The Flash season 8, episode 16 review: The Curious Case of Bartholomew Allen

“I will never get used to that.” Spoilers for The Flash season 8, episode 16 follow.

The Flash goes up against a random mad scientist and begins to age extremely quickly without knowing why.

Meanwhile, Captain Singh makes his way back into the lives of Barry and Joe.

Here’s everything that went down in The Flash season 8, episode 16 “The Curious Case of Bartholomew Allen”.

Premature aging in The Flash season 8

So, first thing: Why does this episode exist? It’s a villain of the week episode from season 1 without any of the charm of the better episodes of that season or even an interesting villain. Seriously, the big bad of this episode has maybe four or five lines. There is literally no distinguishable personality trait to him at all. No interesting motivation. No interesting costume. Nothing. Just a dude in a lab coat. What is this episode?

Barry gets hit by a shockwave from a machine that has something to do with gamma radiation which causes him to prematurely age at an alarming speed. At first, the episode tries to play it off as comedic with Barry acting like a stereotypical old person. However, it suddenly shifts to treating everything in a deathly serious manner with literally no prompting. It’s quite baffling because it just feels like the episode wanted to be one thing, decided halfway through that it wasn’t working, and decided to get extremely serious. The shift doesn’t work at all as a result.

The episode also tries to tie back into exploring Barry’s mental state regarding his worry for Iris using his aging, and yet it does absolutely nothing with that. It’s present in one scene and then completely forgotten. What is this episode?

Return of the Captain

The best thing about “The Curious Case of Bartholomew Allen” is that Captain Singh returns to the show, for at least this episode. For all intents and purposes, it’s nice to see Singh return. Even though he was never a major, major player within the show, his presence in this episode really shows how much he has been missed since he left the series.

However, as nice as his scenes with long-time colleague Joe West are, it’s hard to see the actual point of them. Everything about the subplot feels like complete padding for the episode, as though the A-plot didn’t have close to enough to have complete focus on it, so they thought, “Ok, let’s bring back an old character,” and the writer’s room called it a day.

They’re nice scenes, yeah, but they’re uneventful and feel very inconsequential, unless they’re unless they are setting the stage for what leads to Joe (and obviously Jesse L. Martin) leaving the show.

There’s no real reason as to why this episode of The Flash needed to exist. Everything from the beginning to end felt like padding and completely unnecessary.

The Flash season 8 will take a brief hiatus from The CW next week, before returning with a brand new episode on Wednesday June 8.

What did you think of The Flash season 8, episode 16? Let us know in the comments below!