THE FLASH Review: “The Last Temptation of Barry Allen, Part 2”

The Flash — The Last Temptation of Barry Allen, Pt. 2 — IPictured (L-R): Danielle Nicolet as Cecile Horton, Candice Patton as Iris West – Allen, Carlos Valdes as Cisco Ramon, Grant Gustin as Barry Allen, Danielle Panabaker as Caitlin Snow and Jesse L. Martin as Captain Joe West — Photo: Katie Yu/The CW

The Flash Review “The Last Temptation of Barry Allen, Part 2”

By Justin Carter

Tonight’s Flash feels a lot like a season finale, which is likely intentional given the crossover next week. Under the circumstances, “Last Temptation Part 2” is a pretty great hour that moves along at a fast clip and keeps things engaging enough that it makes this two-parter worth it. 

With Barry under Bloodwork’s control and now being called Dark Flash by Cisco, it doesn’t take long for the Bloody Speedster to turn Central City citizens into blood zombies. Team Flash gets split up into three groups; Cisco and Iris try their own ways to convert Barry, Frost and Joe deal with bringing down said zombies with a last minute save from Allegra, and Cecile and Kamila are trapped in a zombie-filled apartment complex. If you’ve seen any zombie outbreak movie, or really any movie where the disaster is physical and not a force of nature, you more or less know what to expect from this episode. 

That’s not exactly a bad thing; the show consistently maintains an air of tension and unease about it, and even the scenes where people are just talking inside STAR Labs feel like they could be violently interrupted. (Which they do.) All the tense moments with the zombies—sorry, Blood Brothers and Sisters—are well directed, in particular the escape sequence with Cecile and Kamilla. 

Turns out Barry is still in there fighting for control of his body, subtly giving instructions to Cisco and Iris to find Allegra to blast Bloodwork before he can infect all of Central City. I have no clue what Allegra’s future in this show will be, but it’s certainly building up to something interesting, or at least one can hope. It feels earned and right for that character, and if the Arrowverse must put every supporting character into a suit eventually, at least their moments of heroism like this are earned. 

I don’t know how I thought the show would go about realizing Bloodwork’s monstrous form on a TV budget, but what they did was twisted and monstrous enough. I just wish that it stuck around long enough to make an impression, especially given the suite of powers we’d seen Ramsey use before. But now that he’s (presumably) taken off the board forever, it’s time for everyone to reminisce about Barry before the skies turn red. The Crisis is here, and there will almost certainly be blood. 

Additional Notes

• Nash, still in the tunnels underneath the city, basically becomes Pariah just in time to help the heroes next week in the post-credits stingers across the four Arrowverse shows this week. 
• Crisis has quietly made it seem like Cisco would become Vibe again pre-crossover, and I imagined it would happen here. Now that it hasn’t, I’m not so sure. 
• See you in a week for what is basically: Arrowverse: Endgame.