The Wrath of Savitar – When Wally starts having visions of Savitar it seems the God of Speed isn’t as gone as they thought and claims the time of his freedom draws closer. Iris is shocked to learn Barry propose to try and change the future.
Now that the gorillas are vanishing into the mist this Flash season marks its two thirds point by bringing are attention back to Savitar as the big bad for the home straight. This comes via a mix of comics drawn material and original material. The team learn that Savitar is trapped in the Speed Force much like his comics introduction along with a few other comparisons. Another key feature of the episode is that for the first time this season we see physical Savitar costume rather than just CG images. At first the look feels very Power Rangers but once the surprise period has passed it comes across well on screen and in fact looks better than last season’s Zoom costume too. It also gives the episode (and presumably the rest of the season) a critical advantage; it allows Savitar to have much greater screen time (because they can’t afford to heavily feature him in CG) which gives him a much greater presence.
This episode changes Savitar from being a mystery based character to a more fleshed out villain. Courtesy of Julian’s reluctant puppetry sessions we also learn considerably more about him; enough to greatly speculate who is under the armour. We can be 100% certain it’s an existing Team Flash member due to Savitar’s extensive personal knowledge about many of them. The way he talks to them implies personal relations rather than just information that could be researched. As for who? The best bet would be a future version of an existing speedster and right now I’d put my money on Savitar being a future Barry from the specific nature of Savitar’s dialogue towards him. “Trust me, you’ll never get over this”, speaking like a future else having lived with such feelings and guilt. Then there’s even a potentially direct wordplay depending on whether or not his pause implies a comma, “I am the future... Flash”. We could well see Barry fail to save Iris and that becomes the trigger incident sending him towards the path of Savitar. Not to mention that Savitar referring to himself as the “Future Flash” links directly to the Out of Time/Blue Flash comics run where such a future Barry became a blue suited antagonist trying to fix a series of guilt ridden mistakes including the death of a certain other show regular.
The overall mystery and build up was worked very well. It felt like a good culmination of past events like the team working towards changing the future and Savitar’s prior prophecy. The Wally West hallucination scenes were nice and trippy. One in particular had real shades of Buffy’s Conversations with Dead People, helped along considerably by Violette Bean’s Jessie embodying the unnerving atmosphere. Although speaking of Jessie Quick I would have of liked to see her featured more in the episode’s story to put a positive significance on her decision to stay on Earth 1. Frustratingly she spent the whole episode feeling like the 3rd speedster wheel or Wally’s plus one. Thankfully that does look set to improve next week and beyond and the season will be all the better for it. The engagement news subplot fared far better. It gave the team some good happy moments before eventually taking a more dramatic tone and they got Iris’s reaction right; let her shocked by Barry’s ulterior motive before eventually coming to understand his intentions like the intelligent woman her character has been shown to be.
Although the episode was a little static in parts the final act developed into some rather awesome action. In many ways this episode felt like required content, the story leg work, to launch into this final third but still accomplished this with good themes of mystery and drama. Don’t look at the next episode title before seeing the episode as it will be a spoiler.... but in 2 weeks we have the musical crossover with Supergirl to sing about.