THE FLASH Review “Attack on Central City”

By Justin Carter

Attack on Central City

Hey, so remember how last week’s Flash teased an all-out invasion of talking primates armored up and ready to attack Earth-1? Well….yeah, that doesn’t really happen.

Don’t get me wrong, in no way was I expecting a full hour of CG apes running around Central City and turning it into a playground. But despite how much of a threat that Grodd and his gorilla army should be, they never quite rise to the occasion, even when they actually show up in the end. This is partly because Grodd, once again, plays psychic telephone, first with Joe, and later on with a military official who has access to nukes that he plans to use on Central City. Barry manages to stop the nukes from launching, but there’s barely any real tension behind it — of course he’s gonna stop the nukes from launching, the guy has super speed — that it’s barely an issue.

With Grodd on the horizon, Barry begins to consider the option of killing the big ape to prevent any future disaster from him, not to mention that fact that killing him would also stop the invasion from starting, in turn changing the future and preventing Iris from getting killed by Savitar. Neither Wells nor Iris are too keen on Barry changing his ideals to end this conflict, and I’ll be honest, I was expecting him to go back in time to take Grodd down before things got too out of hand. He doesn’t, instead inspired by Harry’s words that there’s always another, better, way to deal with things like these.

As for that better way? Well, that means Cisco has to appeal to Gypsy for help. She’s weirdly insistent on the fact that this is a thing that Team Flash can handle, despite the fact that she created their new problem. Cisco manages to appeal to her heroic side — and also remind her that she’s into him, prompting the two of them to bring Solovar into the fight so he can bring Grodd down himself. The resulting brawl ends in Solovar’s favor, and Barry manages to convince him to leave Grodd in ARGUS custody on Earth-1 while taking the rest of the gorillas home. Watching Solovar and Grodd beat the hell out of each other was cool, but it also could have gone on longer. It’s the most action we get out of the episode, and if nothing else, we’re left wanting more.

Last week saw Wally and Jesse commit to being together by having her decide to stay in Earth-1 once all the monkey business concluded. The only hanging thread here was that Jesse had yet totell her dad, who took it about as well as can be expected. His only attempt to split them up was, in the ultimate of dick moves, to trick Wally into thinking that he’s dying in the hopes that Jesse would return to Earth-2 with him. It was admittedly clever, so much so that I started to buy it for a while, but he finally learns to just accept that his daughter is now out of his life (at least temporarily). So Wally and Jesse are due for a future of bliss…or rather, they would be, if Wally wasn’t seeing Savitar pop up out of nowhere and attack him. This ending scene feels like something the season has been waiting to do for a while now, so now it’s just about how and when our God of Speed will come back into the fold.

Additional Notes

• Harry is such a dick to HR, even when the latter is trying to be a nice guy. Never spit your toothpaste in someone’s coffee, man.
• Cisco finally gets a kiss from Gypsy, who declares that he couldn’t handle her, and I had the same reaction of awe that everyone else did when it happened.
• Speaking of, Cisco, maybe don’t complain about your love life to Caitlin, who’s lost two different boyfriends in the past two years and is likely going to lose a third by the end of this season. (In no way is that a spoiler, and I think we all know that it’s going to happen eventually.)
• Barry proposes to Iris at the end of the episode, because that’ll make her possible death all the more tragic when it happens. There’s no way their wedding doesn’t happen in the final 2 or 3 episodes of the season.