The Flash season 7, episode 11 review: Family Matters, Part 2

“Bring my brother and sister to me or your city will die.” Spoilers for The Flash season 7, episode 11 follow.

With the Speed Force on a rampage trying to find the other Forces in the latest episode of The Flash season 7, Barry Allen must find a way to stop her before her wrath is fully unleashed.

Meanwhile, Frost tries to bring Chillblaine in after part of Iron Heights was destroyed by the Speed Force’s storm, resulting in a meta outbreak.

Here’s everything that went down in “Family Matters, Part 2”.

3 vs. 3 million

The Flash is a show that has always been at its best when Barry is desperate; when he can’t just punch his way out of a problem. And in this episode, Barry is desperate and he just needs to talk to people to try and help him win the day. Because of this, The Flash season 7 is better here than it has been in several episodes.

Grant Gustin’s performance alone makes Barry’s desperation throughout the episode work. He plays so much of the episode as if constantly out of breath, which is something he never is. It’s a great visual cue to convey how worried he is throughout the episode. It never needs to be explicitly stated that he’s running himself ragged because we can see it.

On top of seeing Barry’s struggles, we get some solid scenes with Psych and Fuerza while the two are hiding out from the Speed Force. Very predictable scenes, but pretty enjoyable nonetheless.

The best scenes in this episode though are, hands down, the ones between Barry and the Speed Force. It’s here that we finally get the proper reason as to why the other Forces need to die, which creates an interesting trolley problem for the heroes. While this type of story has been done to death, it’s always interesting to see it within the context of superhero storytelling. It raises the question of what truly is the moral stance for a superhero take in these situations and when done well, which it is here, there is no easy answer – which is always enjoyable to watch and here it results in some of the best stuff the show has had to offer this season.

The Forces together in The Flash season 7

After a couple of episodes of the show seemingly just spinning its wheels with no real forward momentum, it’s nice to see the Forces actually all come together in this week’s episode. They all have their reasons for finally wanting to work with The Flash, especially Deon, and it’s nice to see actual character development that feels earned – something we haven’t seen happen in this show for a while.

Them coming together leads to a pretty CGI-heavy fight that pushes the budget of The Flash a bit too much, however, they do some cool things with what they can and it creates a solidly entertaining finale. It’s hard to criticize the CG too much though as with the relatively low budget that The Flash has, it probably looks better than it should.

Chillblaine

If you wanted a discount Kraven the Hunter combined with a discount Captain Cold, well, that’s also in this episode. In what are distracting and absolutely out of place scenes, Chillblaine makes his return and he’s just as annoying as ever. There’s really no way that this character can becoming anything other than an annoying distraction at this point (unless he gets a personality transplant).

Seriously, he and Frost are only in a few scenes here and they are just edited into the episode for seemingly no rhyme or reason. Sure, this is more than likely setting up Frost’s eventual release from prison – because who actually thinks that she’ll be there forever – but just like every Frost story this season, it is just so poorly done. Wait, what’s that? She’s been released from prison at the end of the episode… well, that storyline earlier in the season was worthless.

After a couple of lackluster episodes, The Flash has an incredibly solid outing this week, despite an absurd inclusion of Chillblaine.

What did you think of The Flash season 7, episode 11? Let us know in the comments below!