episode all of that is resolved and the characters are free to move on with their lives. Well done. Somewhat belated, but well done.
The episode does not ignore the other fallout from the mid-season finale, either. The fear and uncertainty Barry feels concerning the mysterious, newly-christened Reverse Flash is the main emotional thrust of this episode, as he wonders whether those he is sworn to protect are best served by tackling the petty immediate threat of the Cold-Heat coalition or by continuing to train for the next time his new arch-nemesis zips into town.
The subplot concerning Ronnie/Firestorm also gets a look-in, with multiple hints at intrigue that will doubtless carry through the rest of the season.
The regular cast members are very good as usual, with Jesse L. Martin as Detective Joe West proving once again that he is the real secret weapon of the show, making every gesture in his interactions with daughter Iris and surrogate son Barry seem astronomically more meaningful than they might have been in lesser hands.
Wentworth Miller, reprising his role as Captain Cold, occasionally slides uncomfortably into camp territory but largely gets away with it by dint of playing a character who is clearly as in love with the codenames and theatrical affectations of supercrime as imperishable geek Cisco is.
Meanwhile, Dominic Purcell gives an oddly stilted performance as Heat Wave that actually works really well for a character who is not quite right in the head and into fire in a way that implies that he probably has burns on parts other than his arms, so well done there.
Overall, this was hardly the best episode of the show, largely devoted as it was to picking up the pieces left over from the installment immediately prior, and the conclusion was less imaginative than we might reasonably have come to expect from such a consistently smart show. But that is the thing about consistency - the troughs and the peaks remain fairly close, and even a below-average episode of The Flash is better than most of what is on network television at present. In short, The Flash is still a good show and still worth your time. In other news, let us go to our bears-pooping-in-the-woods correspondent...
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