The Flash is still working through some of the kinks. It's early so the writers need to lean on a formula that can be tweaked later on. It helps that the show recently got a full season order, and that means the writers can pace out the story over the long term. So Barry and the STAR Labs team are set on fighting another meta-human who didn't perish in the particle accelerator explosion. He encounters some difficulties with the freak of the week, along with the usual complications in his personal life; There is a flashback that fills in some information that wasn't known before, and the episode ends with Harrison Wells having ambiguous intentions. It would be tedious if the series didn't retain its light touch and shifted its focus to other aspects.




The villain that the team has to deal with here is The Mist. That is the same name of a DC Comics villain from the 1940's who had the ability to transform himself into a poisonous gas. That happens here as well, although his backstory is written to fit what happened in the Flash world at large. In this case, the Mist is a death row criminal who was scheduled to be executed the night of the particle accelerator explosion. So he can turn himself into the hydrogen cyanide gas that was supposed to kill him. It is visually appealing to see the Mist kill a couple of victims and then face off with Barry at the end. Barry is still in dire need of some combat skills aside from just throwing a right hook (which doesn't show him as particularly smart even as it initially looks like there's no good way to stop the Mist). But once again, the STAR Labs team provides Barry with the exact information to beat the Mist.

There is going to be a time where Barry won't have that crutch to lean on available to him when he goes out to fight the bad guys. In fact, fighting the Mist also marks the second time in three episodes where Barry is fighting some kind of cloud-creating villain. The twist here is that the Mist isn't killed. The team comes up with a logical, albeit temporary, solution of using the particle accelerator as a makeshift prison for those with superpowers. That's probably not going to come back to bite them, but we'll see with time.





The flashback in this episode focuses on what happened at STAR Labs as the particle accelerator was being activated. Barry asks the logical question of what happened to Ronnie, Caitlin's fiance, and this episode shows snippets of that to fill in some of the blanks. Ronnie was the structural engineer for the particle accelerator and he basically saved Central City from getting more damaged in the explosion. He was the one who made the explosion go into the sky, a decision that looked like it cost him his life.


Now, the rule in many genres is that if you don't see a body, the person in question is usually not dead. Combine that with the fact that the show wouldn't hire Robbie Amell to be a one-off appearance and it's likely that we'll see Ronnie again. It's just a question of when that will come to pass. The flashback does humanize Caitlin a bit, showing her as more than the sad, stern, but still attractive genius supporting character.




The show is still thin on fleshing out certain supporting characters (Eddie, Iris, and Cisco top that list right now) but does excel at other things. It nails many of the emotional beats, even if those beats cover some of the same material as the previous episodes and is still reliant on the score to pull them off. The conversations between Henry Allen and Joe and Barry play very well. It competently addresses some obvious details like the prison for the meta-humans and Barry blurring his facial features so that his father doesn't recognize him as the Flash. It will most certainly get better once the writers show that they can introduce and handle a more serialized arc. Something that goes beyond the repeated assertions that Joe and Barry will get Henry out of prison to find the true killer of Barry's mother.