Wednesday, October 17, 2018

The Flash - Blocked


"Blocked" opens with the season's mystery villain Cicada (Chris Klein) breaking through a police convoy and beating last week's baddie Gridlock (Daniel Cudmore) to death. When not moping over the fact that her daughter would rather spend time with the father she never knew, and has more in common with, Iris (Candice Patton) begins an investigation into the attack while Nora (Jessica Parker Kennedy) works her way into the lab to help Barry (Grant Gustin) as a CIA intern. While in costume the pair also take on a meta (Erin Cummings) using her block powers stealing high-tech weapons. As with last week's episode, Team Flash takes down the villain of the week, but their first encounter with Cicada doesn't go nearly as well. While Cicada's look and wheezing aren't that impressive, his ability to temporarily steal the powers of metahumans does offer a serious threat.

B-stories of the week involve Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) and Ralph (Hartley Sawyer) working to help Cisco (Carlos Valdes) get over his heartache and Cecile (Danielle Nicolet) dealing with the loss of her telepathic connection to her daughter. With both starting more as comic relief, each subplot is nicely intertwined to larger stories as Barry heads to Joe (Jesse L. Martin) for advice on his struggles to teach Nora, which allows him to connect to both Joe and Nora in new ways, and Caitlin's need to help Cisco eventually plays into her larger arc about finding a mysterious father who may have faked his death years ago. So while I'm not quite sold on the season's new big bad, or Iris continuing to mope, there's still quite a bit here to enjoy.

No comments: