In a moment of total desperation in “Enter Flashtime,” Barry Allen probably just set up Team Flash’s problems for The Flash Season 5.
Spoilers follow for The Flash Season 4, Episode 15: “Enter Flashtime”
Tuesday night’s episode is actually the shortest episode of The Flash ever, because the whole thing takes place in less than ten minutes.
Jesse’s on a visit to Earth-1 trying to reconcile with her dad when a paramilitary force detonates a nuclear bomb in downtown Central City. Barry essentially freezes time by entering “Flashtime.” (That’s what it’s called when he freezes time like he did with Iris in “The Trial of the Flash.”)
What ensues is a race to stop a nuke that’s already gone critical. Barry tries everything, dragging Cisco, Harry, and Killer Frost into Flashtime to try helping. He even sends Jesse to get Jay Garrick from Earth-3. Breaching it to a dead Earth doesn’t work, freezing it doesn’t work, and throwing lightning bolts doesn’t work.
So what does Barry do? Unleash the holy hell of the Speed Force upon it.
Remember the quark sphere that Team Flash created in the Season 4 premiere to bring Barry out of the Speed Force? It’s been sitting in the Speed Force pretending to be Barry this whole time getting struck by lightning, so Barry opens a breach into the Speed Force, steals the sphere, and throws it at the nuclear bomb. Enough Speed Force lightning should, in theory, neutralize the reaction.
The whole plan is insane, risky, and incredibly it works. (Props to Iris for coming up with the idea.)
Pretty awesome, right? Probably not.
The return of Jesse Quick is a welcome addition to this episode.
Every season of The Flash so far more or less starts with some kind of rupture in the Speed Force, timeline rewrite, or dark matter explosion. The last time this quark sphere traveled between Earth and the Speed Force, it created 13 new bus metas.
Not only will the Speed Force probably get really angry again that the Speed Force Prison is empty, but that breach that opened up in downtown Central City. Speed Force lightning struck an active nuclear bomb, so the whole event probably unleashed all sorts of insane dark matter energy on tons of people.
For all we know, even Joe West is a meta now.
This is what happened the last time Barry pissed off the Speed Force.
Who knows, maybe the Speed Force will finally stabilize and it won’t cause any problems. But this event probably caused something to happen.
We don’t see any immediate ramifications from it, but the Speed Force is bound to react in some way down the line, probably immediately after they take care of DeVoe later this season. Even if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, “Enter Flashtime” was still one of the best episode of the season by far.
We’ll have to wait and see if The Flash decides to follow through on the implications it created.
The Flash airs Tuesdays on The CW at 8 p.m. Eastern.
