TV REVIEW: The Flash “Nuclear Man” Reveals FIRESTORM Origin Story

By Justin Carter

All’s fair in love and war. Unless you’re Caitlin, in which case nothing is really fair when it comes to love.

Superheroes and romance go together like lighter fluid and orange juice. I don’t think there’s a superhero with a love interest who hasn’t died or come pretty close at least twice in the comics. Frankly, it’s a miracle that anyone in superhero comics have anyone they love at all, all things considered. This is what I was thinking while watching Barry eat a ghost pepper in the hopes that Linda Park will give him one more date. I criticized last week’s episode for feeling like a weird Valentine’s Day installment that boils down to “women have crap taste in men”, this one’s main takeaway to me was “you can fail at love twice, but the third time’s a mouth burning, exploding charm.”

Robbie Amell returns again as Ronnie Raymond, though this time he’s playing Victor Garber’s Martin Stein … inside Ronnie. The day the particle accelerator exploded, Barry and Martin shared a train together and talked about science. Martin showed up to STAR Labs literally moments before it went off and grabbed the FIRESTORM experiment from his briefcase, which put the Stein consciousness into Ronnie’s body. Ronnie-Stein tried to go to the latter’s wife, but she doesn’t recognize him in his new body. He also tried consulting an old colleague of Stein’s, but that went south once said colleague ended up on fire. Watching a relatively young man spout lines that should be coming out of the mouth of a 50-year-old professor is a bit odd, no doubt about it, but Amell does a good job playing Stein in another person’s body, particularly when he’s unhinged and it feels like he’s bursting at the seams. The episode works best when it tries to be a FIRESTORM origin, flashing back to a month post-accelerator explosion to show how Ronnie-Stein ended up in the state of affairs we see him in the present day. But despite being the titular Nuclear Man, his storyline for the episode is given second billing to yet another romance plot.

It makes sense that Barry would try to make things work with Linda, because he’s Barry and he wants this. Iris talking to Linda and unknowingly revealing that he had a thing for her doesn’t feel like the betrayal he makes it out to be. We’ve all been there. But if they’re going to make Iris realize her feelings for Barry, that’s something they should have had going through the whole series and not just the second Linda shows up. As it stands, it comes out of left field and makes this inevitable love triangle appear even more forced. Throw in Barry’s rushing away for superhero business, and there’s no real reason for Linda to try and continue dating him. And take this for what it’s worth because I’ve never been put in a situation like this, but if someone told me that they would eat a ghost pepper  unless I agreed to go out with them, I would just let their mouth burn in agony. This is also moments before Ronnie-Stein goes nuclear after Caitlin kisses him, so it’s hard to feel for Barry when his coworker’s fiancé detonates like the atom bomb.

While the romance plot continues making me want to bash my head against a wall with how needless it is, there’s some progress with Joe and Cisco trying to figure out the lightning Barry saw when his mother was killed. They go to Barry’s old house, where there’s a disturbingly out of place horny cougar who tries to get with Joe, Cisco, or both (I honestly couldn’t tell who she was making bedroom eyes at). Once that runs its course, the investigation actually does lead to a rather interesting development in that traces of blood are found on the floor. The blood belongs to none other than Barry himself.

The adult Barry. If that’s not a big leap toward time travel, I don’t know what is.

Additional notes:

• Seriously, that woman Cisco and Joe met. She just comes completely out of left field.

• Clancy Brown shows up again as General Eiling, but it’s not until literally the very minute half minute of the episode. Bit of a waste of a credit.

• “If you change again, I’m gonna shoot you.”

• I figured the show would use “Uptown Funk” at some point, I just wasn’t expecting it to be only a few weeks after the song came out. And then they followed it up later with “Only One”, which is a bit ironic, given Barry’s love life.

• If someone offers to eat a ghost pepper to get you to go out with them, you may as well just record their reaction.