Holy shit, the real villains of this week are Cisco’s shitty fucking family.  Jesus.  I mean Thong Song wasn’t exactly groundbreaking but it did pretty well.  It was all over the place in the 90’s, that’s respectable, even if there wasn’t a follow-up hit.  But man are they a crappy group of people.  I kind of wish last week’s tsunami hit landfall if it meant wiping that colony of assholes off the face of the map.  Good god.  Speaking of last week’s tsunami it was apparently the only thing that ignited Iris’ love for Barry.  See boys, the woman you love probably loves you back, you just need to put her in a life threatening situation and then save her and all those feelings will come gushing out.  Also keep in mind, as the show has established, that if you ARE a hero you are allowed to look at a woman naked without her permission.  The Flash ladies and gentlemen!  He’s a role-model to poorly adjusted perverts everywhere!  His costume should really come with a red fedora.

Flash immediately subverts everything that happened last episode without any sort of debate that makes it worthwhile.  All the debate about time travel comes after the fact, Wells warns that any tragedy subverted by time travel will only be replaced by an equal or greater tragedy.  Apparently this means that Barry doesn’t get his sex prize because suddenly Iris doesn’t love Barry the way she did at the end of last episode.  By Odin’s hoary beard this aspect of the show pisses me right the hell off.  I can’t focus on anything else.  While I’m just generally venting, before I get into the episode proper, let me tell you how well the show hooked me this week?  After 5 minutes, when they made last week totally irrelevant, I decided that my living room really needed to be cleaned.  Then, boy, those dishes should probably be put away.  Then, man, I should probably use that Neti Pot I got to try to help with a sinus infection.  I decided sinus irrigation with warm water was preferable to watching this.  DO YOU KNOW WHAT A NETI POT IS?  DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT DOES?  Look that shit up and realize that I would rather do that than watch this week’s Flash.

The only redeeming quality to this episode is the return of Captain Cold and Heatwave along with the debuting Golden Glider.  Although I don’t remember Golden Glider having a gold gun.  There was a DC Green Lantern villain called Goldbug that had a gold gun but Golden Glider just had ice powers like her brother Captain Cold.  Except she ice skated around on ice producing skates and maybe she had a cold wand?  I don’t remember and it doesn’t really matter.  Captain Cold just gets better and better with each appearance as he seems to settle into the role nicely.  His chemistry with Heatwave is really great and understandably so since the two spent a lot of time together as the ‘Prison Break Bros’ but I think their characters and their dynamic was a bit different.  All I know about Prison Break came from watching commercials about Prison Break.  But I welcome Captain Cold any time I get to see him.  On a random note did Barry just make a deal to allow crime as long as Cold keeps his identity?  Did I understand that exchange right?

This episode was worthless.  I would have cut everything but Cold/Heatwave and ran that as an online short.  It would have been just as effective.  Cisco’s family is utterly unlikable so their whole brotherly love sub plot couldn’t have interested me less.  Barry struggling with the changes to the timeline wasn’t very interesting and nothing gets addressed or moved forward.  Not only could they not have aired this episode but they would have been better off not airing last week’s episode as well.  It should have just been an hour of commercials and dead air both weeks.  Where is my fucking telepathic monkey!

Score: 2/5

The Flash 1.16

The Flash airs Tuesdays 8/7 C