Barry & Wally Face the ‘Death of the Speed Force’ on ‘The Flash’ (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 6, Episode 14 of The Flash, “Death of the Speed Force.”]
Things are falling apart in Central City for Team Flash — and all Iris (Candice Patton) can do is watch from behind a mirror.
Both Cisco (Carlos Valdes) and Wally (Keiynan Lonsdale) return to The Flash in “Death of the Speed Force,” and both end up wrapped up in storylines that have serious implications moving forward. For Cisco, it’s a discovery that may beat everything he found on his fact-finding mission across Earth-Prime, while for Wally, he and Barry (Grant Gustin) must face an uncertain future as speedsters.
Is Life About to Change Completely for Barry & Wally?
While speed-cleaning up after Wally’s welcome home party, Barry inexplicably stops mid-run and crashes into the wall. It was just a hiccup, one of a few, due to his body still recovering from Crisis, he tells his fellow speedster. But Wally thinks something is wrong with the speed force; he’s learned to project his consciousness into and communicate with it, and a few months ago, the voice he heard went quiet. Barry insists there’s nothing wrong.
But Mirror-Iris spills about an “incident” between Barry and the speed force, prompting Wally to confront the Flash and bring him into it. They find the speed force, as Nora Allen, dying, “because of what you did,” she tells Barry. Once out of it, Wally blames Barry, not for what happened when Ramsey infected him, but for not telling him sooner. The speed force used to show Kid Flash visions of different futures, and there was always a chain of lightning stretching through centuries, of other speedsters (Wally’s kids, Nora). Now, the chain ends with them.
(Colin Bentley/The CW)
Barry uses a tachyon enhancer to enter the speed force and learns that the green lightning everywhere is the result of his actions during Crisis. The Spectre gave him his energy so he could enter the speed force, and that upset the balance of energies. Before dying, the speed force forgives Barry and warns him, “You only have a few steps left before we’re gone from you entirely.”
After Joe (Jesse L. Martin) reminds Wally that Barry’s going through the same thing he is, the speedsters have another talk. Barry fills him in on what really happened to the speed force, and Wally assures him that any hero would have made the same call during Crisis.
To Barry’s surprise, when he eventually speaks with his (mirror) wife, she suggests that losing his speed is for the best. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be the Flash forever, and now they can have a normal life.
Less Is More (and Necessary)
The team learns Wally’s back when he makes quite an entrance, saving a helicopter full of people before it crashes. (He also disassembles the chopper and speeds the pieces down to the ground.) But for one of the passengers, it’s only a short reprieve from death. The meta-of-the-week finds her at Jitters, seemingly freezes the rest of the room, and attacks her. When Joe, Barry, Wally, and Cisco examine her body at the crime scene, the young Russian socialite was seemingly 110 years old when she died.
Cisco recognizes the meta’s work as Turtle 2.0’s (“less is more,” he says of the name). (He’s been tracking her on his trip.) She can create potential energy force fields around her victims and age them centuries in the blink of an eye. Joe busted her for an international drug ring out of her apartment, and her first victim was one of two informants.
(Colin Bentley/The CW)
Turtle 2.0 targets Joe at CCPD to get to the other one, to take what was taken from her (time), but he refuses to give in. And with Barry and Wally running low on speed, they have to use it responsibly as they take her down. Though she traps Wally in a kinetic energy ball, Barry’s able to distract her long enough for Joe to inject her with the Velocity X formula Cisco and Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) tweaked to neutralize her powers.
“Crisis, the Gift That Keeps on Giving”
Nash (Tom Cavanagh) interrupts Cisco’s work on the meta-of-the-week case to ask if he saw anyone from another Earth on his trip. But Cisco brushes him off, pointing out all doppelgangers would be dead due to neurological degeneration. When Nash brings up the ones that were already dead, Cisco insists it’s not possible and doesn’t let him speak long enough for Nash to actually explain his problem.
And that’s a very, very big problem because by the time Caitlin talks Cisco into talking to Nash, the latest Wells isn’t quite himself anymore. Cisco realizes immediately as soon as he sees him. “Hello, Cisco,” Thawne greets him before attacking, ready to finish what he started and raising his hand. However, because he’s in Nash’s body, he doesn’t have his powers. Cisco fights him off long enough for Cecile to take Thawne down with a taser.
And into the pipeline he goes; cue the usual threats to Barry about killing him and his friends and family. To Barry’s surprise, Thawne knows that the speed force is dead and the Flash will be powerless in a few short weeks.
But there is one good thing about having Thawne around (and him reminding Barry he built his own power source). “I need your help to build an artificial speed force,” Barry tells Cisco and Caitlin. “That’s how I can get my speed back.”
(Colin Bentley/The CW)
Mirror, Mirror…
Iris is still trapped in the mirror dimension with Eva (Efrat Dor), and the two reflect on their husbands. Iris shares that Barry calls her his lightning rod, that he’s said he could find her anywhere in the universe. It’s too bad he doesn’t notice that she’s not the one next to him, but hey, at least Wally notices “something’s different about her” and warns Joe to keep an eye on her before he leaves.
Meanwhile, Eva knows down to the number of days how long it’s been since she’s touched her husband — and as she repeats the count, so does Mirror-Iris out in the real world, in an almost trance-like state. Kamilla (Victoria Park) is the one to catch her as she over-pours champagne for Wally’s welcome home celebration.
Kamilla is also the one to face Mirror-Iris’ wrath when she takes her photo. Mirror-Iris claims she doesn’t want to risk Citizen employees’ photos possibly ending up online with Black Hole assassins out there. While Kamilla agrees to delete the photo, when she checks later, it’s still there because the filter is still loading. She applies the “Prismatic” filter and suddenly Mirror-Iris looks like she’s made up of prisms.
Mirror-Iris is behind her in the deserted office to confirm she’s not her friend — and blast her with some type of gun that presumably sends her somewhere, perhaps the mirror dimension?
The Flash, Tuesdays, 8/7c, The CW
