A quick review of last night's “The Flash” coming up just as soon as I bring my orange soda…
By bringing back so many supervillains, on top of having Arrow(*) and Firestorm show up to help Barry fight Reverse-Flash, “Rogue Air” arguably tried to squeeze too much into a single hour. The climactic fight in particular felt like it should have been significantly longer, though that assumes that the show's budget and the schedule of the VFX team would allow for that. (And I'm assuming we'll have a more elaborate Barry/Thawne fight once Barry travels back in time to save his mom.)
(*) One of the perils of having two shows with intertwined continuity is that if a viewer falls behind on one, he can get spoiled or confused when it crosses over with the other. In this case, I'm a week behind on “Arrow,” so last I saw Oliver, he still seemed to be brainwashed by the League of Assassins. I imagine his behavior here will make more sense once I catch up – and that it didn't matter at all to people who only watch “The Flash” – but it still took me out of the scene a little.
But I really liked how this episode, like the previous one (which aired during my vacation), went head-on at a problem the show has had for a while. It was dumb of everyone to keep Iris out of the loop, and she was right to call them out on it last week, and it's sketchy as hell for them to have turned STAR Labs into a black site to keep the supervillains locked up in perpetuity with no trial or anything else. In the comics, there are prisons built for superhumans, but they exist within the established framework of the criminal justice system; this show takes place so early in the rise of super-powered people(**) that this isn't realistic. Barry and company have been trying to make the best of a bad situation, but I appreciated that he was so concerned about saving the lives of Weather Wizard and company, and that Joe finally raised a strong objection to the whole arrangement. Barry's a good person, and has been under the sway of a really bad one in Eobard Thawne, and if he looked like a sap because Captain Cold hustled him, his intentions were good enough to make that stuff work.
(**) Note the wink to Green Lantern with the line about how Ferris Air shut down because “one of their test pilots disappeared.”
What did everybody else think?