The Flash season 9, episode 9 review: It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To

“I hope you don’t mind me crashing your party.” Spoilers for The Flash season 9, episode 9 follow.

Team Flash throws Barry a (second) 30th birthday party, but a surprise visitor comes to ruin the celebration.

However, thanks to that, a familiar face returns to help save the day.

Here’s everything that went down in The Flash season 9 episode 9 “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To”.

The Flash season 9 episode 9 review

Arrow returns

The most exciting part of this episode from the outset is obviously the return of Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen. It’s really been the first time all season where a teaser for the next episode has played and it actually elicited some excitement. Thankfully, this episode actually warrants that excitement because this is the first actually good episode of the season. That’s a low bar, but this episode crosses it by a substantial margin. It takes a bit too long to get there, but it’s immediately exciting when the Arrow theme begins to play as Oliver first shows up and says, “Barry, Barry, Barry. What did you do this time?” What a fantastic entrance for the illustrious Oliver Queen.

But seriously though, Ollie is the absolute best part of the episode. They don’t try to play around with “Is this an alternate Ollie?” or anything like that. Nope, this Ollie is our Ollie, Spectre and all. We don’t have to get used to a modified version, but are able to just jump back into this character that we know and love. Which also then lends itself to the absolute best writing of the entire season, which is every interaction between Ollie and Barry. Every single one of their one-on-one interactions is gold.

Plus, we get a fantastic Arrow fight scene that rivals, and betters, almost all of the fights on Arrow itself. There was some shaky cam that was obviously added in post-production, which was annoying, but it didn’t really take away from the fight scene as a whole.

Terrible party

But before we get to Oliver, we have to get through the party. How does the first five minutes of this episode feel like a century? Truly. It’s so bad. Terrible dialogue, uninteresting character interactions, and apparently Wally is now trying to do another Flashpoint just to achieve “enlightenment.” Just an utterly baffling scene on every level.

Oh, and then Bloodwork appears. Because why not? At least he’s a good villain who is actually intimidating and begins to make the episode interesting. Ramsey Rosso crawling into Barry and Wally’s minds is interesting, but Wally almost immediately falling for his rhetoric is beyond questionable. He hasn’t been seen for who knows how long, and suddenly is like, “I can look into the multiverse to search for enlightenment, but I get tricked by a second-rate villain.” It’s really poor writing for Wally.

However, that 4th wall break that Bloodwork has while messing with Barry is fantastic. It’s a fun, clever way to engage the audience in something that can get very repetitive that really catches the audience off-guard in a really good way.

There are definitely a couple of moments in this episode that bring the episode down, but they’ve been issues that every episode this season has. However, they aren’t as prominent here, so it’s not that big of a deal.

The Flash, finally, has its first good episode of its final season by doing one simple thing: Having interesting character interactions.

If you’re a fan of The Flash, listen to The CW Spiral Podcast for more news and updates about the final season and the future of the Arrowverse. Subscribe to their YouTube channel here.

What did you think of The Flash season 9 episode 9? Were you glad to see Green Arrow back? Let us know in the comments below!