The Flash S1x07 “Power Outage”

WARNING! SPOILERS!

And… The Flash just made it seven episodes out of seven. No other new fall show has a track record of 100% excellent record so far for me, apart from maybe Showtime’s excellent The Affair and super twisty ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder (although only just with the latter), and this episode is another winner just in time for the upcoming The Flash vs. Arrow crossover that looks set to be incredibly awesome and it’s great to see that we’re getting it as quickly as we are.

Anyway, Power Outage was a sort of Arrow crossover in its own right, featuring the Clock King, who worked pretty well alongside Blackout in an interesting storyline that finally brought the mystery concerning Dr. Wells to focus, as it was revealed that Blackout was given his powers of electricity following the storm caused by the Particle Accelerator. The show gave us some interesting villains this week and the Clock King is easily one of the best ones so far, with Robert Knepper transitioning from the fantastic Time of Death episode on Arrow. He played Tockman very well indeed and on top of that, the development of Blackout’s character allowed the audience to sympathize with the character, which made a refreshing change from the antagonist of last week’s episode.

Speaking of last week’s episode, we got to see Girder return a lot sooner than I would have expected. His death prevented any further issues from arising concerning Girder’s knowledge of Barry’s identity, and the character worked a lot better than he did last week, with the role reversal being pretty cool and it was great to see him fight Blackout when the character invaded Dr. Wells’ STAR Labs HQ. It also allowed for some great scenes between Blackout and Dr. Wells, who played a very important role in this episode.

It was great seeing more attention focused on Dr. Wells as opposed to the teasers that we’ve been getting in the past few episodes. He was front and centre here as Blackout targeted Wells personally, which allowed for a pretty emotional moment when the character listed off all the names of those who died in the explosion. This was one of my favourite moments of the episode, and the fact that at the same time there was more questions answered about the character, particularly with him taking note of the fact that Blackout can take away The Flash’s powers, something that I’m sure will be used later, which sets up some very interesting prospects from the future. Also, given the habit that Arrow has with bringing back characters from the dead, it’ll be interesting to see whether Girder and Blackout do remain permanently deceased or not. Certainly, if Girder were to come back after his heroic turn, it could allow for a good development.

With each episode of The Flash it seems we get further references to comic book characters, further teases that they could show up in the future. Another part that I loved about this episode was that we got plenty of villains namedropped in the list of the deceased at the hands of the Particle Accelerator. As well as Ronnie Raymond, we got references to The Elongated Man among a few more characters, which was very awesome indeed. So it’s great to see that The Flash is continuing to use these references week in, week out and hopefully they won’t disappoint when they show up on the series proper.

Also, it seems like Power Outage is further increasing my theory that Dr. Wells is Reverse Flash. There are several subtle hints dropped here and it would certainly make for an interesting reveal indeed, so it’ll be fun to see where the show takes it going forward. It’s still early stages, and the Arrow/Flash crossover can’t come quickly enough, with plenty of potential here to really impress.

It was also important to note that Power Outage was probably the darkest episode of The Flash so far. We got deaths (whether they’re permanent or not yet remains to be seen) and it had the potential to go even darker with the Hostage Situation that could have been handled very differently if the show’s producers decided to go down that route. This allowed things to adopt a darker tone going into the upcoming Arrow crossover, which would suit things nicely as we will no doubt see some conflict with Joe West and Ollie’s methods as the promo trailer indicates.

Power Outage therefore, was a pretty strong episode and handled the lead in to the Arrow/Flash Crossover better than its Arrow counterpart did. It’s got pretty much every fan of both shows looking forward to next week, and it’ll be great to see how the crossover turns out.