THE FLASH - Season 5.17

THE FLASH – Season 5, Ep. 17:  “Time Bomb”

Team Flash find out about a new metahuman – a suburban mom named Vickie Bolen – and she is in danger.  They are racing to save her before she falls to the new Cicada.  She’s been hiding her abilities from her family.  Barry, however, urges her to share her secret with her family.

We start in 2049, Nora races to Eobard, freaked out about the new Cicada disrupting the timeline.  She wonders why things haven’t changed.  She asks Eobard for help, and he’s not sure who or what is going on.  She is frantic about what to do, and begs him to find a way to help.  The only thing he suggests is that Nora tell her father the truth.

We head back to the present, where Orlen wakes up, still groggy, but healing.  Grace tells him it will take awhile, but he will heal.  He asks who she is, and she hands him the dolls that he gave her.  She tells him that she grew up and became the woman before him.  He says she’s from the future, like Flash’s daughter.  She says she came back to work with him, finish what he started.  She goes to leave, and he asks where she’s going, and she says she has something to take care of, and he sees her hesitate in pain, and sees her wound.  She says that when she gets back, they’re going to see about getting his powers back.

At the hospital, Joe and the team are interviewing one of the nurses about Ambres and her past.  The nurse says that once her family was killed, she became distant, except when watching over Grace.  Joe asks the nurse if she would know where Dwyer is, but she says no.  Cecile confirms it, and Joe asks her to keep in touch.  Barry notices Nora seems a bit off, but she says she’s got a lot on her mind.

At the lab, Sherloque is going over Nora’s journal entries, but doesn’t see who she’s working with.  Cisco calls him, and says the lab won’t clean itself.  He heads into the lab, and they’re getting a hit on an artifact stolen from the archives.  They split into teams to look for what’s missing.  Turns out, Cisco and Sherloque find Thawne’s time sphere in the forest, meanwhile, Caitlin and Ralph see it in the archives.  They deduce that someone took the sphere from the future, and travelled back to the past.  Sherloque also deduces that it appeared the same time this new Cicada showed up.

Speaking of Cicada, she arrives at the police station, looking for apparently a file or something, where she fends off a guard, and makes off with it.

Barry, Joe, Nora, and Cecile arrive at the station, and look over the scene.  Barry does a speed check of it, and finds out Cicada was looking for a cold case from 2017.  Joe decides to do some digging.  We then check out Jitters, where Cisco is on his date, when all of the sudden, Ralph shows up, kind of ruining the date.  He lets Cisco know Barry wants to see him.

Iris comes upon Sherloque working in his space, asking him what he’s working on, and has he found it.  He says he’s close.  She asks him if he’s been working on it the whole time, he says yes.  He then leaves, putting down what he was reading, which was the blueprints for the lab.  Iris sees it as he takes off.

Cisco, Barry, and Nora arrive at an ATM, where they say the cold case came up empty.  The camera was destroyed and they had no evidence. They want Cisco to vibe, but he says he can’t.  But he sees burn marks, and is able to vibe that.  He sees a woman using powers to steal from the ATM…then two people arrive to use it, and the ATM explodes, killing them.  There’s a little girl in the car who witnesses the whole thing.  It turns out that the people who died were Grace Gibbons’ parents, and she witnessed it.  They all discover that SHE is the new Cicada, coming back from the past to kill whomever killed her parents.

At her secret hideout, Grace talks to her Uncle Orlen about how she found the file on her parents’ death, and that the CCPD did nothing to help her.  They felt that it was a job for The Flash, according to her.  She says that she came back to finish his plan.  He wonders what plan.  She says the plan eliminate all metahumans. 

Joe, Barry, and Nora head to a party, where they meet a woman named Vickie Bolen, who they ask about the ATM machine back in 2017.  She says she touched it, and it started sparking, so she ran off.  People thought she may have robbed it, and she didn’t.  She was glad no one got hurt.  The trio pause, and Joe finally says that someone is going to try and kill her, and Joe offers protective custody.  She refuses, and asks them to leave.

We hook up with Ralph and Cisco again, and Ralph believes that he’s helping Cisco again, by hooking up his girlfriend with Iris’ newspaper for a photography gig.  Cisco isn’t thrilled, but his gal wants to celebrate, so they take off. 

We see Sherloque deep in the archives looking for something from Eobard Thawne.  He ends up finding the wheelchair that Eobard had used as Harrison Wells.  He also discovers the power source Thawne used to increase his speed.

Joe, Barry, and Nora talk about Vickie, but can’t figure out what to do.  Joe takes a call from Cecile, and Barry and Nora debate about Vickie telling her family about her powers.  Barry says keeping a secret like that, and not giving the family a choice isn’t right.  Just then, Nora gets a vision.  She can see Cicada coming.  Her and Barry quick change, and get the kids out of the area.  Cicada shows up, and she takes on Flash and XS, but disables them.  Vickie then uses her powers to take out Cicada, but in the process, her daughter gets hurt.  Flash and XS gets the family out of there.

At the hospital, they look in on Grace, and they can’t imagine how she can become evil.  Cecile can sense her anger…the anger she got from Orlen.  They hear arguing in the other room, and Vickie’s husband wants her to go away, and all she tried to do was save her family.  Her daughter just wants her dad right now, and Joe breaks up the argument.  Vickie walks off in frustration.  Barry and Nora talk, and Nora feels that all this just made matters worse.

Cisco is working in the lab when Ralph comes across him and they talk.  Ralph thought he was the problem, but it turns out, Cisco feels that HE is the problem…his double life.  He was hoping to never expose Camille to his superhero world, but Ralph reminds him that he can’t keep it from her forever…and if he tries, it will tear him to pieces.  He leaves Cisco to think.

Grace returns to Orlen, and says she failed to get her.  Orlen went over the file, and said that nothing made sense.  It just seemed like an accident.  Grace doesn’t believe it, and feels that her uncle has gone soft.  She plans on finishing the job, and he feels she needs to let go, but she pushes him away, and she heads off to find Vickie and kill her.

Sherloque heads into the secret space and talks to Gideon, putting the cube into her, and seeing a video file of Thawne…who had cracked a code on how to make time malleable. 

At the hospital, Vickie has been talking to her daughter, telling her the truth.  Barry says they’re a good family.  Just then, Cecile sensed Grace’s hate, and Nora sensed her yet again.  Joe gets Vickie’s daughter out of the way, and Flash tells XS to run, and take Vickie with her.  She takes off, as Flash goes to confront Grace.  He tries to appeal to her, but she ends up fighting him.  Cisco and Ralph arrive a distance away to help XS as she’s being chased by Cicada’s knife.  Cisco manages to breach her and Vickie to the lab, keeping them safe.  Just as Ralph and Cisco go to head through the breach, Cicada stops them from coming through…a new wrinkle in her power.  She incapacitates him, and just as she’s about to hit the death blow, Dwyer shows up.  He tries to appeal to her, and asks her to let her anger go.  He says it’s too late for him, but not for her.  She says it is too late…for him.  She ends up killing him with his own knife.  As he dies in Flash’s arms, Dwyer asks him to save Grace.

Later at the lab, they talk about Vickie and her family in protective custody. Caitlin tells the team that because Grace’s dark matter is in her head, it makes her more powerful than Dwyer was.  And because her and Nora are from the same time, they’re psychically connected.  As they’re all about to leave, Nora stays behind, hesitant.  They ask her what’s wrong, and it’s then that Sherloque reveals to the team Nora’s secret---that she’s been working with Eobard Thawne this whole time, as part of his plan to alter the timeline.  Barry and Iris asks her if it’s true, and she apologizes for not telling them sooner, that she wanted to, but before she can say anything else, Barry grabs her and locks her in the pipeline.  She apologizes to her dad, and says she’s sorry, but Barry, says so is he.  And walks off.  We see her crying in her cell as the show ends.

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First of all…I KNOW this is LATE…but---I had internet issues, and couldn’t post until this afternoon.  My apologies, guys!  I’ll TRY to make sure it doesn’t happen again!

This was an emotionally charged episode…but a good one, as things begin to fall more into place, and the big secret is now out in the open.

Grace’s Cicada powers are definitely more powerful and more versatile than Dwyer’s.  To be able to not only fend off and take the powers of metahumans, she was able to also block Cisco from being able to breach.  I wonder how she managed to learn those things.  We also see the motivation for her return….to kill the person who caused the death of her parents (which was accidental), but to help her uncle finish what he started.  She has carried his anger with her and made it her own her whole life.  And while it was nice to see Dwyer finally come around, and see the consequences of his actions as Cicada, but to see how his anger corrupted his niece, seeing that destructive emotion at a glance, he finally got it.  But at a price….his own life.  This I kind of saw coming earlier in the episode after he tried to appeal to her humanity before, and she blasted him.  Grace is now more dangerous than ever, and it will be tough to be able to stop her.

Good to see Ralph back, helping the team out.  Again, he was the comic relief, but he’s also shown a lot of wise support as of late.  Helping Cisco out…or at least TRYING to…and seemingly making matters worse for Cisco…especially in regards to Cisco’s relationship with Camille.  However, what we see is him trying to help his friend realize that he can’t keep his two worlds apart from Camille forever….otherwise it will eat him up inside, and mostly, cause his relationship with Camille to fall apart.  Honestly, to see Cisco struggle with this, he should be asking the ONE person who dealt with this first hand:  Barry.  He saw the consequences when Iris finally found out Barry was The Flash.  It was NOT an easy road for them.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to see Cisco overcome his own personal demons, and go from there.

Sherloque is one crafty detective.  He lives up to his name well.  To put the pieces together, and discover Nora’s secret, it shows that he’s no bumbling fool.  He’s definitely proven his worth to the team time and again, and breaking THIS news was HUGE.  You gotta hand it to the guy that, no matter the distractions Nora tried throwing in his path, he stayed the course.  It WAS kind of a bummer, though that HE was the one that spilled the beans to Team Flash instead of Nora.  Finally, that cat is out of the bag….and now she is going to suffer the consequences of her actions.  Her working with her father’s greatest enemy is a punch in the gut to Barry AND Iris.  Both lost so much because of Eobard, and for their own flesh and blood to be working with him in the future, it smacks of ultimate betrayal.  And no matter what she’s going to say, or how she tries to explain it away, the trust between parents and child has been severely eroded.  Her willingness to hide the truth from her parents finally caught up to her.  And now, she gets time in the pipeline for her troubles.  One of the things that, sadly, has been a fallback plot device on a lot of these shows…The Flash especially…is the “betrayal by friend or loved one” narrative.  It worked the first season brilliantly.  But the more they did it…with Zoom in season two, and now Nora this season…it’s going to the wishing well one too many times.  I get this is a tad different because this is Barry and Iris’ daughter.  However, the premise is still the same, and it’s something this show needs to break the cycle of. 

As for Eobard…we saw in the journal clip shown by Gideon, that he KNEW how to manipulate time…thus making it malleable.  It makes you wonder just how much he’s strung Nora along in the future.  And, having gotten what HE wanted, he probably managed to manipulate Nora enough that when she DID confess to working with him, he KNEW that they would never believe her again, and would shatter the family apart.  One more chance to poke fun at the Flash.  I also would NOT be surprised if he had left enough clues for Grace to find the time sphere and use it to travel back in time to disrupt things, and take her revenge.  Motivate another villain to do his dirty work---sounds like Thawne.  It will be very fascinating to see if this is how the story unfolds in the weeks to come.

We’ve reached the end of this lap of the season, and we have a bit more to go, but the pace is picking up.  Thanks for checking out the blog, and hope you guys subscribe and pass it on down the line.  Drop a comment too, I’d love to hear from ya!

Until next week…keep on running!