The Flash (7×11) Family Matters, Part 2 Review

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

Synopsis: Barry and Iris come together to try to stop a dangerous force from destroying Central City. (IMDb)

The Flash doesn’t waste any time picking up from the “interesting” cliffhanger of last week’s episode. Iris, Alexa, and Bashir aren’t dead as we presumed, but is that really a shocker? Instead, Bashir made it look like they were by creating an illusion of their dead bodies to trick Nora. That power of illusion was admittedly a pretty cool reveal, and it was fun to see them all wrap their heads around it.

In any case, Nora spent the entire episode freaking out about the fact that she and Deon didn’t kill Iris, Alexa, and Bashir as she had hoped. The rage within her made her lash out at Central City and bring in a cosmic storm of sorts (it wasn’t her, but more on that later). The storm wreaked havoc on Central City, including destroying a part of Iron Heights that led to a bunch of imprisoned metahumans escaping.

Nora’s whole game here has been to be the left Force standing and eliminate the rest of them. Why she wanted that, and why she has been so eager to make it happen was up for debate. But after witnessing what a world of just her as the single Force was like, she was quick to change her mind. In the vision she had, Nora saw that being alone was extremely isolating and daunting.

While the episode was slightly better than episodes past, there were still some issues. The first thing being Nora’s transformation from being incredibly evil to an understanding family member. As we saw during the episode, the other Forces were to blame for a lot of things (aka the storm by accident), and Nora’s intentions were to get rid of them because of it.

The person to sort of solve during this entire debacle was Joe, who has been in his own feelings since quitting the police force. He feels a bit of regret over whether or not he should have stayed but comes in clutch when everyone needs him the most. When he overhears Barry and Iris discussing if they have the capacity to be good parents, Joe chimes in to point out that they’re wrong. When they’ve both needed to step up, they’ve been each other’s support system, and that’s the same logic they need to apply to the Forces, aka their “children”. Instead of pulling them apart, perhaps bringing them together will fix all this animosity. And it turns out, Joe was right!

This is where things felt a bit rushed. Once Barry and Iris applied Joe’s approach to their “children” Nora flipped a switch and that was that. The Forces lived happily ever after, and while that’s great, it should have been done in a more enjoyable, believable way.

There were a lot of plot twists to follow, including Frost getting out of prison for good behavior. It sort of got muddled in there with the fact that metahumans escaped from Iron Heights so it wasn’t clear where that was going to go. Plus, they went through all this hoopla with her trial and put her into jail, and now she’s already out for good behavior? Not sure that makes sense.

In any case, the Forces joined together to stop the cosmic storm, proving The Flash is and always will be about family. Speaking of family, the episode ends with Barry and Iris deciding to have children of their own, and they got busy working on just that.

We will get a tiny hiatus before the next episode, which looks to mark Cisco’s final episode on The Flash. I’m not ready to say bye yet, so I will refuse to believe it’s coming until I have to.

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Ariba Bhuvad