The Flash S1x20 “The Trap”

WARNING! SPOILERS!

After last week’s episode where Barry, Caitlin and Cisco stumbled into the secret room containing Gideon and a newspaper article from the future, you got the feeling that The Trap was going to be a very awesome episode of The Flash and it did not disappoint, delivering some excellent tension as the team attempted to bait Wells into confessing that he murdered Barry’s mother so they could release his father from prison. The result of this laid the foundation for one of the best episodes of The Flash so far, with things kicking up a gear as we entered the final episodes. Also, I mentioned in my review in the previous chapter that this week we’d see Grodd, but it looks like they’re holding him off until next week,  which should be pretty interesting to see, especially given the revelations that we got in this week’s episode.

Right from the start, we got a hell of a lot of awesome things revealed about Wells by Gideon. We learnt that Gideon was actually created by Barry Allen, which is something that we will probably end up seeing on the show sooner rather than later (maybe Gideon will be a replacement for Wells as a mentor to the team in Season 2), and I liked the comment from Cisco where he realised that if he were to improve Barry’s suit using the upgrades that he got from the image, he would be effectively creating a time-loop. Something that was also important this week was Eddie, who planned to go ahead and propose to marry Iris, despite Joe’s wishes, which left Barry in a very interesting situation indeed because he’d just found out that Iris, who wrote the article about the Flash missing in a Crisis, actually has his surname, so it’s now Iris West-Allen. So right from the start, you knew that something big was going to happen concerning Eddie.

And something big certainly did happen towards the end of the episode, when Dr. Wells kidnapped Eddie right when he was about to propose. It certainly doesn’t bode well for Eddie’s character, even though he’s probably going to end up living as Wells needs him to be alive in order to be born. It’ll be certainly interesting to see what happens next though, especially now that Iris seems to have finally realised that Barry was the Flash. It looks set to be very interesting indeed.

The pace was awesome throughout this episode and it really picked up in the final act. The Trap for Wells after Cisco found out that he killed him in another timeline was handled very well, and we got the scene where Wells confronted him again in  a way that was handled just as well as the original. We got the same amount of tension even though Caitlin was watching AND Barry and Joe were hiding behind some canisters, and I found myself again wondering whether Cisco would make it or not. So there was some very awesome scenes happening there, and it was great to see the reveal that they’d not taken the fact that Wells might already know into consideration, and planned the Hannibal Bates reveal in advance, which was very fun to watch unfold, and allowed for some great monologue that gave some great material for Tom Cavangah to explore the character who has been the most enigmatic on the show since its start.

The flashback material in this episode was pretty cool, and it’s refreshing to see it used so well here when in Arrow the flashbacks have been consistently among the weakest part of the third season (the second and first, not so much), but it was nice to see some brief scenes where we saw how Iris and Joe were reacting to Barry whilst he was in a coma. We got the scene where Dr. Wells offered to transfer Barry to Star Labs as well, which was pretty cool, and a reminder that Joe had always been untrusting of Wells, which leads to an interesting question concerning what could have happened if he’d failed to save Barry, or if Joe had not let Wells go to STAR Labs. What would he have done? He certainly wouldn’t have got the chance to stand over his future rival, and we wouldn’t have seen that cool monologue where he let Barry in on his plans. And the best part is that we don’t even know the whole mystery concerning Wells yet, because we still don’t know why he hates the future Barry so much. I guess time will tell.

Anyway, that’s all from me. Next week we should have Grodd, which is something that should be very awesome indeed, and things are really getting exciting as we enter the final stages of the season.