Saturday, October 20, 2018

The Flash 5x02 Review: "Blocked" (Squaresville, Daddy-o) [Contributor: Deborah MacArthur]

Original Airdate: October 16, 2018 

While last week officially introduced Nora as a new member of Team Flash, this week acts as the official introduction of our season five villain, Cicada. Mostly because it’s the first episode where our heroes learn he exists. On top of that, there’s a new meta-villain of the week in Block, a woman who can encase people in what appear to be blocks of lemon Jell-O. Yeah, it sounds like a bottom of the barrel kind of power, but she does manage to turn a guy into a meat cube with it, so I guess that’s something.


The episode starts with Cicada in a locker room after the events of the previous episode. Cicada thinking back to the Gridlock fight is intercut with scenes from the fight itself, including Cicada throwing his lightning bolt knife down, getting punched a bit by Gridlock, then sucking Gridlock’s metahuman powers up with the knife. His motivations are unclear, as I’m sure they will remain for a while. We also don’t really know who Cicada is in his regular life, or why his coworker walks into the locker room, sees he’s covered in gnarly cuts and bruises, and just shrugs it off.

Meta-villain of the week time! An escaped convict named Vanessa confronts an old criminal acquaintance. She uses her metahuman powers to create a yellowish energy cube around him and starts shrinking it, turning the man into a meat cube for CCPD to find later.

And leading the CSI team for CCPD? Barry Allen. I do love when Barry gets to do his non-superhero job. Why doesn’t the show let him keep his job all the time? You’d think the procedural aspect would make it much easier for the team to slip into the metahuman storyline of the episode, but I guess the writers disagree. Anyway, Nora has followed Barry to work and pretends to be a CSI intern, which leads to a lot of adorable enthusiasm from her and a lot of adorable freaking out from Barry. Nora is so much like her father, and I love it.

Also at the crime scene, doing her job: Iris! Boy, it’s just a West-Allen family event at this crime scene, huh? Iris is investigating the murder of Gridlock and gets some off-the-record information from Captain Singh. I enjoy seeing Iris in her element as a reporter, especially when the show takes the opportunity to utilize her more dynamic personality. I think the writers are finally starting to understand that Candice Patton can handle Iris as a spunky reporter, a wannabe-cool mom, whatever the opposite of a “movie buff” is — just a bunch of little, humorous, interesting personality quirks that make Iris so much more than Barry’s personal cheerleader. I just wish they’d managed it a lot earlier.

During her investigation, Iris learns that Gridlock was the only target in the attack; the guards were hurt, but they were collateral damage. She also gets footage of the attack from one of the officer’s body cameras (footage she accesses through Barry’s computer, by the way — not sure if that’s gonna come back to bite him or not) and hears a strange, insect-like sound during the Gridlock fight.

The Flash and XS go to take down Block, but Nora gets cubed and tossed away. Barry has to save his daughter, so Block escapes. Without their satellites, Team Flash’s only option is waiting for her to strike elsewhere. In the meantime, Barry tries teaching Nora what she’ll need to know as a speedster, starting with the basics. Nora’s eager to get to the more impressive, heroic stuff, and gets carried away with her exuberance. She accidentally hits her dad with lightning. Ah, kids.

Those difficulties get resolved after Barry has a chat with Joe and, as a more united front once more, Barry and Nora confront Block. Barry gets trapped for a bit, which signals Cisco and Ralph to breach to his rescue, but Nora handles Block with some superspeed parkour. When Block gets too exhausted to use her powers, Nora cuffs her and Barry’s Jell-O prison melts away. Just as everyone’s about to call this case closed, Cicada shows up and stabs Block in the back.

Barry tells Nora to get Block to a hospital. Cicada throws his dagger down, negating Barry, Cisco, and Ralph’s powers. Cicada has gets the upper hand in combat and is about to kill Barry when Nora returns. She calls Barry “dad” and Cicada looks up, sees her, and flees. It seems like it’s the word “dad” that made him run, but I don’t know.

After the fight, Iris plays the Gridlock footage for the team, revealing that the guy they fought is the same guy apparently targeting and killing metas.


As is common with episodes of The Flash, the plot of “Blocked” is a crunchy outer shell that allows the gooey, nougaty emotional center to keep its shape. A few characters have their pathos through-lines, like Cisco still reeling after his split with Cynthia and Caitlin’s reaction to her dad’s faked death, but the core of the episode is the connection between Barry and Nora and how they learn to understand each other.

Nora wants to be like her hero, Barry, without realizing that her over-enthusiastic hero worship makes her exactly like him — and just as destructive. When he was a kid, Barry saw Joe as a hero and wanted nothing more than to impress him, even if it meant going overboard with science projects and setting his school gym on fire. Nora’s the same way, except with learning how to be a great speedster. But while Barry was able to eventually see the humanity in his hero, Nora grew up with only the hero, not the father. Nora learned everything she knows about Barry from a museum dedicated to Barry, which seriously skews how important and imposing he is.

So far, the show is doing a good job making the parent-child relationship between Barry and Nora interesting. The two are charmingly similar, which this episode makes a point to emphasize, but the emotional impact of Nora’s story isn’t lost in all the cutesy stuff. There’s genuine room for the both to grow and learn from each other, which means Nora’s role is elevated from a clever little plot point to a character with lasting significance.

However, I gotta say: the father-daughter relationship isn’t the one I’m most interested in. I want to know what Iris and Nora’s deal is. Iris seems so open and almost goofy around Nora, it’s hard to guess why Nora’s responses to her are always so cold. What happens to Iris in the future? Is she too heartbroken from Barry’s disappearance to be anything more than an authoritarian mom? It’d be easy to say Barry’s just a cooler, more idealized parent, but Nora seems too visibly uncomfortable around Iris for the answer to be that simple. Even with a strained relationship, I’d think Nora would at least find some amusement in her (presumably stern) mother acting so dorky, but she doesn’t.

Yeah, so I really have my fingers crossed for some mother-daughter team ups soon. Nora and Barry are amusingly alike and I love the parallels, but Iris and Nora are where all my curiosity’s going.

Other Things:

  • It’s so weird how much I’ve liked Ralph these past two episodes. Him leaving a message for Cisco was a highlight, but even his “27 Steps” were funny. I have a feeling that last season’s list would’ve been a lot more gross, but this season’s Ralph Dibny does stuff like paint his toenails (“Pastels look best”) and attend “Corgi beach festivals.”
  • “You mean you don’t have a scene-wide modified bosonic frequency field to avoid cross-contamination?” “I don’t even think we have some of those words yet.”
  • I didn’t get to talk a lot about it in the review, but I really loved the way the stories interlocked in this episode. The main Block/Cicada cross, Joe’s speech to Barry about being a good teacher to Nora being intercepted by Cecile, the father/daughter story of Barry and Nora and the father/daughter story of Caitlin and her missing dad... Things just meshed well with this one.
  • Next week... Cisco dies? Okay, one: I doubt it, but, two: if they kill off Cisco in the same episode they introduce a silly Wells character, I’m going to be mad.


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