Flash: Season 1, Episode 23: Fast Enough

Anger, love, anxiety, admiration, confusion, happiness, sorrow, excitement, arousal maybe. I can’t even really pinpoint all of the emotions that ran through me during this episode. The science wasn’t bad at all and I LOVE time travel, causality and theories of space-time. Everyone was on their scientific A-game. Dr. Stein was a good replacement for Dr. Wells and even Ronnie showed a little brain flexing. Funny that it was fire related though.

There is a bit of a hiccup in the science though. There is a massive paradox that I’m sure a lot of time travel geeks may or may not have noticed. I’m a time travel geek so I’ll explain:

According to their own science here, anything that happens in the past, no matter now minor, has to potential to change everything. Obviously, Barry’s conversation with his mother shouldn’t change anything because she died right after and the knowledge wouldn’t affect anything. At the same time, Barry’s future self seeing him makes sense, because he would know he was there because he should have that memory from the future. No matter how difficult the decision was to make, being told no by both his father and his future self should stop his temporal meddling. It would’ve taken tremendous strength of will to resist saving her.

The thing that itches a little for me is the way Reverse-Flash was disposed of. Eddie Thawne was his ancestor so it makes sense that he would disappear from the timeline if he died. I was definitely wondering what the deal with Eddie was and what would be his part to play in all of this other than a love triangle with Iris. I did not see the ending coming, even though it should’ve been pretty obvious. A much easier way would’ve been to have Cisco sabotage the time-sphere and let it explode mid journey to strand the villain elsewhere (elsewhen?), but keep him alive for future appearances. This was was much more touching and meaningful, but it leads to my gripe with the episode.

What bothers me though, is the lack of change in the timeline after the death occurred. If every decision makes such a massive difference then why would the fact that Eobard Thane never existed not change anything. Time has a cyclical effect here, but why wasn’t anything Reverse-Flash did erased. If Barry saving his mother didn’t change anything, then why was everything the same when his nemesis died. Basically, if Eobard didn’t exist then he couldn’t have gone back in time and set literally EVERYTHING in motion. Barry may have still become the Flash, but there should be severe differences.

The only thing that could possibly make this turn of events make sense, is if being so close to a singularity changed the flow of space-time around them. Time and space are severely disrupted when in the vicinity of black holes, so I can buy the idea of it destabilizing the timeline and at the same time anchoring everything that wasn’t directly affected by Eddie’s death. Hopefully the writers will explain that next season, since they left with such a massive cliffhanger. The show has been really smart thus far so I wouldn’t be surprised if they made sense of it.

Man that got really nerdy just now. I got pretty deep into theoretical science for much longer than I meant to. Sorry about that, it just happens sometimes. At least now people can’t question the validity of my geekhood. I guess I’ll get back to the review now.

So anyway, this was an amazing episode. There was so much heart involved and this season has been a true treat that seems to have found its stride already. There were easter eggs galore here. Maybe people who have been keeping up noticed the appearance of Hawkgirl right at the end along with the mention of Rip Hunter. Both of those are pretty massive tie-ins to the upcoming “Legends of Tomorrow” series. If we’re lucky, Rip Hunter’s involvement will lead to an appearance of Booster Gold, but that’s a discussion for another time (no pun intended).

There were huge hints as to the destinies of Caitlin and Cisco here as well. Cisco was revealed to be a metahuman, which explained his ability to see his alternate death. He ends up as the vibration powered superhero named Vibe in the comics and this was a great way to allude to both that and the possibility of seeing him in the future. He deserves superpowers anyway, he’s pretty awesome and definitely insanely useful.

As far as Caitlin is concerned, her relationship with Firestorm is a big deal in the comics and that’s been played up well all season. The better part was seeing a glimpse of her as Killer Frost, her deadly comic book alter ego. Since Thawne explained that Barry was seeing his past, present and future, this means that this is a definite future event and not an alternate timeline. We’re going to see some interesting things in the coming seasons. It only leaves us wondering what’s going to happen to S.T.A.R. Labs.

Speaking of alternate timelines, how about Jay Garrick’s helmet? Since he’s been both the Golden Age and Earth-2 version of flash, so that either showed us a piece of history to be explored or somewhere else where Barry could go. There was so much potential for fanboy insanity here and so much more, but they keep the show grounded and away from too much chaos. I only hoped Barry might change the past and end up with his parents so that Joe had a second daughter which would lead to the possible birth of Wally West. Who knows though? Since Linda Park was introduced we’ll probably end up seeing ol’ Kid Flash anyway, just a different incarnation.

So much happened and it was so great to see it all on this show and since I doubted its potential in the beginning I am happily eating all of my doubts. If next season is even half as good as this one, I’m looking forward to it. This was definitely one of the best first seasons of any show I’ve ever seen and I’m very excited about seeing what happens with the aftermath of these events next year!

Jonathan Jones

Jonathan Thomas Jones is a speculative fiction author and founder of geekhavenreviews.com. He has been passionate about all things geek for his entire life. See more about him at jonathanthomasjones.com and follow him on twitter @jtgloryjones.