The Flash "Plastique" Review: What Women Will Do 

The Flash "Plastique" Review: What Women Will Do

The Flash\'s guest characters and villains in these reviews, but they do end up having a sizable influence on my enjoyment of any given episode, considering the show\'s structure and the fact that its more serialized elements—the love triangle, Iris\'s interest in the Streak, and Harrison\'s ultimate agenda—tend to move at their own pace. As such, the serialized stuff ends up feeling either super important or not all that important, let alone interesting. Basically, The Flash needs good Freaks of the Week, or at least regular joes with cool toys, to keep itself moving right now.

And after finally giving us a a villain with a personality in Leonard Snart, "Plastique" changed things up again by presenting a Freak of the Week who wasn\'t evil. Sure, Bette Sans Souci (Kelly Frye) was motivated by revenge just like Multiplex (who wasn\'t totally evil, but was definitely way less of a nice person than Sans Souci) and Mist, but her motivation for that revenge was a bit more shaded than those of her metahuman predecessors. She didn\'t want her powers—the ability to make anything explosive by touching it, except for clothing she\'s wearing, because comic book logic—and thought her powers were the results of experiments conducted on her without her consent by General Wade Eiling (Clancy Brown), even though they were, of course, caused by the particle accelerator explosion.

Sans Souci\'s dilemma created a number of threads that, while never felt fully tied together by the end, were still interesting enough. The core of Sans Souci\'s problem was one of victimhood. She\'s not a bad person, and she didn\'t ask for these powers that made her ability to touch things and people nearly impossible. She just wants those powers removed, and while she\'d get it done by blowing up things and people, she was also happy to take a less explosive route, provided S.T.A.R. Labs could supply one. The powers may make the goal easier, but they also have their limits. As Caitlin notes, Barry\'s ability allows him to help people, but Sans Souci\'s "makes things explode." While making things explode can provide some assistance, it\'s ultimately far more dangerous and devastating than being able to run 

really fast, especially when that power isn\'t as controllable as splitting yourself into duplicates or manipulating the weather.

Such powers also made Sans Souci an obvious weapon for other people, someone to be used to achieve ends other than her own. That was where the real villainy in the episode came out. The episode did quick work to establish Eiling as a guy who did bad things—and to gorillas no less!—in the name of national security. He no longer saw Sans Souci as a human being, but as a weapon that could save other lives. This is pretty standard bad guy military stuff, but I do appreciate that The Flash made sure Eiling wasn\'t just military might and violence. He figured out that the particle accelerator was responsible for Sans Souci and the Streak, and is thus a step ahead of everyone else in Central City and makes him a recurring villain figure for the show.

More chilling, but not surprising, is that Harrison used and manipulated Sans Souci to achieve his own goals: the death of Eiling. It\'s a great moment for the episode, and Tom Cavanagh continues to excel at this shady mastermind version of Harrison. It was a clever pivot to re-focus Sans Souci onto Eiling by saying the general would hunt others like her to get her to do what he wanted. If she had survived, she might\'ve made a useful agent for Harrison to use to deal with people who would threaten Barry, but as it stands, he\'ll just have to keep getting his own hands dirty.

It would\'ve been nice if Sans Souci had managed to break free of this cycle of men using and wanting to use her without having to (apparently) die in a spectacular watery explosion, and for her to achieve some sense of peace with her new self. As it stood, though, her death ends up being on both men\'s hands, and that feels like a much more damning takeaway, especially as her dying words may eventually come back to haunt Barry.

Speaking of men trying to tell a lady what to do, Joe and Barry did their best to keep Iris from blogging about the Streak, and because it wouldn\'t be safe for her to continue to do it because some metahumans may end up coming after her and because it may end up resulting in Iris discovering Barry\'s secret identity. And that would also be bad...because...yeah, no one gives a great reason for this. Thus, after five episodes, 

The Flash has officially hit a wall on this plot. Iris is a character that exists to be lied to, and supposedly for her own good, but I fail to see how Barry revealing his identity to Iris doesn\'t solve this problem.

I liked that Iris was blogging about the Streak to help Barry, to help convince the rest of the world in "the impossible." It is exactly the reason why Joe came to believe Barry regarding the events of Nora\'s death, and why he agreed to help find the real killer, but because Iris doesn\'t have powers or a badge and thus cannot protect herself, it\'s less acceptable of a reason? It\'s pretty much nonsense, and just another reason to tell her about Barry\'s abilities. While Caitlin and Cisco aren\'t drawing attention to themselves by blogging, they\'re also perfectly incapable of defending themselves in the event that someone comes after them, and yet no one seems all that worried about this possibility. All this makes even less sense since Snart knows they\'re associated with the Streak. Iris doesn\'t know and would be danger if she knew, but the S.T.A.R. Lab scientists do know, and thus they aren\'t in as much, if any, danger? 

It\'s why her shift from doing the blog to help Barry to wanting the rest of the world to know seemed so flimsy and kneejerk: Because it is. It\'s manufactured drama to keep this plotline going, to create some trouble in unrequited love paradise—Barry\'s suggestion that they not see each other for a while likewise puzzles me; don\'t they live in the same house?—and to keep Iris locked in a seemingly dead-end plot where everyone around her just keeps lying and lying. I know and understand that the secret identity and the attempts to uncover the secret identity are part and parcel of many a superhero narrative, but in this case, there feels like there\'s no reason for doing it the way The Flash is going about it.

– I love that Barry can\'t get drunk because his body metabolizes alcohol too quickly. I also love seeing Caitlin and Cisco outside of S.T.A.R. Labs, as I was worried they were becoming

The Flash\'s version of Gotham\'s Barbara Gordon: confined to one location and not allowed to leave unless kidnapped.

– "Yeah. He\'s so hot. I mean, genetically speaking of course. Because I’m a geneticist. Do I sound like Felicity?"

– "What if I get a bunch of mattresses and stack them? "Barry, this isn\'t a Road Runner cartoon." It\'s awesome that Barry is always asking for help from his team, though I really need to know how he knows whether he\'s running at the correct speed once they tell him what speed he needs to run at. And by "really need to know" I mean that I\'m picking at a nit that I really don\'t care about, just like the matter of whether or not the Army can really just show up and assume control of an investigation.

– "Didn\'t really think this one through, did you?" Haaaaha.

– You know what I loved more than seeing the team drinking at the bar? Barry tickling Joe by vibrating Joe\'s vocal cords. If there\'s one thing I really enjoy about

The Flash, it\'s that it has fun with Barry\'s powers and allows its characters to respond to those powers in ways that feel organic and fun. I mean, if you heard Barry AutoTune his voice, wouldn\'t you laugh?

– Have fun theorizing what it means that Harrison "has a whole different future" planned for Grodd. I know I was doubtful about the show\'s ability to depict Grodd in a convincing manner, but now that the Easter Egg from the pilot has become an actual plot point, I need the show to deliver on a talking, psychically powered gorilla that\'s hellbent on world domination. I. NEED. IT.

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