CW's 'The Flash' returned with a new episode last night. It wasn't quite the triumph of great television story-telling as the mid-season finale. Character moments for the series leads and a well-serviced overall narrative saved the episode from some plots to nowhere and poorly staged battle scenes. In 'Revenge of the Rogues,' Leonard Snart/ Cold (Wentworth Miller) recruits Mick Rory /Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell) in an attempt to halt the Flash, while Barry Allen/Flash (Grant Gustin), Iris West (Candice Patton) and her father Detective Joe West (Jesse L. Martin) evolve their relationships. And engineer Cisco Ramone (Carlos Valdes) steps up showing possible hero potential.
The story opens with the Flash and his STAR Labs support team training at the abandoned airstrip. Cisco pilots the armed helo-drones, Dr Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) monitors Barry's physical condition and Dr Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh) provides his trademark coaching and irony. When one of Cisco's strikes lxplodes too close to Barry, Dr Wells almost stands up from his motorized wheel chair, almost. He does convince Barry to devote himself to training, while he and Cisco will help the police with countermeasures for Cold's freeze ray. This leads to our first plot dead end and Cisco's first opportunity.
Following this singular training scene, we see Cold and Heat Wave break into a customs warehouse stocked with imported top-end cars and steal... nothing. The scene provides the opportunity for character moments between Miller and Purcell where we see Snart's precision clash with Rory's passion. Miller's and Purcell's performances in this episode get very cosy with the boundary between dramatic and campy but stay on the side of dramatic.
Barry tells Joe that Flash will sit-out the effort to arrest Cold to focus on his training. Then we never see him train again, the rest of the episode. The producers could at least have shown Barry, dressed in sweats, step off the treadmill to grab a towel or a Gatorade. Instead, we see him in the room with the treadmill twice...drinking coffee and talking with his support team. It's a problem for me that Barry doesn't follow through on reason for not engaging Cold.
Cisco has a really good scene demonstrating his and Dr. Well's cold countermeasures to the police. An officer questions why they should accept the proposed upgrades to their ballistic shields, given how STAR Labs' particle accelerator accident a year ago hurt the city. Cisco responds with humility and inspiration, showing possible hero potential.
Later, during a successful heist, Miller and Purcell's battle with the police is amateurishly staged, with the villains pointing their rays sometimes randomly, sometimes right at the shields. Cold and Heat Wave actually steal a painting worth $25 million. Afterward Purcell torches it. I have a problem with burning art, even modern art that looks like a giant finger-painting, but that aside, it renders the theft pointless, another plot dead end.
Along the way.... Cisco names the new villain. Wells has an ironic conversation with Barry. Caitlin provides relationship insights to Barry, who in turn, provides some insight into FIRESTORM. This scene also moves the narrative forward, allowing us to see that Caitlin is processing her feelings about her transformed fiancee, while still using her pain to help her friends.
The final battle with the Flash against Cold and Heatwave was just a poorly staged as the one during the art heist. The cold ray and the heat ray and Flash's running visuals looked great, but the staging seemed quite random: Beams flailing around, cars exploding, but buildings not catching fire. But this sequence provided an opportunity for Det Thawne to have a really good scene. Thawne scrambles out with a countermeasure shield to protect the Flash from Cold's ray. This scene makes a very good companion to scenes from prior episodes: Thawne's anti-Flsh Task Force scenes and Flash saving Thawne from the Man in Yellow/ Reverse Flash, moving the overall narrative forward.
Speaking of the overall narrative...Barry and the STAR Labs team continue to brood about the Man in Yellow/ Reverse-Flash. Barry and Iris have a couple of scenes dealing with the awkward emotional fallout from his previous profession of love for her, in the mid-season finale. Iris still moves in with her boyfriend, Detective Eddie Thawne/ her father's Police partner. And we dramatic / familial tension between Barry and mentor Joe, which resolves near the end, as Barry moves back into Joe's house. “I am a Millennial, and this is what we do.” The show's trademark post script moves the Rogues narrative forward as well.