THE FLASH “Rupture” Recap: Zoom Lets Loose in Central City

By Justin Carter

It was probably safe to assume that Barry would eventually get his powers again after being de-powered a couple of episodes of The Flash ago.

The de-powering story is a tried and true trope, and one that was used earlier in the season. What makes this one different from last time is that the de-powering was absolutely the fault of Team Flash weirdly taking no time to pull a fast one on Zoom and nip the whole problem in the bud.

The show’s still riding the “no powers” train, and apparently last week’s solution to up Barry’s suit via dwarf star was a short term one, as Barry and Cisco make use of a hologram to scare petty criminals out of action this week. This feels like an easy solution, but instead, the show takes the time for Barry to be told that this is all ultimately his choice, by both his fathers (hey, John Wesley Shipp’s still around!), and by Iris.

The only one who seems to care about finding a cure to Barry’s powers is Harry, who is still gung ho about creating another particle accelerator explosion. Everyone seems to be largely focused on what could happen should things go wrong, which is fine, until you remember that this is a problem largely of their own making. Sure, there’s the understandable worry about creating more metahumans and destruction, but one would think that someone other than Harry would be on the side of “Zoom is in your world now, so let’s get our speedster back to full strength.”

Zoom’s trip to Earth-1 with Caitlin naturally starts at Central City, and he decides to start off his plans for inter-dimensional conquest by booting the CC police out of their own station. Caitlin manages to keep him from killing them outright, but only just barely. It’s safe to say that Teddy Sears definitely plays unstable madman very well; even when he’s not doing the Tony Todd voice, his facial expressions and mannerisms make it so that even watching him stand in front of a woman handcuffed to a table is unnerving. (Well, more than it already is.)

To aid him in his conquest of this Earth Zoom brings along some Earth 2 baddies, and this week is accompanied a bad guy by the name of Rupture (guest star Nichlolas Gonzalez). If you play Destiny, just imagine someone cosplaying their character as a visual reference for him — plus an energy scythe. What’s noteworthy about Rupture is that he’s actually the E2 version of Cisco’s brother, Dante.

Cisco and E1 Dante get attacked by Rupture while hashing out old family woes, partly due to the fact that Zoom has successfully managed to dupe Rupture into thinking the evil Reverb was taken out by his good counterpart. You might imagine that this news would maybe lead to Cisco finding an offensive use for his powers, but that goes right out the window after he and Dante escape Rupture. All it really does is get Cisco to hug his brother after watching Rupture get slagged. The baddie of the week never learns the truth about who killed his brother before Zoom kills him for sucking as a villain and getting captured by the CCPD.

The highlight of the episode is in the final act, where Zoom just drops the pretenses and kills everyone in the coffee shop except for Joe, Singh, and Barry. It’s the first time in probably a while where he’s threatening both in appearance and in voice, doing a good job of reminding us that this dude can be bloody terrifying when the show lets him cut loose. The near massacre is finally what spurs Barry into getting his powers back. I was expecting things to go smooth as butter, so it was definitely shocking to see Barry literally torn apart and turned into pure energy. But all that buildup was actually a smokescreen to reveal an even bigger surprise: the birth of Kid Flash and Jesse Quick.

If the rest of “Rupture” had managed to be as entertaining as those last 10 minutes, it’d be a full on blast. As it is, it’s another filler episode that briefly springs to life during our closing act.

Additional Notes

• Before Barry gets atomized, Iris decides to reveal her feelings for him. That probably could’ve been timed at a moment when your crush isn’t going through an existential crisis, no?
• Wally and Jesse spend most of their time locked away in the STAR Labs closet before they get blasted with energy, which is no doubt a reflection of their characterizations up to this point.
• How does Barry not realize that Garrick was his grandmother’s maiden name? Even taking into consideration his dad being in jail most of his life, he had to have done a family tree project at some point, right?
• It honestly shouldn’t have surprised me that the writers used the second accelerator explosion to introduce Kid Flash and Jesse Quick, given that Kid Flash is making an appearance in DC’s upcoming Rebirth reboot (try saying that five times fast). The Flash’s solo comic in June will feature the birth of multiple speedsters, meaning that Jesse will likely be one of them.
• Credit to the show for not trying to go all “Is Barry dead?” on us. Instead, he’s in…Speedster Purgatory?