The Flash 4.03: Luck Be a Lady
Sam Chalsen and Judalina Neira
Armen Kevorkian
"Luck Be a Lady" is a bipolar kind of
episode in my mind. On the positive side, the show has, for one week at least,
waded into an area where Barry and Team Flash don't have to deal with the
near-destruction of the world. The villain is definitely on the lighter side,
and the show nicely weaves in her connection to the Thinker, clarifying a bit
what the bigger plan for the season is without giving away the whole game. On
the negative side, the whole episode doesn't assure me that the show has
entirely gone away from indulging the habits that made it lose its way the past
two seasons. There are still way too many characters stuffed into the show, and
all of them have to be serviced within one episode, which then results in it
often feeling directionless.
At least visually, this week's villain(ess)
allows for The Flash to show off its
more impressive CGI sequences of the early season. It doesn't have the epic
feel of the Flash's battle with the Samauroid in the season premiere, but it's
still impressive nonetheless. It starts off small, as unlucky Becky Sharpe
turns it completely around so that the people around her experience what she
has been through her entire life. She catches her boyfriend cheating, gets
fired from her blackjack dealing job, and gets her car booted. Something
happens on the bus she takes home that changes all that. She begins to
experience a wave of good luck, as a series of unfortunate events befalls those
in her vicinity.
Team Flash is technically a science-oriented
group, although Sharpe's "abilities" do test that assumption somewhat.
Most of them see it as a good luck/bad luck dichotomy, mostly with Cisco
determining that Sharpe brings bad "juju" and Barry providing the
counterpoint that there has to be some logical explanation for the series of
events around her. It takes the return of Harry from Earth-2 to fully commit to
the scientific explanation for what Sharpe is going through. Harry makes a
surprise appearance here in order to deliver a "breakup cube" from
Jessie to Wally. A breakup cube is just how it sounds, a cube that plays a
holographic message along with some music in order to break off a relationship,
Earth-2's equivalent to breaking up via text message on this Earth. Turns out,
being a messenger isn't Harry's only purpose here. Apparently, he's been
banished from Jessie's equivalent of a Team Flash (personally, I like the name
"Jessie and the Quicksters," even if it sounds like a bad cover
band), and doesn't really have a place to call home.
So, in a majorly contrived manner, the show
brings Tom Cavanagh back into the fold, and while it takes a little bit of time
to get into their old rhythms, his sour demeanor and constant bickering with
Cisco are welcome highlights of the episode. I do feel that this version of
Wells won't be here for too long, and that we'll see a different Cavanagh
interpretation of Wells some time later this season, but for now, this fits.
Harry is all about the concept of "quantum entanglement," and that
ends up being the explanation for what's happening to Becky Sharpe. She was
exposed to dark matter, and that exposure means that she is unintentionally
emitting an energy field that slowly gains intensity as the episode progresses.
She gets all good luck, and the more good luck she gets, the stronger and wider
the inverse bad luck field gets. It gets to the point where all manner of chaos
breaks loose. The Wests' house starts to break apart beyond a simple
malfunction of the pipes. The particle accelerator at STAR Labs spontaneously
activates, and threatens to discharge once again.
This episode plies in simple solutions for its
problems. Sharpe doesn't really feel like a villain in the traditional sense.
In fact, it feels like Barry and much of Team Flash take pity on her. Even when
she tries her luck at winning the $10 million jackpot at her casino, there was
a part of me that rooted for her. So Barry doesn't take the traditional route
in taking her down as he would with other villains he's faced. It's actually
quite amusing to see the normally infallible Barry slip on a bunch of marbles
or somehow handcuffing himself by accident. Ultimately, she does feel
forgettable, or rather inessential..
The episode zags where it would normally zig. Normally, most everything in a season would be entirely Barry's fault. Here, as we learn about Sharpe and Kilgore's connection with the Thinker and dark matter, it's not really Barry's fault so much as it is Team Flash's for removing Barry from the Speed Force. They're going to have to deal with that whopper at some point. And with Harry's arrival from Earth-2, there are too many characters on the show so they conveniently excise one by having an almost completely absent Wally cement his breakup with Jessie, then have him go off on his own journey (which may yet explain why he shows up at random on Legends of Tomorrow). His exit also takes care of the fact that the show has been doubling up on speedsters, and Wally has become redundant with Barry taking point on the team. But there's a clear structure to the season now, with Team Flash trying to identify the twelve "dark matter metas" from the bus before (or as) the Thinker finds them and activates their powers. It's now a question of where the show goes from this point on.
- The “breakup cube” is incredibly cruel, but somehow hilarious in the same moment
- Becky was wonderfully “adorkable” and managed to sell her character’s motivations well
- Cecile being pregnant is not exactly a showstopper of an episode ending, is it?
- This series is over-populated, which continues to water down the storytelling