The Flash Review: Failure is an Orphan (Season 5 Episode 16)
The Flash Season 5 Episode 16, “Failure is an Orphan,” finally tries to face the fact that Orlin Dwyer’s Cicada is a complete disaster as a villain, but it’s honestly a case of too little, too late.
At the start of this season, Cicada had so much promise as a Big Bad. The idea of a faceless, Jack the Ripper-style meta-killer that history remembers as the monster that even The Flash couldn’t stop felt like a genuinely fresh kind of threat.
Unfortunately, The Flash has dragged this story out to ridiculous lengths, doing everything from simply ignoring the Cicada plot entirely for weeks at a time to giving Orlin Dwyer a sob story background meant to humanize him for viewers.
Not even giving Nora a secret Cicada-related mission involving Eobard Thawne has helped, largely because we don’t know what their ultimate goal is, or how Nora teamed up with Thawne in the first place.
Things have basically spun in place for so long that it’s hard to care about any of these plot points anymore.
Therefore, the revelation that Cicada and Barry are about to have their final confrontation doesn’t carry nearly the weight that it should. In fact, most of us probably just shrugged.
We’ve seen a lot of these beats before, after all. And, for the most part, that remains true here.
Barry breaches in to face Cicada, Killer Frost ices their foe for a minute only to vanish mysteriously offstage instead of continuing to attack him, and Barry gets his butt kicked. Again.
Oh, and Cicada says some growly things in the utterly horrible Walmart Bane voice he’s taken to using at all times even when he’s not in his monster suit.
(Honestly, I’m so mad at whatever director told Chris Klein that this take on the character was the one worth doing. His overly breathy line readings and cheesy dialogue are THE WORST.)
The gist of this episode is that Barry must figure out an appropriate patented Flash pep talk that will convince Cicada to take the metahuman cure, stop killing people, and change the future.
This does eventually happen, but not until everyone misses all the obvious signs of both how to achieve their goal, and the consequences it will inevitably bring about.
First, despite the fact that the entire season hinges on the fact that Dwyer’s primary motivation has been protecting his niece, it takes the entire episode for everyone to clue in to the fact that Grace is his weak point.
Once Barry decides to try and relate to Dwyer father-to-father – and also takes his mask off and reveals his real identity, like half the city doesn’t already know he’s the Flash –they come to an agreement.
Cicada will take the cure, so that they can then in turn cure Grace, who’s also been turned into a meta by the dark matter lodged in her brain.
To be fair, there are some lovely moments of suspension and tension here, from the moment Dwyer’s brought into Star Labs to the arrival of the second Cicada.
We’re never quite sure whether we can trust Dr. Ambres, and the sequence after the power goes out is actually pretty great television.
But the arrival – and ultimate identity – of a younger masked Cicada, sporting powers that are three times that of our current version isn’t as shocking as it should be.
That’s largely because every single person watching this show guessed the twist that Grace would ultimately take up her uncle’s mantle back in The Flash Season 5 Episode 12, “Memorabilia.”
Of course this is a Cicada from the future. Of course Team Flash curing Cicada and removing all his future murders from the timeline changed things significantly.
And if Nora can come back and change the past to try and alter the future, why can’t Grace?
Grace’s arrival is probably the “something coming” that Thawne predicted in the episodes opening moments. But it’s also another big dollop of mess in an already hyper confused timeline.
I’m generally of the opinion that Nora’s arrival in the past should have been enough to change the future in substantial ways. Should she go home, I feel like she should arrive in something that basically looks like The Man in the High Castle when compared to the world she left.
But The Flash is generally pretty lazy about its own internal rules of time travel and things are generally no different here.
“Failure is an Orphan” sort of attempts to hash out those issues via its Nora/Iris plot, drawing distinctions between the future as both women will experience it.
Nora finds her mother’s obsessive list of things to do with her daughter initially stifling, until she understands that, when she goes home, she can just walk back into their relationship, whereas Iris will have to wait decades to do this again.
(We think. Are we all 100% certain this Nora will even exist in the future they’ve all changed so much? Ugh. Headaches.)
At any rate, now that Grace-Cicada has arrived, Team Flash must face another moral quandary: What to do when one of humanity’s worst killers is in a coma just down the hall?
But first: They need to catch up with the rest of us and figure out who she is.
Stray Thoughts and Observations
- If broken down, grizzled Eobard Thawne is not next season’s fulltime Harrison Wells variation I’m going to be so angry.
- I’m so glad to see Jesse L. Martin back and doing his patented Papa Joe counseling sessions that I’m willing to over look the fact that the Joe/Cecile scenes were pretty much completely unnecessary this week.
- Why does Cecile still have powers anyway?
- Do Killer Frost’s ice sutures ever melt? I don’t understand this healing technique.
What did you think of this episode of The Flash? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Reviewer Rating:
User Rating:
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!
Lacy Baugher
Lacy is a pop culture enthusiast and television critic who loves period dramas, epic fantasy, space adventures, and the female characters everyone says you're supposed to hate. Ninth Doctor enthusiast, Aziraphale girlie, and cat lady, she's a member of the Television Critics Association and Rotten Tomatoes-approved. Find her at LacyMB on all platforms.