‘The Flash’ Season Premiere Recap ‘Nora’
The Flash Season Premiere Recap ‘Nora’
The Flash returns, picking up where the Season 4 finale left off as Barry and Iris meet their future daughter, Nora. Naturally, they are a bit hesitant at first to believe that the girl before them is their daughter, but eventually, they come to terms with the news. Iris takes it a bit better than Barry does and wants to spend time with her. Nora reveals that she can’t seem to run fast enough to travel back to the future, so the team sets out to figure out how to fix this issue. Wally goes to the Legends for help, learning that Nora can’t because of negative tachyons inside of her. So unless they figure out how to cancel out the tachyons, Nora is stuck.
Meanwhile, a new metahuman named Gridlock is threatening Central City. Barry goes off to stop him, and Nora follows. Unfortunately, her interference causes Gridlock to escape. Barry and Iris finally have a heart-to-heart about their future daughter, and Barry admits to feeling like he has lost a lot of the joys of being a parent by not getting to experience the whole process of having a child. He says that for once, he thought they would be able to have something happen normally. Iris tells him that they are doing things out of order, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get to experience it. Something clicks in Barry and he confronts Nora about the future. He asks what happens to him. Nora shows him the newspaper article from the time vault, saying he disappeared when she was young and never came back. The reason she time traveled was so she could meet and spend time with her father. The negative tachyons are coming from a device she stole from the Flash Museum in the future. She knew that they would send her home as soon as they could if there wasn’t something keeping her there. Their conversation is interrupted when Gridlock strikes again, this time threatening to bring down a plane.
Team Flash doesn’t know how they’re going to stop Gridlock, who gets stronger with movement. The plane is on a crash-course, but it is suggested that they phase it through all the buildings. Barry can’t do it alone, and even with Wally, it would be near-impossible to phase it through. They need Nora, but she’s never been able to phase before. Barry tells her that he knows she can do it. Cisco vibes the speedsters onto the plane right when it hits zero gravity, allowing them to stop Gridlock. Next, the three position themselves to phase the plane. Nora is panicking, but Barry talks her through it, remembering the words spoken to him by Wells when he first learned to do it. The three succeed and successfully land the plane in the water. Nora is ecstatic that she was able to do it, and Barry was glad to be there to experience her first phasing. It was a really great sequence.
Cisco and Caitlin have figured out how to get Nora back, but Barry says that they shouldn’t send her back until they know for sure that her powers are back to normal. There’s no harm in keeping her around for a couple of days. As Nora bonds with Joe and Wally, Ralph admits to Caitlin that he was doing some research into her father’s death. Turns out the death certificate was signed by someone who doesn’t actually exist. Caitlin’s father is actually alive. The final scene of the episode is Gridlock being transported to prison when the convoy is attacked. A mysterious man appears before Gridlock, holding a piece of metal shaped like a lightning bolt (and there’s a sticker or something on the bolt which says “labs”). He tells Gridlock that he is here to kill all of the metahumans. This man is our season villain, Cicada.
I thought that this was a really solid season premiere and I’m really liking the dynamic between Barry and Nora. It will be fun to see where the show is going to go with that relationship, as well as how things are going to play out leading to Barry’s disappearance. I’m interested to see more of Cicada. I think that bolt of lightning is from S.T.A.R. Labs, which means it could be someone we know, or it might be someone from the future who was stealing things from the Flash Museum just like Nora. Overall, I think this is a great set-up to Season 5.
Next week’s episode is entitled ‘Blocked.’
Covering superheroes, anything dark, horror, and more! Lead writer for Fan Fest
