The Flash season 6, episode 4 review: There Will Be Blood

“How do you convince your best friend not to save your life?” Spoilers for The Flash season 6, episode 4 follow.

Team Flash now knows that Barry is going to die in The Flash‘s upcoming Crisis, leading them to all have different reactions.

While the team is dealing with their own death in the family, Ramsey is trying to cure his own death.

Death is coming

Now that The Flash himself, Barry Allen, has revealed that he’s going to die in the crisis, thankfully not letting the secret eat him alive, he’s focused on saving as many lives as he can, starting with Ramsey. They aren’t doing it without any help though as Nash Wells joins them on the journey. Well less a journey and more of a heist. And that heist, unsurprisingly, quickly goes wrong, which helps to show what Nash is capable of.

This is one of the first times in what feels like forever where the A-plot of an episode of The Flash actually has a good amount of humor to it. This story may have dire circumstances with some darker ulterior motives, such as Cisco’s betrayal of Barry to try and save Barry’s life, but it’s still funny and entertaining. It’s channeling the tone of the first season of the show, aka the best season, in such an excellent way. Hopefully, the show manages to keep this tone for a couple more episodes.

When the story needs to get really serious though, it kind of falls flat. Dialogue feels awkward and silly in ways that it hasn’t felt like in the past. Grant Gustin and Carlos Valdes both give solid performances, but even a good performance can’t make the dialogue better. It’s attempting to carry over the thanatophobia theme from last episode, this time applying it to Cisco, but it doesn’t work as well. Not because Cisco doesn’t except Barry’s death and his fear of his friend dying, but rather the execution is flawed because of the cheesy dialogue that doesn’t fit the tone of the scene. The later portions of the episode manage to do a better job with Cisco, but because the biggest scene fell flat, the story doesn’t fully work.

This sense doesn’t carry over to the final scene with Barry and Joe. It’s a heartbreaking conversation that the two have, performed perfectly by Grant Gustin and Jesse L. Martin. If every emotional moment in the episode had been like that, it would’ve been one of the best episodes of the series.

Bloodwork is here

One thing that’s always baffling is the treatment of genetic diseases as happening at the same time in parent and child. The parent gets it at a way older age, but the child gets it at a younger age. It’s what happened with Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and it’s happening with Ramsey here. Regardless, it’s happening, so what matters is what it means and what it means is that the character has a ticking clock.

Before Team Flash can get the cure to Ramsey though, he begins testing himself even more than he was before. Because of this, once Barry delivers the potential cure to him, it doesn’t work. Once this happens, he pretty much suffers a complete break from reality. He realizes what he needs to make his cure work, adrenaline, and of course his first thought to gain the adrenaline that he needs is to kill people, hence the break from reality.

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Since the first episode of this season, Ramsey has been portrayed as someone who isn’t a good person, so it’s not surprising he would break his Hippocratic Oath so quickly, which the episode makes a point to show. While it makes sense that someone like Ramsey, who has already been shown to be very selfish and angry, would make that choice, the decision is extremely quick. A bit too quick.

Once we get to the final action sequence where we see the extent of Ramsey’s powers is one of the best parts of the episode though. It’s very horror-tinged with his victims essentially being controlled as zombies. It creates a very creepy vibe, especially in a darkened hospital corridor, perfect for a Halloween episode, even if Halloween is only mentioned in passing.

The search for Sue

Where Cisco’s plot fails to properly deal with the themes of the season, Ralph’s portion of the episode, albeit much smaller, deals with it so much better. Ralph has accepted that he can’t save Barry, unlike Cisco, but instead of attempting to save others, he doesn’t think that he can save anyone. But like Barry told Cisco, it starts with saving one person.

For Ralph, that person will be Sue Dearbon who is Ralph’s beloved wife in the comics. Hopefully, she’ll enter the picture soon and Ralph’s search for her doesn’t last long as that’s one of the biggest thing that Ralph has been missing in the show, his relationship with Sue. He doesn’t quite feel whole without her.

The Flash stumbles a bit in its latest episode, but still has plenty of strong elements that pushes the season forward in a positive way.