by Chelsea Dee, Editor-at-Large

While The Flash 1×12 didn’t have as much excitement as last week, and the villain wasn’t nearly as interesting as the Piper, there was plenty to love about it. It continued the major storyline well and threw in some great character development. Previously on The Flash, Barry met the Pied Piper/Hartley Rathaway who was Wells’ former protege. He tried to kill Barry and they stopped him, but he told Cisco he knew what happened to Ronnie. That’s really the only fact that seems important here. The Cisco storyline can be addressed first. He decides to let Hartley out in exchange for telling him about Ronnie. It is revealed that Ronnie fused with Dr. Martin Stein during the accelerator incident, and so that might mean Ronnie himself is dead and/or Stein is just in his body. We’ll get more details about that next episode. Firestorm is a confusing storyline, so they’re going to struggle with it in the TV show, because even in comics it’s a little out there. Of course, this is a comic with a genius giant gorilla bad guy, and oh yes, we’ll get to that shortly. The important part is that Hartley manages to escape from Cisco shortly after revealing the truth about Ronnie. He doesn’t kill Cisco when he easily had the chance. Why? Uhhh because the show says so! He seemed perfectly happy to kill Barry and other people last week, just saying.

The villain of this week is Shauna Baez aka Peek-A-Boo. Yeah. It’s a silly codename. At least in context of the show it makes sense for Caitlin to make it up, since she doesn’t usually do the nicknames. She has a pretty great power, which is to be able to teleport herself and anyone else to any place she can see. It might’ve seemed like not much of a threat at first, but she quickly proved herself legitimately dangerous (and frustrating!) to Barry. She can teleport around fast and distract him, and he has trouble catching up with her fast enough to do anything about it. She really just wants to get her boyfriend out of prison and to escape town, but he convinces her to help pay off his mob boss so he won’t have anyone looking for him. Instead the mob boss is like oh hey meta human, I can use you. They are nearly all caught by the police, thanks to Barry’s father getting information in prison, and then he’s stabbed for it. Barry’s naturally freaked out about it, but his father is firm in wanting to do the right thing, and besides that, he knows Barry is the Flash. They were talking a little too openly about that in front of the doctor. I mean the doctor was in the back, so he probably didn’t hear, but still. Keep it on the DL, boys. Eventually she is stopped by all the lights around her being taken out. She can’t see where to teleport. Her boyfriend abandons her. It kind of sucks she ends up in Star Labs’ prison, unable to see anything but the walls around her, because of that. It’s not like she was a really bad person or tried to destroy the city. Hm.

Also a cool side note, her boyfriend actually shot Barry, and he only barely caught the bullet before it hit the back of his neck. That was a really cool moment.

Meanwhile Barry decides he needs to find a way to move on from Iris, and Caitlin wants to find herself a life outside of work. They decide to go out drinking. She gets wasted, and they sing karaoke. Unfortunately Grant Gustin is only allowed to sing a few lines. He’s a very talented singer, and I hope that karaoke spot shows up again with a full song for him. While there he meets Linda Park, and that immediately made me go OH REALLY. Linda Park is famously the love interest of Wally West, the second Flash. Barry’s personality on this show is much more similar to Wally than the actual comic Barry, so I found that interesting. Linda will be around for a few episodes at least, I think, so hello to her. She works at the paper with Iris, although Iris wasn’t aware of it, and she feels a little jealous of Barry’s new date. Uh oh. Note: it isn’t that unusual for friends to get jealous of a new boyfriend/girlfriend. But obviously this is going to be ~true love~ instead or something. Sigh. Barry takes care of Caitlin while she’s drunk, and I think there’s some implication of possible romance with those two. I have a tendency to wish that there were more male-female friendships without sex involved on the screen, so I’m a little iffy on it. They do have decent chemistry though.

And the most important part: We see Gorilla Grodd at the end. If you were on social networking and saw your comic fans freaking out at it, it’s because Grodd is a very famous bad guy in the DC universe. I’m surprised they really plan to do him, just because I imagine the CGI is going to be really expensive and hard for him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see him, I just wonder how strong their budget will be for him. He’s a telepathic super smart gorilla who can control the minds of others. We haven’t seen him do that yet. He’s been teased in the show so far, and he was kept as a pet by Wells, so that’s probably how he got his abilities/intelligence in this. It’ll be exciting to see where they go with him and what they can pull off. It was a decent episode all around, although not particularly memorable. Seeing Caitlin sing and be hung over was fun, it’s nice to see her let loose, but I’m not looking forward to more of a love triangle with Barry-Iris-Linda-Eddie … and maybe Caitlin too? I hate love triangles. It looks like next week we’ll be getting Firestorm answers.

Rating:
ComicsOnline gives The Flash Season 1 Episode 12 4 out of 5 Drunk Caitlins.

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