In ‘The Flash’ recap, Barry chases down a monster terrorizing Central City, Caitlin goes to her mother for help and Cisco doesn’t trust the new Wells…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
The monster of the week — no pun intended to the title of this episode — on ‘The Flash’ really took a backseat as the team members on Team Flash all dealt with a lot of issues outside of the strange electricity zapping creature that was terrorizing Central City.
Barry faced the reality that the tension with his co-worker Julian Albert largely remains a mystery because he was created as part of the changes due to Flashpoint. Barry has been agitated with Julian all season long, but now he wants to repair their previously frayed relationship or at least understand whey they don’t seem to like each other very much at all.
Meanwhile, Caitlin has been dealing with a rather massive problem of her own as powers have started to manifest ever since Barry changed this timeline and now she’s exhibiting abilities like her Earth-2 counterpart Killer Frost. Caitlin is struggling to understand the powers and she’s clearly not ready to share this information with her friends and co-workers, which leaves her with only one other option for help — she turns to her estranged mother for assistance.
And finally, Cisco tries to adjust to the new Harrison Wells from Earth-19 — H.R. Wells as he’s known in his world — except there’s something off with this doppelganger from another part of the multi-verse. Considering how things ended with the first Harrison Wells this gang ever knew, it’s easy to understand why Cisco is untrusting but is H.R. earning his disfavor or is it all in his head?
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘The Flash’ titled ‘Monster’…
Cold Shoulder
Following her icy shower to close out last week’s episode, Caitlin takes a leave of absence from Team Flash to go visit her mother Dr. Tannhauser —a noted scientist and innovator in her own right — to ask for help to better understand these powers she’s been developing. While Caitlin can produce sub-zero temperatures from her fingertips, it’s clear the real iciness in the room is from the relationship she barely shares with her mother.
Dr. Tannhauser runs all the necessary tests but doesn’t seem to find much of anything to help her daughter and Caitlin starts to believe that this visit was a bad idea.
It’s clear that Caitlin hoped her mother would sympathize and offer her some comfort over these new found and rather frightening abilities that have just developed, but instead it’s a clinical diagnosis and nothing more. Finally, Caitlin is ready to give up and go home when her mother’s lead assistant traps her in a room and declares that he’s going to figure this out whether she wants him to or not because he’s tired of living in Dr. Tannhauser’s shadow.
The threat is enough to send Caitlin into cold-mode and she nearly freezes the guy’s arm off until her mother enters the room and tells her to let go.
Caitlin’s mother finally understands just how frightened her daughter is with these newfound powers and she agrees to help as much as she can while also giving her the emotional support she really needed. Caitlin goes home with a better relationship with her mother, but not a much better understanding about her powers.
That’s until Dr. Tannhauser calls Caitlin and leaves a message that chills her to the core — according to her mother, her powers are evolving at a rapid rate and the more she uses them, the harder it will be to reverse the effects.
Monster Side
The big bad of the week is a gigantic monster that appears out of nowhere in Central City and begins terrorizing the streets while electric transformers explode all around and people run in fear as the creature stomps from block to block before just disappearing into thin air.
Barry and the gang are completely baffled by this occurrence and they aren’t getting many answers from the investigation. Sadly, H.R. — the new Harrison Wells from Earth-19 — is better at fetching coffee than actually offering up any scientific solutions.
That leaves Barry to do some investigating at work while trying to co-exist with Julian, who just reported him to the captain for nine different instances of insubordination. Thankfully, the captain brushes off the complaints and tells them to get back to work, which only further irritates Julian. Barry is obviously irritated that Julian ratted him out, but he’s also curious why they’ve had such a tumultuous relationship ever since he arrived in town a year ago (although Barry only remembers him for the past two weeks after he reset things with Flashpoint).
Finally, Barry makes an effort to reach out to Julian by sucking up to him a bit and asking for help from his forensic expertise. Barry wants to shadow Julian for a day and in exchange he will move his gear down into the basement into a storage room so he no longer has to share the lab with him. Julian agrees and he takes Barry out to look at the transformers that exploded when the creature first arrived in town.
Barry does his best to probe into Julian’s mind and figure out why he’s so volatile. He discovers that Julian doesn’t seem to like the Flash very much nor does he have much love for any of the metahumans in town. Their conversation is cut short when the creature reappears, but with Julian standing next to him, Barry is unable to race off and transform into the Flash. Thankfully, Barry did stick around to help save Julian after he was nearly cut down from some falling debris after another electrical explosion.
Back at STAR Labs, Cisco starts to figure out a way to track the monster because it only seems to travel within a certain radius inside the city. They are starting to believe that the creature is being controlled by somebody but who? When the monster pops back up again, Barry gives chase and H.R. suggests using the old “Empire Strikes Back” trick by tying a giant rope around the creature’s legs and watching it topple over like an AT-AT.
There’s only one problem — when Barry swirls around the creature, not only does it avoid falling over but it just steps through the ropes. That’s when he realizes that the monster isn’t real — it’s just a hologram.
That forces Barry to stop the snipers set up by the police who are now shooting at the creature and potentially harming the bystanders on the street. Meanwhile, Cisco triangulates where the majority of the electricity has been flowing during the power surges caused by the creature and that must be where the puppet master is hiding.
Sadly, Barry realizes that if Cisco figured it out, chances are so did Julian.
Barry races upstairs and finds Julian at a standoff with the bad guy with a gun drawn. Julian ultimately fires a bullet when the culprit tries to run, but Barry intervenes and that’s when they discover that the person behind the monster was just a kid. Apparently the 15-year old inventor just wanted to feel powerful after being picked on and bullied in school his entire life.
Back at the station, Julian feels awful that he almost shot a kid and that’s when he finally opens up to Barry. There was some part of him that felt anger towards the metahumans because so many of them got powers and then used them to harm people, yet Julian feels like he would have been a force for good. Julian also explains how he came from a very wealthy and powerful family in England (Malfoy perhaps?) but he never wanted to follow in the same business as his father. So Julian came to the U.S. to become a scientist but just when it seemed like he was making some serious breakthroughs, the particle accelerator exploded and people started getting all these new and strange abilities.
It forced Julian to re-align his studies and now he’s just a forensic investigator for the Central City P.D. Barry sympathizes with Julian’s plight and even offers to have a drink with him after a long, hard day at work.
Not the Real Wells
Ever since the new Wells arrived from Earth-19, Cisco has been suspicious about him. While H.R. seemed friendly enough doing his best to get to know Team Flash and even bringing them all coffee in the morning, there was just something off about him.
Finally with a nudge from Barry, Cisco decides he’s going to vibe on the new Wells to find out exactly what he’s hiding. H.R. actually discovers Cisco going through his bag and that’s when he reveals that he’s not only a scientist but also a novelist and that was part of his reason for accepting the gig. H.R. wants to write a book about his adventures on Earth-One.
But that’s only part of the story.
When H.R. offers up ideas about how to stop the monster terrorizing the city but doesn’t come up with any actual science to back them up, Cisco becomes even more suspicious. That’s then the full truth is revealed — this Wells isn’t actually a scientist at all but instead only a writer. His partner in STAR Labs back on Earth-19 was the real scientist and he’s the one who cracked the code sent over by Harry Wells a week ago.
The team is ready to boot him back to his own Earth but H.R. offers up a solution — allow him to stay for a few weeks as the “idea man” to help them come up with answers to the metahuman problems, even if he’s not the one who ultimately finishes with the science, and see if he can be a valuable piece to the puzzle. If not, he’ll go home peacefully.
Barry and the gang agree and now they’ve got a new Wells on the team — for now.
‘The Flash’ returns with a new episode in two weeks following the Election next Tuesday night.
