Spoilers lie ahead.
The Flash is back with season three. So begins the Flashpoint storyline that we were left hanging with at the end of season two. We immediately see Barry trying to build up the courage to talk to Iris, who recognizes him, but can’t quite recall from where. After talking briefly, they have plans for a date. While everyone has a similar life as they did in the pre-Flashpoint timeline, they’re still drastically different people. Cisco is rich and bought the Star Labs building, Caitlin is a pediatric eye doctor, and Wally is Kid Flash (or just The Flash, as he prefers). Let’s not forget that Joe ends up as quite the angry drunk.
That’s the gist of these current characters. Naturally, the Flashpoint dilemma needed a fix quickly. This episode, we already see Eobard Thawne, aka the Reverse Flash, take Barry back in time and kill his mother. The dialogue between Thawne and Barry really stood out because it was very direct and quite corny. Within their first conversation, Thawne calls this situation “Flashpoint” in an overly enthusiastic way. It feels clunky when they have dialogue like that, but it wasn’t detrimental to the episode.
Flashpoint, the comic, shows how once you mess with time, it won’t necessarily be the same if you just go back to the moment you left, and the writers do a great job of translating that to the TV screen. Once Barry is back to the regular timeline, he finds out that Iris doesn’t talk to Joe, but has no clue as to why. The audience doesn’t find out either. They allow us now to take that trip with the audience. And this will not only affect these characters, but will roll over into the other CW shows, especially Arrow.
Overall, this episode accomplished what it needed to. Flashpoint isn’t fixed just yet, and I suspect it will take at least a couple more episodes to get things resembling more of the team we saw last season. It will be interesting to see how things play out with Iris and how Barry plans to explain all of this. It did feel as though Flashpoint Iris believed him a bit too easily about something so strange and foreign. That likely won’t play a factor into the episodes going forward, though. We even get a new bad guy to look forward to this episode that crosses over on both timelines as different monikers. The Rival, who Barry and Wally barely manage to defeat, will be Alchemy going forward.
Check this episode out even if you were wary of how they would handle Flashpoint. Season two had some highs and lows, but season three is off to a good start so far.
