The Flash finally returned last night from its last hiatus of the season with an episode that had a nice crossover with Arrow’s Ray Palmer/The Atom (Brandon Routh) and Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards).
As someone who really loved the Flash/Arrow crossover back in December, seeing these mini-crossovers with characters like Ray and Felicity is just a blast. As much as I love these two characters on Arrow, they just fit in so much better here on The Flash. Maybe it’s with the light-heart tone of it all, but it was a nice breather to have Ray and Felicity interact with Team Flash. Cisco and Ray is a pairing we absolutely need to see more of because I couldn’t get enough of that bromance. I can only imagine how much fun Valdes and Routh had working together. While I didn’t understand a lot of the tech aspects of what they were doing with the A.T.O.M. suit, it was great to see them get it somewhat upgraded as events on this week’s Arrow will probably need Ray in action.
The episode also marked the introduction of The Walking Dead’s Emily Kinney as Brie Marvin a.k.a. the Bug-Eyed Bandit, and while I’m not familiar with the comic version of the character, I wasn’t particularly intrigued by what we got here. That’s nothing against Kinney; it was fun to see her as Felicity’s nemesis, and they can always bring her back for future episodes in other seasons. Sadly, she just wasn’t a big highlight of the episode as a whole. Also, whenever you are giving me something that focuses a lot on bugs and whatnot, then you automatically have me checking all my walls, because they ain’t nothing but nasty!
I have waited to see some big moments for Eddie this whole season, and this episode really made him shine a lot because he was representing the audience in a very good way with his opinion on keeping Barry’s secret from Iris. It can’t be said any other way: it’s terrible that they are not telling Iris, and I don’t blame Iris for any of her reactions in this episode. She has every right to be angry at Eddie for not being willing to tell her. I know some might look at her breaking it off with Eddie as overly dramatic, but I praise her for that because there is no other way she should react to this. It will be interesting to see how they are going to proceed from this, and if we will have Barry reveal to Iris that he is The Flash sometime before the season finale.
Felicity’s role in “All Star Team Up” was very similar to her first visit back in The Flash‘s fourth episode, where she once again served this great mentor position for Team Flash as Barry had his doubts and speculations on Caitlin and Cisco. Although I do think that Barry may have been a little harsh on actually suspecting that these two were in on it with Harrison, I can see it from his POV a little bit. At least by the end of the episode his doubt disappears. The post-credit scene was one of my favorites of the season, especially because not only do they get in on it with Barry and Joe, but Cisco reveals to everyone that he has been seeing flashes of Harrison killing him in this — now — alternative timeline.
Overall, “All Star Team Up” was a solid episode that gave us another fun “Flarrow” crossover, and I hope that even though Ray is going to be busy with the untitled spin-off show that he can visit this show as often as possible.
The Flash airs on Tuesday nights, 8/7c on The CW.
[Photo via The CW]
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At least one or twice a season, we get an episode which doesn’t contains a whole lot of action, but exists solely for the purpose of setting up the rest of this season. This was that episode I think. Maybe it was because the 2-3 previous episodes before this were slap you in the face awesome, but I didn’t really care too much for this one. The villain was kind of lame and I’m not really sure what purpose she served except for giving Ray the idea to go smaller (foreshadow anyone?). I don’t think it was a particularly bad episode, but it didn’t excite me the way previous episodes have. Now that 3/4 of team flash know about Wells’s secret, I’m expecting the rest of the season to just go all out.