In Review: The Flash – Nora

Synopsis: After an unexpected guest from the future, Nora West Allen, appears at their home, Barry and Iris must figure out how to get her back to the future without disrupting the timeline…even more than she already has. Team Flash must work together to send Nora back, while simultaneously fighting another villainous meta.

Review: Season Five of Flash opens up pretty much from where the last season left off. Nora West Allen crashes Barry and Team Flash’s celebratory shindig and reveals herself as Barry and Iris’s daughter who is also known as Excess.

From there on in we get a few cultural references to Back To The Future and Terminator as the plot starts to unravel.

The Story

Nora plays a pretty major part in this story and is like a total fan girl when it comes to meeting her father. To say it is a dose of hero worship would be an understatement, but the reason for that becomes pretty clear as the episode unravels.

The episode has a few funny moments such as Dibny finally catching up with everyone when it comes to time travel. His confusion about Earth 2 being somewhat of a funny joke, which kind of falls a little flat. It almost felt like the writers were not too sure what to do with Dibny for that particular moment in time. He does get something juicy later in the episode, which concerns some information he finds about Caitlin Snow’s dead father.

The meta this week is called Gridlock and he feeds off kinetic energy, which in short means that when the Flash punches him he becomes more powerful. The way in which they defeat Gridlock is quite clever and allowed for a nice bonding moment between Barry and Nora with a little help for Kid Flash, who will seemingly be rejoining the Legends.

Sadly the episode was missing Harry Wells. Hopefully, we will get a return for a Wells because it just doesn’t feel like an episode of The Flash without Tom Cavanagh playing the arrogant scientist or playing the mentor role.

We learn some interesting future events in the episode, which explain why Nora has arrived on the scene.

The episode closes with the introduction of the new main villain, which is  Cicada, who is a fairly recent villain from the comic books given that he was only created back in 2001.

Created by Geoff Johns. Cicada has an interesting origin, which will hopefully get explored over the course of the series.

Overall

A fairly solid opening episode, which for the most part focused on Nora’s introduction and introduced a couple of new mysteries to intrigue us over the coming months.

I really liked the phasing effect when the planes passed through the buildings as the result of Barry, Nora and Wally’s efforts.

Tom Cavanagh was sadly missing from the story except for a brief flashback scene of him teaching Barry how to phase. I’m in for another season and hoping that it will be a step up after last years mediocre season.