The Flash 2.16 “Trajectory”

Remember that Simpsons episode where Bart and Homer tried to cross Springfield Gorge? A friend on Twitter posted that the opening scene in this week’s episode of The Flash reminded him of that moment and I think I’d probably have to agree. Barry’s testing his powers and is trying to improve the speed that he needs to beat Zoom, but isn’t fast enough to get to the other side, and promptly needs rescuing from Cisco who brings his drones along to save the day. It’s a nice, fun start to the episode before the arrival of yet another speedster, someone who is neither The Flash or Zoom, and seems intent on causing chaos in Central City, bringing ruin to Barry’s good press that he’s earned with the public by dressing up in his costume.

The Trajectory angle was interesting even if the episode itself was kind of dull as a result and she was a rather forgettable villain. Trajectory, however, will be remembered for one thing and that’s the revelation of Zoom’s identity in this episode as Jay Garrick, which is something that the audience knew already, but the main characters did not. It’s very much an Eobard Thawne/Harrison Wells 2.0 kind of thing. It was, however, a pretty neat way to link Trajectory to Zoom. The pieces are put together before the character’s disappearance that the V-9 seems to cause blue lightning which indicated the cause of a sick speedster. With Jay being sick when Zoom has blue lightning the connections were put together, and this prompted Cisco to touch Jay’s helmet revealing that the Jay they knew was in fact Zoom.

I was surprised mainly that the reveal happened so quickly. I was half expecting it to happen later in the series towards the finale, but The CW often moves shows along at a quick pace (one need only look at The Originals and The 100 for examples of this) so it was great to see that here. With the added promise of a Supergirl crossover to look forward to around the corner, it will be interesting to see how things head towards the eventual showdown with Zoom because there are still far more secrets that need to be revealed. The main mystery of course being the identity of “The Man in the Iron Mask”. Another speedster maybe? Earth 2 Wally West?

As usual, the West family drama was one of the weaker elements of Trajectory and Wally’s role in this episode could have easily been cut out altogether, as he didn’t really bring anything to the table here. Neither did Iris’ new employer, Scott Evans, who felt like another attempt to create a forced love triangle now that Patty has gone.

So on the whole Trajectory was a fairly okay episode of The Flash, with not really that much to write home about aside from the awesome final reveal of Zoom’s identity and the opening scene with Cisco’s rescue of Barry with the drones. There certainly have been better episodes of the series, it’s fair to say, but this wasn’t exactly the worst one that we’ve had yet.

The Flash returns next Tuesday at 8pm on the CW.