The Flash (7×04) Central City Strong Review

For our review of the last episode of The Flash, click here.

Synopsis: The Flash must deal with Abra Kadabra’s sudden return to Central City; Allegra deals with a tricky situation; Caitlin suspects something is off with Frost; Iris is forced to look at a dark moment in her past. (IMDb)

The theme of this week’s episode of The Flash is “moving on, but failing to do so”. With everything that happened with Iris stuck in the Mirrorverse, Barry is filled with so much regret and shame and wants nothing more than to make it up to her. I guess not realizing your wife isn’t actually your wife can do a number on your mental health. To compensate for it, Barry whisks Iris away to every single romantic destination he could think of–Paris and Maui. It’s about time he uses that super speed for something good!

While trying to make things up to Iris, Barry is also trying to make amends to Central City after the havoc Mirror Monarch brought upon it. He feels like he let it down and now it’s time to live by the motto, “Central City Strong”. Cheesy as always, The Flash!

Meanwhile, Iris is adamant about feeling alright, but in reality, she’s struggling more than ever. Despite Barry’s efforts, she is struggling to hang on, and to make things worse, her article about the Mirrorverse didn’t read as great as she would have wanted. The issue at hand is the refusal to face the trauma she endured, and she attempts to do so when she attends a support group with other individuals that got trapped in the Mirrorverse. But it’s all too much for her and she rushes out of the group before saying much of anything.

It doesn’t help that in the middle of all of this Abra Kadabra returns to Central City with his killer deck of cards. He’s eventually caught and sent over to A.R.G.U.S. but the fact that it happened so easily makes all the more sense when we learn Abra Kadabra wanted A.R.G.U.S. to capture him because it would help him get his hands on the tech needed to create an anti-matter bomb.

As expected, Barry falls into the usual cycle of self-pity and regret over not doing what he should have. At this point, it would be nice if Barry was given an arc where he was badass and proud of what he could manage to do. Unfortunately, the writers seem to want to do anything but that so here we are.

Iris shows up to S.T.A.R. Labs to give him the usual pep talk, and in the process, she realizes she needs to take her own advice. It’s probably one of my more favorite scenes from the last few seasons because we often see these two rescuing each other, but we don’t always see them getting to the core of their issues. This was nice to see that here.

After this talk with iris, Barry realizes that Abra Kadabra wants to take down Central City because he lost someone close to him and he thinks the Flash is to blame for it. Cisco learns that Kadabra has a machine called a Martian Memory Restorer which apparently restores Pre-Crisis memories. Back in season 3, Kadabra took Barry’s advice to heart and started a family of his own. Unfortunately, he lost them during Crisis and he thinks Barry is to blame because he didn’t disappear as well. And now,m he’s left with all this residual trauma, much like Barry and Iris.

There is a moment between Barry and Kadabra that takes us through Barry’s grief of losing Oliver, and how Crisis impacted him just as much as it did Kadabra. But it was important to move forward and heal.

One would think that would be the perfect place to end the episode, but instead, a huge beast shows up out of nowhere and kills Kadabra. Not sure what that was all about.

By the end of the episode, Iris decides to take her trauma into her own hands and go back to the support group to talk through her experience. She opens up in a beautiful way and Candice Patton deserves a shout out for doing such an incredible job with it. I’ve loved seeing how far she’s come and I’m really glad that the series is finally giving her time to showcase her talents.

The episode ends with a somewhat exciting reveal, okay pretty cool reveal–Caitlin and Frost have officially split into two separate people. That might explain Caitlin’s killer migraine all episode! It’s unclear where this will all go but I’m so here for this Caitlin times two situation.

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Ariba Bhuvad