The Flash S:02 E:16

Episode Title: Trajectory
Original Airdate: 3-22-16

Barry and co are back from their mini hiatus and are met with yet another speedster and this time it’s a lady. Meanwhile Iris has to deal with her own mini J. Jonah Jameson who also just happens to have a little crush on her, which is probably why she hasn’t been fired yet. And the show ends on one of the most anti-climactic reveals in the show’s history considering that it’s essentially just the characters finding out something that the audience already knew.

I’ll start out with saying that I do like how this time around the characters more or less figured things out for themselves at least a bit faster than they did with Harrison Wells last year. It also helps with at least one plot point that helps to reveal a little something else with Zoom. Here’s my current theory based on what we learned in this episode. And to clarify things, I will refer to the characters as we have known them, Garrick is the one who spent time in Earth 1 posing as Earth 2’s Flash and Zoom is the one who is still alive on Earth 2. So we know that Jay Garrick lost his speed due to an overuse of Velocity 6. We also know that using too much Velocity 9 (and likely 6) causes a speedster’s lightning to turn blue. So Jay Garrick could be Zoom from the future after the Velocity 6 had damaged his body enough so that he lost his speed, which is why Zoom killed him. He was bound for the grave anyway and the reason why he has been looking for a way to cure his condition before it gets that bad.

Back to the episode, it seemed like a bit of an odd choice to have Barry and Iris reminisce about their alternate reality marriages, both future and Earth 2 in the same episode that introduces Iris to a new love interest in her boss. It also annoys me when characters in workplaces end up dating their bosses, it’s such an HR nightmare that shouldn’t happen in this day and age. And while it’s not a bad idea to bring in a character that’s not evil and doesn’t like the Flash, it feels too much like it’s directly copycatting J. Jonah Jameson without the cartoonish rants. He is just so far on the side of getting dirt on the Flash that he’s not willing to listen to any opinion that differs from his, which is exactly what he claims he was doing in the first place. And then to add the workplace romance on top of it, it just wasn’t working for me.

Another thing that didn’t really work for me this episode was the split personality and drug addiction metaphor they used with Trajectory. It was such an odd personality quirk to add complete with the stylistic breakdown as she gave into her addiction when she is just a one episode villain who was introduced only on this episode. It also goes into the ability of the episode where he learns to make this giant speed leap that may or may not be used ever again and felt very forced. But even though there were plenty of nits to pick in this episode, the overall tone still felt like the Flash and was fun to watch.