The latest episode of The Flash opens in earnest: a couple is trapped in their overturned car underneath a festooning of sparking power lines, and Barry races to the scene. He pulls the male from the wreck, and returns for the woman, only to seemingly be consumed by the ensuing fuel explosion. However, Barry is faster than the flame, and he gets the woman out unscathed.
Back at S.T.A.R. Labs, Caitlin and Cisco talk about Cisco’s continued research into F.I.R.E.S.T.O.R.M., which Caitlin asks Cisco to stop because she has to move on from Ronnie, who is clearly not the man she knew. Cisco reminds her that, in order to move on, she “actually [has] to move on,” implying that Caitlin is stuck in a rut.
We’re then introduced to this episode’s “freak of the week,” a woman named Shauna Baez, who teleports around Iron Heights in a cloud of black smoke before finally coming to a stop in the cell of one Clay Parker, her boyfriend, whom she teleports out of the cell.
Barry arrives on the scene in civilian clothes, and finds an organic particulate scattered around Clay’s cell, which he collects for analysis. He is then surprised by a face-to-face visit from his father, who is being moved around the prison in the wake of the breakout. Barry is moved by the moment, which Joe confesses he arranged with a guard that “owed [him] a favor.”
We then see Shauna and Clay plotting to leave town, but before they do, Clay has to repay some debt to a mobster named Stockheimer. Shauna begs Clay to leave, but he holds firm on his position, explaining that he can use Shauna’s powers to get the money.
The S.T.A.R. Labs team analyzes the particles, and find out that they’re in a constant state of flux, and they hold the DNA of two people: Shauna Baez and Clay Parker. They determine that Shauna’s cells are the ones that are in flux, but that Clay’s cells were energized in a similar capacity through contact.
Cisco goes down to the metahuman prison in the decommissioned particle accelerator in order to grill Hartley Rathaway for more info on Ronnie and F.I.R.E.S.T.O.R.M. Rathaway reveals that the oft-mentioned Dr. Martin Stein was at S.T.A.R. Labs the night of the accident, and taunts Cisco with a riddle. “The mystery isn’t why Stein was at S.T.A.R. Labs…it’s why he didn’t leave.”
Barry meets Iris at Jitters, and Barry talks about how nice it was to see his father without a pane of glass between them. Iris bemoans her job at CCPN, thinking that she doesn’t want to be treated as the Flash’s PR person. Again, this is a person who got their paying job based off of her work on a free blog. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a first-world problem.
Cisco lets Rathaway out of his cell, but handcuffs him in order to make sure he doesn’t try to make his escape.
Barry and Joe go to Henry to use him as an “inside man,” to try and get info on Stockheimer in order to find Shauna and Clay. Henry is all too eager to help, and begins to try and get the information from the other inmates.
Back at S.T.A.R. Labs, Cisco brings Rathaway outside, where they find a mysterious silhouette etched on the wall. Rathaway refers to it as a “bomb shadow” in Japanese, to which Cisco responds “How can you speak six languages and sound like a dick in every one of them?” Rathaway explains that the shadow is what remains of Dr. Stein before trying to escape Cisco. The two scuffle and Cisco disables Rathaway with a remote control. He explains that he modded Rathaway’s cochlear implants, and that Rathaway “isn’t the only one who understands vibrations,” a sly wink at Cisco’s DC Comics alter-ego of Vibe. They then move on for the rest of the evidence of what happened to Dr. Stein and Ronnie.
The Flash intercepts Shauna and Clay at an armored car heist, and Shauna gives Barry a run for his money with her teleportation. It seems that Barry finally has the upper hand, but he literally dodges a bullet fired by Clay that begins to bore its way into the back of his neck. In the ensuing chaos of Barry trying to outmaneuver the round, Shauna and Clay escape.
Back at S.T.A.R. Labs, Caitlin is helping Barry patch up after his near-miss with Clay’s gun (“Guess I’m a lot faster than a speeding bullet,” he quips), when the discussion turns to Shauna and her abilities. Her metahuman abilities are based on “quantum entanglement,” which means that she can move between locations based on line-of-sight. Caitlin dubs her Peekaboo in Cisco’s absence. Barry goes to try and help Iris with her assignment at CCPN, but gets blown off by her when she goes out to dinner with Eddie. Undeterred, he decides to canvass the dive bars that Shauna and Clay used to frequent, hoping to find them, an assignment that Caitlin volunteers to join him on.
Cisco and Rathaway find the security camera footage of the night of the accelerator accident, and Cisco finds out that Dr. Stein was vaporized as he held a mysterious box, and a ghostly image that looked like Ronnie was seen entering Stein’s body. Rathaway pulls out his cochlear implant, activating a tone that disables Cisco, and escapes.
At the dive bar, Barry and a very drunk Caitlin do a duet on “Summer Lovin’” on the karaoke machine (a throwback to star Grant Gustin’s days on Glee). As Caitlin goes to the bathroom, Barry gets flirted with by a woman who trades contact info with him. Caitlin comes out of the bathroom, confessing that she doesn’t feel well. Barry none-too-wisely runs with Caitlin, which leads to her vomiting on the ground. Barry brings her back to her apartment and helps her change out of her clothes. When asked if he snuck a peek, he says no, explaining he “wouldn’t be much of a hero” if he did.
Clay turns in his money to Stockheimer, but Stockheimer is reluctant to let him go. Shauna tries to teleport away, which Stockheimer recognizes as a useful talent. Joe and the CCPD raid the warehouse, but in the ensuing firefight Shauna and Clay escape.
A very hungover Caitlin and Barry reunite at S.T.A.R. Labs, where Wells makes Cisco confess that he let Rathaway escape because of his alleged knowledge of Ronnie and F.I.R.E.S.T.O.R.M. Caitlin asks him why he was still pushing the Ronnie issue after she told him to stop, and Cisco confesses that he sealed Ronnie in the accelerator the night of the accident. Caitlin forgives Cisco, explaining that Ronnie would have told him he did the right thing. The team then finds out that Shauna can’t teleport in the dark, a revelation that’s quickly overshadowed by a phone call. Barry’s father was stabbed in Iron Heights for sticking his nose into Stockheimer’s operation.
Barry rushes to the prison, where his father explains that he was more than happy to help, as he wanted to feel useful and to help Barry in any way that he could. Henry found out about a big heist that Stockheimer was commandeering, and that one of his top men, Julius, had more information.
Barry, as Flash, drags Julius outside of the cell, explaining that any escape attempt would add years into his sentence. Julius spills his guts, and Barry runs off, leaving him outside. So Barry is now committing acts that will wrongfully extend someone’s prison sentence. What a hero!
The Flash intercepts Shauna and Clay again, and chases their car into a tunnel. Shauna once again proves that her teleportation is faster than Barry’s super-speed. She and Clay try to escape yet again, but Barry knocks out all of the lights in the tunnel, leaving Shauna unable to use her powers. She is then imprisoned at S.T.A.R. Labs in a cell where the door is a one-way mirror, ensuring that she doesn’t have the line-of-sight she needs to teleport away.
Barry gives a portfolio of information to Iris in order to help her with her story, and she surreptitiously shoots a photo of him as he runs away. Barry visits his father in the prison infirmary, where Henry notes that the Flash has been helping out people around Barry an awful lot. Barry says that if he was the Flash (wink, wink), his father would be the first to know. Henry then explains that if he was the Flash’s father, he would tell him that he was a hero and that he was proud of him. I then wonder why there’s so much dust and onions in my living room.
The show ends in a sewer, where two workers stumble across the word “GRODD” scrawled on the walls. We’re given a shadowy reveal as Gorilla Grodd quickly dispatches the two men in horror-movie-esque fashion.
While mostly filler, the episode once again spent a good amount of time and resources ensuring that the mystery of Firestorm is dosed out in an intriguing fashion. While comic fans already know what happened to Ronnie Raymond and Martin Stein, the show’s slow trickle of info is thoroughly intriguing.
Peekaboo/Shauna is a kind of lame-duck villain, but her existence serves its purpose: to show us a side of Barry we’re not normally privy to. The moments he shares with Caitlin are sweet and humanizing, and the idea of a woman picking him up is alien to him, but exciting. Sadly, this development of Barry comes at the cost of building Shauna in any intriguing fashion. After the threat of Hartley Rathaway being established, her throwaway character is a little disappointing.
All of this can be practically forgiven at the revelation of Gorilla Grodd. There were hints at him in past episodes, but finally seeing the evil ape loping through the shadows is pretty much weaponized geek-out fuel. I’m excited to see where they’re going to take what’s arguably one of Flash’s greatest villains while still keeping it slightly grounded.