The Flash season 5, episode 21 review: The Girl with the Red Lightning

“How does it feel to know you’re about to go extinct?” Minor spoilers for The Flash season 5, episode 21 follow.

Cicada now has the equipment to commit genocide against the metahumans of Central City, with Team Flash racing against the clock to save them.

In order to try to save them, they need to make a enough of a cure to administer to as many metahumans as possible.

Cicada’s genocide

Everything leading up to this episode makes complete and perfect sense regarding Cicada’s plan. Both of their plans to be exact. Everything really seems to be ramping up now, with the complete genocide of the metahumans happening. Orlin Cicada’s mission was to take out as many metahumans as he could, never to kill all of them.

However, Grace Cicada seems to wrapped up in an even more twisted version of her uncle’s mission, which makes sense that she would want to kill everyone. The issue with this is, she’s barely in the episode and her threat isn’t really felt. Plus, it seems like they’re just giving Cicada powers just to artificially up the tension, which doesn’t work at all.

This portion of the episode does give Renee Adler and Sherloque some time to shine when Cicada attacks them at the university. This episode is able to demonstrate an interesting side of Sherloque that we’ve not really seen up to this point. There’s a bravery to him, and Renee, in this episode that hasn’t really been shown, which is great. The problem with the part of this episode, though, is that relationship really hasn’t been built up well.

With Team Flash also trying to help as many metahumans as possible and providing the cure as best they can, this leads to another potentially tense part of the episode. It’s too bad it never really feels that way and that the panic the episode is trying to bring forth isn’t felt.

Nora’s dark side

Now that Nora has brought the Negative Speed Force into her body, and supposedly expelled it, she’s now able to connect with Cicada’s dagger. It’s an interesting development that probably could’ve been used several episodes ago, which really brings forth the pacing issues of the entire season. This season has lacked focus on the things that it wants to do and, as such, leaves great ideas feel a bit rushed.

More from Arrowverse

• The 9 best (and 8 worst) Arrowverse characters
• 27 best fighters in the Arrowverse, ranked
• All 8 Black Canary actresses ranked from worst to best
• 11 things nobody wants to admit about the Arrowverse
• The 7 best (and 6 worst) Arrowverse villains

That said though, the execution of the idea in this episode is really solid. The distrust that had been present after the truth about Nora’s interactions with Thawne definitely feels evident in this episode. The apologies of the previous don’t feel as permanent as they were meant to feel, which is a good thing. This brings a realism to the interactions that the show sometimes lacks.

Because of that distrust though, it causes Nora to go out on her own and try to deal with Cicada by herself. This turns out to be a bad idea for her, as she causes more harm to herself than she was thinking could happen. By doing this though, the episode is able to display how much Nora has grown and what she’s willing to do to keep others safe, and it does a really good job at that, which is the only idea that the episode really executes well for the non-Thawne related things.

Thawne on death row

With Thawne’s time running out, he remains unclear as to what his ultimate plan was to send Nora back in time to stop Cicada. While the rest of the team doesn’t seem to care about this development anymore, Ralph is obsessed with it and potentially discovers Thawne’s goal.

This episode definitely provides an interesting development as to where the ending of the episode leads regarding Thawne but, again, it’s too bad this didn’t happen sooner in the season. It’s also nice that this episode brought Ralph back around to actually being a detective.

While more focused than previous installments, this episode of The Flash feels incredibly frustrating because it fails in execution with several of its potentially great ideas.