The Flash season 9, episode 8 review: Partners In Time

“I’m The Flash, I’m pretty sure I can handle one mold inspector.” Spoilers for The Flash season 9, episode 8 follow.

Barry calls in a mold inspector, but a whole team of them show up instead because S.T.A.R. Labs permits have been out of order for…8 years.

Meanwhile, the rest of Team Flash has the day off.

Here’s what went down in The Flash season 9 episode 8 “Partners In Time”.

The Flash season 9 episode 8 review

Inspectors

This episode begins in such utterly questionable fashion and it never gets better. Why is the entire premise of an episode in the final season of a long-running TV series a bottle episode about…inspectors coming to S.T.A.R. Labs? Because none of their permits have been renewed since season 1? It’s just baffling that this is the inciting incident of the episode. But even worse, this is the third episode in a row that feels like a rejected script from a previous season. There is no purpose to this episode beyond one conversation between Barry and Iris.

That conversation? It’s about Iris being scared of change happening literally and metaphorically to her. This episode really does try to have an emotional conversation about change and pregnancy, and but it struggles since it’s sidelined in such a gimmicky episode. There’s an actual good idea here that’s just executed so poorly.

But the crux of this episode comes from Barry, Iris, and the inspectors getting stuck in a time loop in the speed lab. It’s a simple bottle episode. There’s really not much more to say to it than that. These inspectors are incredibly annoying, which at this point isn’t a surprise. And it turns out that one of them is a time thief. Why? At this point in the season, who cares about the why, it certainly feels like creative team never asked that question. And this reveal then turns out this waste of an episode uses what is interesting villain in the comics in Lady Chronos. But they do nothing interesting with her. She’s a time traveler stuck in a bottle episode that does nothing fun with the time travel aspect. It’s a complete waste.

Day off

So with the rest of Team Flash having the day off and out of S.T.A.R. Labs, what does the show focus on? Chester and Allegra’s stay at home. But not just that, there’s a plot twist. Chester tells Allegra that he loves her but she doesn’t immediately say it back! Such an original plot twist!

That’s obviously a joke. This is the most cliché plot that’s been done to death in literally every single genre of film, television, novels, comics, and even the news probably. There’s genuinely nothing more to say about this B-plot other than that it’s unoriginal, uninspired, and, at the end of the day, meaningless. This is a relationship that just is not interesting at all, so any drama that’s being experimented with right now is also uninteresting.

The Flash, yet again, has another meaningless, and often boring, episode that feels like it should never belong in a final season of a show. A final season didn’t need an interlude, much less a four episode one.

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