This week’s episode of The Flash focuses on Ronnie, AKA FIRESTORM again, and we learn a lot more about Barry’s mother’s murder. Check out Josh’s episode recap, followed by both Josh’s and Violet’s thoughts about the episode, and let us know what you think in the comments!
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Episode Recap of The Flash, Season 1 Episode 13: The Nuclear Man
This episode of the Flash begins with Barry getting ready for his date, trying on different outfits, and showing Joe. He heads to the date, grabs a flower on the way, and the date is interrupted often with emergencies from Cisco and Joe. Luckily, Barry is able to stop the catastrophes without interrupting the date too much. The date goes well and Barry even gets a kiss out of it!
Then we see Ronnie, greeting an older man, and the man realizes that Martin is inside Ronnie’s body. Ronnie pleads for help, but he goes all Firestorm, and incinerates him.
The next day, Iris overhears Barry, Caitlin, and Cisco talking about Barry’s date and Iris seems a little jealous…Cisco leaves abruptly to help a “friend”.
That friend is Joe, and he is trying to keep this meeting on the down low–because they are investigating Barry’s mother’s murder. They meet at Barry’s old house, and an attractive cougar has Joe tied in knots, but they head inside to do some checking around. Unfortunately, they come up empty at first…
At Star Labs, Wells and the gang (sans Cisco) discuss what to do about Ronnie. Barry has a flashback of seeing the older professor, Martin Stein, that he just happened to meet on the night of the explosion. We then see the explosion, and the merging of the two bodies into Ronnie’s.
Barry heads to Martin’s widow’s house with Wells. Turns out the wife feels as though she has been watched, and even had a run in with Ronnie before, who tried to convince her he is Martin. He ended up fleeing though, when the wife called the cops. After leaving, Wells decides they should stake out the wife’s house. Barry has a date, but will be on call. Caitlin will be keeping Wells company though.
Back with Cisco and Joe, they are still coming up empty, until they finally locate a mirror that has remained in the house since Barry lived there. Cisco then is able to come up with a method to use the mirror to generate images of what happened 15 years ago. He does so, and both figures are seen, and the scene provides a location of some blood spatter–which is still behind some wallpaper put up after the murder. Cisco plans to run some testing on the blood spatter.
But back to more important things like Barry’s date…they move pretty quickly. Unfortunately, his fun is ruined by both him reacting weird to the sexual tension, and then a call from Caitlin because Ronnie has shown up. Barry awkwardly gets dressed and leaves his date in his house. Barry heads to stop Firestorm, but Ronnie ends up picking him up and tossing him to the ground. Caitlin is able to talk Ronnie down, but Ronnie flies away.
The next day, Barry visits his date Linda at work, and she seems bummed, but strong willed. Unfortunately, Barry gets yet another SOS from Wells and company. After Barry heads out, Iris kind of tells Linda that Barry might still be hung up on her.
Caitlin, Barry, and Martin’s wife locate Ronnie again. The wife is able to talk him down, and Ronnie comes willingly with them.
Back at Star Labs, Ronnie/Martin has became more lucid due to a drug cocktail that Wells made. Wells isn’t sure how to separate the two entities though. Barry gets a call from Linda, who wants to end their relationship. Linda tells Barry she knows about him being hung up on Iris. Barry heads to the paper, and gets a little snippy with Iris.
At the police station, Cisco has been able to identify the blood types of the two people involved. Joe then drops the bombshell–he asks Cisco to run the blood type against Dr. Wells. Cisco is appalled that Joe would even ask, and storms out.
Back at Star Labs, Caitlin realizes that Ronnie/Martin is heating up, temperature-wise. Wells comes to the conclusion that the two bodies are rejecting each other, which would cause a nuclear explosion.
Wells determines that Ronnie needs to be killed to avoid a nuclear disaster. Caitlin tells Wells that they need to try to figure out a solution. Wells heads to his secret lair, and determines he can make a device to separate the two people, but it would be at the expense of his Tachyon device. Unfortunately, before they can use the device, Ronnie has already headed out of town to minimize the damage his explosion would cause. He also has a gun, planning to take himself out.
Meanwhile, Cisco has run the blood test, and it looks like Barry might have come back from the future…The blood belongs to an adult Barry Allen. It seems that Wells might not be the other speedster though.
Barry plans to head out to him with the device in hand, and Dr. Snow demands to go with him. They make it to him, and even get the device, but it doesn’t seem to work. Barry is forced to carry Snow as Ronnie/Martin explode, narrowly outrunning the blast.
Finally to get Linda back on board with dating, he says he will eat a ghost pepper if she doesn’t agree to go on another date. He does so, and she finally caves. Iris seems a little disappointed though.
The final scene of the episode has the friendly General Eiling demanding to have FIRESTORM brought to him.
Josh’s Thoughts: The Flash, Season 1 Episode 13: The Nuclear Man
I found this episode of The Flash pretty interesting. The combination of two people into one body was an interesting concept, and I thought Robbie Amell did a pretty good job of trying to portray that. It has to be heartbreaking for Caitlin to see her fiancé with a different man trapped inside. Despite being stuck with this situation, she does a fairly good job of remaining level headed about it I thought. As much as anyone else could at least.
I am curious about Dr. Wells’ attempt to save Ronnie though. When he is talking to Gideon, he has that moment where he picks up the gun, then goes for the less than lethal option. It doesn’t seem to be out of compassion though–it is more out of reason, probably thinking that Caitlin may rather blow up Central City than not try to save Robbie. I like the twist that from what it looks like, the device didn’t work. We will have to see what happens on the next episode though, as General Eiling seems to think that FIRESTORM is still around.
As for the silly love triangle between Iris, Linda and Barry, I could do without that “CW-ness”. I don’t really like Linda all that much, and at the risk of sounding way too into the love stories of Flash, I still say Barry should be looking more towards Dr. Snow’s direction. She is probably all hung up on Robbie though, so that currently would not work.
But my favorite part of the episode was Joe investigating Barry’s mother’s murder. Finally getting a little concrete evidence there was very exciting! As I had surmised, a future Barry Allen was at the fight when his mother died, along with whoever this yellow speedster is. Based on what Cisco found, it actually might not be Dr. Wells. It was hard for me to decide if Cisco just didn’t even look in Wells’ direction, or if he did actually perform the test, and confirmed Wells wasn’t a part of it.
I am really excited to see what is next in regards to the investigation. It is really hard to investigate a crime that happened 15 years ago, yet hasn’t happened at all. It is pretty confusing to think about, but both saying it already happened and hasn’t are both true, depending how you look at it.
Violet’s Thoughts on Season 1 Episode 13 of The Flash: The Nuclear Man
Wait, so the blood they found at the crime scene doesn’t belong to Wells? Then who could Reverse Flash be??
[Warning: a bit of a spoiler] Josh had told me that in the comics, Reverse Flash is not Dr. Wells. However, I wouldn’t let him tell me who it was, because I didn’t want to be spoiled. He and I both thought that the show would be different from the comics, because things have really been pointing to Dr. Wells being Reverse Flash lately. However, if the blood does not belong to Dr. Wells, then maybe the show will have the same person being Reverse Flash that is in the comics. [End of mini-spoiler.]
That is, unless Cisco is actually protecting Dr. Wells, and/or actually did not run the test. But he sounded pretty sincere, so I don’t know. If the only blood he was able to match positively identified as Barry’s, is it possible that Reverse Flash could be another incarnation of Barry himself, but an evil Barry? I mean, who could be more reverse of the Flash than the Flash himself? If that makes any sense. In any case, if Reverse Flash actually turns out not to be Dr. Wells, I’m going to feel kind of bad, after all that time I was defending Dr. Wells, only to stop defending him when things started looking really bad.
As for the big love triangle that was starting to get set up in last week’s episode, it seems like Caitlin has been dropped out of it. For now, at least. At the moment, she is too caught up with Ronnie being back, even though he’s really Martin Stein too. I have a feeling that they will find a way to separate Ronnie and Martin, and that Caitlin will get Ronnie back. It would have been interesting to see one more episode before Ronnie came back on the scene so prevalently, to see Caitlin considering a new interest in Barry. But I guess even the CW realized that too much was going on already with the Barry-Linda-Iris love triangle. It seems like Iris is in the “I don’t want him, but I don’t want anyone else to have him” phase. However, I’m not liking Linda yet either. But we’ll see where that goes, if anywhere…
Scenes from The Flash, Season 1 Episode 14: Fallout
Here are scenes from the next episode of The Flash, titled Fallout:
