The Flash S1x14 “Fallout”

WARNING! MAJOR SPOILERS!

The Flash once again proved that it’s one of the best new shows to come out of last year’s fall season by delivering one of its best episodes so far in the series. It once again directly addressed the Firestorm arc, splitting Ronnie Raymond and Dr. Stein from their bodies in the wake of the nuclear blast allowing both characters to be reunited with their loved ones. This episode already proved to be an improvement on last week’s when it ditched the Iris/Barry/Linda love triangle material for this episode, choosing instead to focus primarily on the Firestorm story itself, and it was certainly worth sticking around for.

We got to spend time with both Ronnie and Dr. Stein separately as this episode really fleshed out both of their characters, giving both actors something to do. Ronnie is understandably pissed at Dr. Stein for his actions when both men had their bodies combined, so it was interesting to watch how the appropriately titled Fallout dealt with these things, almost serving as a “Part Two” of the story that began last week. Unlike last week we also got a villain, but unlike the majority of characters in the show the villain of the week was not a metahuman, but Clancy Brown’s one-dimensional Eiling returned as he tried to continue to exploit the superpowered humans for his own ends. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before in multiple mediums, be it the comics, TV shows or movies, but Brown gave Eiling that intimidating and scenery-chewing factor that kept him from ever being dull. And on top of that, it gave us one of the best ending sequences that the series has given us so far, with Grodd showing up at the end

Once again, the focus on Barry was pushed to the side this week, but we did get some development on the story concerning his mother’s death. As it turns out, Barry was the second speedster fighting against the original killer, but because his mother died, he knows that he failed. This is pretty evident that we’re going to see time travel happen at some point (maybe towards the end of the season, in the penultimate episode or the finale?), and maybe this could lead to an alternate reality being created if Barry does end up pushing harder and saving his mother. There’s lots of things that this show can explore by going down this route, and hopefully we’ll see time travel tackled sooner as opposed to later.

The team-up between Firestorm and Barry proved to be pretty spectacular and was great to see this unfold on-screen. Where Firestorm goes from here with his bodies reformed at the end of the episode will certainly prove to be very interesting indeed, and it also further looks like we’re slowly getting our own Justice League formed on the TV show as well as the comics. There’s The Flash, Green Arrow, with ATOM and Firestorm in the works as well as Black Canary and even Huntress, as well as Supergirl getting her upcoming TV show with the potential to bring Vixen in if her animated series does well. And while we’re on the subject of upcoming shows, there’s even a Titans series to look forward to, so even if it is very unlikely, it would still be cool to see these heroes all on one screen at some point in the future.

One of the strongest parts of this series has been the fact that most of the cast has had something to do and there’s hardly anyone who’s unlikable in the same way that other comic shows have given us in the past, with the likes of Skye (Agents of SHIELD), Barbara (Gotham) and Pre-Season 3 Laurel and Thea (Arrow) struggling to leave a convincing display (It’s also worth noting that nobody on Constantine is annoying as well). The Flash doesn’t have any unlikable lead characters so far and it’s great to see that everybody’s getting plenty of things to do.

So on the whole then, The Flash gave us another excellent episode that did not disappoint, with Fallout once again being one of the finer hours of the show to date. It’s also worth noting that as it turns out, there’s actually no new episode of this series next week, with it resuming on March 17 so you’ll have to do without my reviews until then.