In Review: The Flash – O Come, All Ye Thankful

Synopsis: While Nora grapples with unresolved anger over her father’s disappearance in the future, Barry and Team Flash must stop a powerful new meta, Weather Witch, from killing her own father, Weather Wizard.

Review: This episode reveals a lot about Cicada’s backstory and also takes time to explore the different dynamics of family.

The Story

This week we get three stories crammed into the one episode.

The main story sees Nora learning about how much risk her father takes when he is The Flash and explores her emotions surrounding how close The Flash constantly comes to death and the very real fear that she has about losing him in the future.

That main story ties into the Weather Witch and her single-minded mission, which is to murder her father Weather Wizard, which involves her trying to break him out of Iron Heights.

But the surprise package of this episode is the backstory for Cicada and the reasons why he has it in for Meta-Humans.

All these plot threads made for a pretty compelling episode and Cicada’s backstory seemed a lot more interesting than the other two. I even found myself empathizing with Cicada given that he seemed to be getting his life together before the satellite shard struck him.

The Acting

There are a lot of solid acting performances in this episode, but I’m just going to highlight a couple that struck me as the standouts.

Up until this episode have been finding Nora West Allen kind of annoying but in this episode Jessica Parker Kennedy gets to grapple with some really intense emotions, which make Nora a lot more relatable. I mean the scene where she literally has to shock The Flashback to life was really strong and the scenes that follow where she is dealing with the fallout is some of her best work to date on the show.

I also thought Chris Klein put in a solid performance as Cicada and the scenes where we get the backstory about his personal journey until the night that he is struck down was entertaining viewing. You really found yourself wanting him to be able to get his life together enough so that he could give his niece or daughter (I’m not sure which) a decent upbringing. You basically wanted him to succeed.

Overall

This was a great episode. We even had some comic relief coming from Cisco and the gang and we have the welcome if not the long overdue return of Killer Frost, who gets a brief appearance toward the end of the episode as she sarcastically talks some sense into Cisco and Sherloque Wells.