After apprehending Harrison Wells in last week’s “Rogue Air,” I was immensely curious to see where Andrew Kreisberg and Greg Berlanti would take us for The Flash finale. I had expected the final showdown between Barry and Harrison to come in the finale, perhaps once again in the past as Barry attempted to save his mother. Instead, by moving up the big fight a week, the show chose to slow down and focus on the latter event, the death of Nora Allen.
In its most important episode to date, The Flash, as it has for much of its inaugural season, impressed. I had trepidations heading into “Fast Enough,” despite the hot streak leading up to the finale. Those concerns derived primarily from “The Man in the Yellow Suit,” which served as the fall capper and decidedly dropped the ball. That episode was over-packed and overwrought—an hour that attempted to give light to three major story advancements, all of which were extremely emotional for feature characters, and instead of giving them their due, shrouded them. “Fast Enough” did not suffer a similar fate as it zeroed in on one massive decision and, save for the occasional scene, did not diverge. That decision, of course, was whether Barry should travel back in time and save his mother.
Clearly not a light matter, given the fact that Barry could potentially alter his life and the lives of others in irreparable ways (and, as comic readers know, the decision to save Nora in Flashpoint does not go particularly well), the final hour gave that decision real time to breathe. Barry contemplated for nearly half the episode, consulting all those around him on what he should do. As was discussed last week, The Flash is a different kind of hero. He is not one to bark orders and manipulate the morale of a situation for the greater good. He considers all aspects, and all people, that his choices effect and this choice was no different. Barry spent time with nearly every member of Team Flash and others, all in an attempt to figure out what the right decision was. This led to a bevy of emotionally taxing, but rewarding scenes, particularly those with Barry’s fathers. One of my favorite aspects of this first season has been the relationship Barry has with the two men most important in his life, his biological father, Henry Allen, and his adopted dad, Joe West. There has been, for the most part, a lack of pettiness with these two father figures, in favor of an approach where our hero can have two fathers and love both equally for differing reasons. It also helped that both John Wesley Shipp and Jesse L. Martin have excelled in their respective fatherly scenes, making them some of the most poignant of the series. Last night was no different. Though he’s only appeared a handful of times, the moments Barry has shared with Henry have been powerful. In “Fast Enough,” it was Henry, as he often has, who was the sobering voice. After Joe had, surprisingly, told Barry to risk it and save his mother, Henry warned him against taking such a huge chance. He reminded him of the life he was gifted after his mother’s death, of the time he got to spend with Joe, and Iris, and how all that could be lost if he gave in to his pain and chose to be selfish. But, Henry proved to be a dinghy in the face of a tidal wave, as both Joe and Iris (the people whom Barry is most likely to listen to) told him, in direct and indirect terms, to go for it. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
What I particularly loved about “Fast Enough,” enabled by its commitment to giving the episode’s central decision a legitimate amount of time to develop, was how it allowed all of its major characters to have a moment of their own. What “The Man in the Yellow Suit” set out to do and failed, “Fast Enough” set out to do and succeeded. As I mentioned, Henry Allen had a beautiful scene, Barry and Joe had multiple scenes that were in line with many of their best this year, Caitlin and Ronnie were married, Cisco discovered a life-altering fact (he’s a metahuman), Iris and Barry had one final meeting on the roof, Eddie had three of the best scenes in the entire episode (the first, in which Martin Stein told Eddie that he was the most intriguing man in a room full of heroes because he was something scientist’s can’t account for, an anomaly, and a controller of his destiny, was a particular favorite). No one was left to the side, but the hour also didn’t try to do too much with all of its characters. It knew what the heart of the episode was and it didn’t try to squeeze anything else in, instead found smaller (but no less effective) ways to give every performer one final moment in the spotlight.