THE FLASH: Meet Trajectory

By Justin Carter

I’ll admit upfront that my knowledge on speedsters in comic books more or less begins with The Flash, his sidekick, Reverse, and Zoom and ends there as well, along with Quicksilver. And even then, I have to look up their respective histories to know what they’re about.

So I had no idea who Trajectory was when the news first broke that she would be making an appearance on the show. All I can go off of here thanks to this week’s Flash episode is that she’s different from other speedsters in that she’s got multiple personality disorder, thanks to her addiction to Caitlin’s speed-boost drug.

As Eliza Harmon, Caitlin conscripted her help with it during Jay’s drug trials, and she reverse engineered it to give herself her own boost. The whole “Velocity-9 as a steroids metaphor” thing is an interesting hook, but the show doesn’t really do much with it aside from a hallucinated voice telling her to keep on shooting up. She goes around robbing people, either to test out her powers, or so she’s got money to buy the materials she needs to make her own Velocity-9? That’s not entirely clear, but the episode begins with Team Flash trying and failing to dance at a club, so there’s that.

The actual Trajectory part of “Trajectory” plays out almost like a Very Special Episode. There’s the aforementioned whole shooting up thing with the title villain and her inner voice, plus Barry has a bit of an urge to shoot up on it himself to boost his speed.

Just practicing isn’t getting him anywhere, so what’s the harm in shooting up, right? Well, considering that Trajectory literally evaporates into nothing at the end and screams in pain, the answer is a clear “not well.”

Just remember to say no to drugs, kids, especially if they make you break the sound barrier!

Trajectory’s death is triggered partially by blue lightning, leading the team to discover the connection between V-9 and speedsters, and Cisco’s Vibing confirms it to them. Jay Garrick is Zoom, Barry’s been betrayed yet again, and he’s none too happy about it.

I get the feeling that this was the intended reveal the crew was going for instead of the one that closed out the previous episode, because it definitely tries to hit more of an emotional beat here than last time.

I still don’t think the reveal of Jay as Zoom entirely works, given that the show has done next to nothing with him (and if we’re being real, Caitlin is the one who should get the emotional breakdown instead of Barry screaming into the sky), but it’s a well done way to close off the episode.

As a way to ease people back in after a month long hiatus, “Trajectory” gets the job done pretty well in that regard, but it’d be nice to finally get an explanation as to why Zoom’s doing all that he’s doing. Is that too much to ask?

Additional Notes

• Cisco’s dancing is really bad. Like, really, really bad.
• Harry’s daughter leaves at the end of the episode, but not before a bit of flirting with Wally and skirting around her not technically being from there. So Wally’s just…around, I guess, huh?
• Iris, meanwhile, accidentally leads her boss to thinking they’re on a date when she’s stalling on a Flash takedown piece. She’s not entirely taking the chances of them dating off the table, but given that her recent luck, I can’t imagine this ending well for either.
• Catch a trailer for next week’s “Flashback” below.