CW's Flash

Finally caught up. Good season.

I did like Thinker's plan. It wasn't the best, but I can buy it as a motivation. The impression I got was that he wasn't quite against technology so much as the way technology was used. So once he re-educated everyone, the new world wouldn't use weapons or social media, but would focus on the future and advancement of humanity. Fitting that a key part of his downfall was social media tracking his movements.

I am curious how he expected to educate everyone. I am sure he was aware that a lot of people would die before he got a chance to teach people how to farm and distribute food and all that. He definitely considered those deaths an acceptable price to pay. My question is how exactly he was planning to teach anyone at all. Did the satellites have some sort of telepathic booster so that he could speak to everyone on the planet at once?

His ability to predict what other people would do was based too much on what would be convenient for the plot, though. That annoyed me basically every single time it came up.

Nora could be interesting. I guess she's gonna stick around for next season? Maybe they can finally have a second speedster without ignoring them for ninety percent of the time.

Hah.

Well, I've got hopes for Nora since she helped Barry punch the thing. I'm curious whether her intervention means Barry was supposed to have died there in her timeline.

That wouldn't make any sense, how would she have been born then?

Surprise, Iris is pregnant. Turns out the Fastest Man Alive's sperm, due to being connected to the Speed Force, exhausts itself pretty quickly and it takes an extra-long time to fertilize an egg. This sudden connection to the Speed Force through Iris's Speed Forcefield makes Iris's pregnancy near-lethal, forcing Barry and the team to travel into the future in search of-

I don't know, but I feel like something must have gone wrong in Dawn's timeline. If the finale wasn't going to do something to Barry then I don't know why Dawn decided to intervene in the first place. Maybe she was conceived earlier and she had to grow up without a father. I mean she did seem not-so-subtly awed at getting to meet Barry.

Unless Dawn was attempting to surpass her father's talent for screwing things up.

edited 14th Jun '18 11:25:52 AM by Soble

Even if we leave the pregnancy issue aside, had Barry failed to stop the satellites, then it would've caused an extinction level event (as it said in the episode). No more Barry, no more Iris, no more Nora, nothing.

Maybe he would have survived, but been horribly injured. While he would have healed eventually (he healed a broken spine in less than a week, I think basically anything that doesn't kill him outright will be only temporary), Nora decided to spare him that, and that's where everything went haywire.

Maybe in the original timeline, the Thinker never activated his deadman's switch, but Nora interacting with Team Flash earlier in the season caused a butterfly effect that made it happen, so she had to intervene to help stop it.

Making things worse, the Allen family tradition.

(2)

Possible, but I've also got to wonder how far in the future Dawn is from, or why a Time Wraith hasn't come after her.

Or maybe one has.

Time Wraiths seem to mostly be a threat to Barry.

They've only shown up when he was pulling shit. Even Hunter only got caught because Barry purposely created a time duplicate to lure one out (in the hope it would prioritize Hunter first, but still).

My guess is...the Speed Force just hates the Allen family, and Barry in particular. It will punish others (Thawne losing his speed, Hunter getting Black Flashed) but only minimally why it will go out of its way to screw Barry over because it's already seen what shit he'll cause...which results in him causing that same shit.

So yeah, Speed Force is biased.

The Speed Force is tsundere for Barry.

I think it leans a bit towards yandere.

Thawne mentions that he knows some undescribed method for staying off the Time Wraiths' radar.

It's called "Not being Barry Allen".

Makes sense to me.

Is it possible that Nora hitched a ride on her uncle Wally's time ship instead of running back herself? That type of time travel doesn't result in time wraiths and is less likely to cause paradoxes unless you really screw up, like by killing someone you shouldn't have. Or if you run into your past self, which is the biggest disadvantage it has compared to speedster time travel.

Maybe Nora was in the spedfarce, too, for whatever reason—potentially she went in in the firstplace to help keep him sane as part of a fixed time loop—, and escaped when Barry did to his time instead of to her own—- and if she time travels back to the future now the speedfarce will be pissed about , because nothing pisses off the speedface like speedsters trying to help the people they love.

I wouldn't be surprised. I saw someone mention that Barry mentioned Nora in episode one of last season so her being in the speedforce at some points makes sense. And since Barry doesn't seem to remember his time trapped in the speedforce/most of the events of the first episode of last season it isn't even a plothole.

...huh.

I didn't think of that.

yeah, one of his post speedforce babbles was "Nora shouldn't be here"

Y'know, as Killer Frost becomes more and more unambiguously heroic (or at least, not inclined to stop being heroic at the moment), I keep wondering if they'll eventually introduce Louise Lincoln an Evil Counterpart at some point.

Also, I really hope they don't Split-Personality Merge Caitlin and Frost. I kind of like the unique dynamics of having one member of the cast be the split personality of another member of the cast, keeping that connection while both are treated as their own character (even if the last season kind of wasted Frost in general). It's very... comic booky.

edited 21st Jun '18 8:40:12 PM by KnownUnknown

While I'm annoyed that they're acting like the split personality is an inevitable result of her powers, I do like the dynamic itself. I don't feel like they're going to do a merge. They seem to be leading towards something else, with the reveal that Caitlin is one of the pre-accelerator metahumans. Speaking of which, it looks like we're finally gonna have that plot thread picked up again. Last time it came up was with Deathbolt.

I never really saw that Deathbolt thing as a mystery that needed to be solved, just an acknowledgement that the Arrowverse is a lot wider and weirder than just the one dark matter incident in Central City.

We already knew of at least one other source of superpowers that predated the particle accelerator explosion: Mirakuru. And not long after Deathbolt showed up, Arrow established that mystic totems and other sources of magical superpowers have been around since ancient times, we saw Vandal Savage and the Hawkpeople had their origins all the way back in Ancient Egypt, and the Justice Society of America had a bunch of superpowered heroes back in the 40's.

Basically, when Thawne Wells said back in Season 1 that these sorts of superpowers couldn't have existed before the particle accelerator incident, he was full of shit for more reasons than one.

Mirakuru is basically a super-steroid, not a source of metahuman ability in the same way the Particle Accelerator was. It's also acknowledged the first time that Team Flash encounters Vixen (in her animated origin series) that magical based powers are so rare that Team Flash immediately assumes she was in Central City rather than - at first - believe she was using magic.

Arrow further spells out that the average person would have no idea magic even exists. Wells would have - given that he's from the future and had explicitly fought what it implied to be almost all the superheroes to exist already - but he has no reason to tell Barry, Cisco, etc that, and either way none of that actually contradicts the narrative setup of the earlier seasons were putting into place.

edited 22nd Jun '18 12:52:07 AM by KnownUnknown

Plus, having metahumans outside of Central could be interesting, as we've seen over in Legends that Obsidian has powers without it being implied to come from a serum, magic, or tech.

And I've always liked the idea that some humans in the DC Universe can get superpowers from almost dying.