The Flash Review: Legacy (Season 5 Episode 22)

In many ways, The Flash Season 5 Episode 22, “Legacy,” serves as an almost perfect example of everything that went so right and so wrong with the series’ fifth season.

The first half hour of the episode is pretty much a mess, as The Flash tries its hardest to clean up the nonsensical Cicada saga that never lived up to its potential, no matter how many time the show tried to reboot or recreate the character.

But the second half is so emotionally strong, tying together character arcs from throughout the season that it almost makes up for the fact that the narrative work to get us there is so shaky.

The show was always going to struggle with tying up the Cicada plot, largely because everything about it was pretty much terrible. The villain never lived up to his original hype as a faceless, uncatchable killer who was basically a meta Jack the Ripper.

So by the time The Flash swapped Grace in for her uncle Orlin under the Cicada hood, almost everything felt like a lost cause, and the show pretty much gave up on trying to either a.) make Cicada’s timeline sense or b.) give her anything like character depth.

Here, things make are even less logical than usual, as Cicada 2.0 freely interacts with her past self with no negative repercussions to the timeline, easily escapes a Star Labs holding cell, and takes down the entirety of Team Flash again in a fight with her nebulously defined meta abilities.

Grace is ultimately defeated via the magic power of Nora’s mind connection with her younger self, who takes the metahuman cure and subsequently erases her older, crazier self from the timeline entirely.

This happens because child Grace suddenly decides she doesn’t want to kill people, even though the bulk of this storyline has been based on the idea that she’s some sort of bottomless pit of hate and rage.

At this point, do we even care how it’s over – as long as it’s over?

Not really, because the second half of this episode is some of the strongest work The Flash has done this season.

The idea that Team Flash has to choose between stopping Cicada by destroying the dagger and allowing Grace to be cured or setting Eobard Thawne free in the future (where he’s being held prisoner by that same dagger) is a great twist.

Don’t we wish this conundrum had come up at any point in this season before there were just twenty minutes to go?

As soon as Eobard Thawne steps back into the main villain role, you have to wonder how Season 5 might have turned out had the story divided cleanly between Cicada and Reverse Flash, rather than across multiple Cicadas with a bit of Thawne thrown in around the edges.

What might have been, indeed. (I know that’s a season I would have probably enjoyed more, is all I’m saying.)

As it stands, the back half of “Legacy” is tense and compelling, as Barry, Nora and the rest of the gang battle Reverse Flash. Thawne’s escape from prison is everything that pretty much every Cicada scene has been lacking all season, and his full on fight with Team Flash is well choreographed and exhilarating.

While Tom Cavanagh has clearly had a good time playing various iterations of Harrison Wells over the years, he’s still the best at portraying Eobard Thawne, and fully digging into the mess of contradictions that make up this character.

Thawne is a sadistic madman, willing to rip apart timelines, rewrite history and kill with impunity to get what he want he wants. Yet he also has genuine affection for Barry and it would seem, Nora, his “little runner”.

That affection isn’t enough to cause Thawne to change his ways, of course, but it adds an intriguing layer of emotion to the proceedings, particularly as the cost for the erasure of the dagger from the timeline becomes apparent.

That cost is Nora.

For some reason — and look I gave up trying to figure out how The Flash understands time travel a long time ago — the destruction of Cicada’s dagger somehow also…erases Nora from existence?

There’s some precedent for this, as Barry’s adventures in Flashpoint managed to turn the Diggles’ daughter on Arrow into a son.

Perhaps we’re meant to assume this move only erases the Nora that came back to the past, and regular Nora still exists in the future. Maybe Nora is now Henry. We just don’t know yet.

But either way, it’s the end for this particular version of character that spent months getting to know her parents and becoming part of Team Flash.

After Nora rejects the idea of safety in the Negative Speed Force — insisting that she can’t live with the anger and rage she’d be cursed with to do so — she shares a tearful goodbye with Barry and Iris before disintegrating into sparkly dust.

I’ve spent many episodes wondering how and/or when The Flash would write out Nora, and I have to admit, this isn’t how I thought Jessica Parker Kennedy’s time on the show would end.

It’s a bittersweet and brave twist, one that speaks to The Flash love of heart and family above all else. Nora earns her heroic death, and leaves the world better than she found it. That’s her legacy.

You can ask for a lot more than that, for a character.

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• “I’ll see you at the next Crisis,” Thawne says, and between this and the Arrow finale, the CW sure is getting the hype train for next season’s crossover going fast.
• Why didn’t Team Flash just…breach Cicada 2 into one of the pipeline cells that have held ridiculously strong metas for years?
• Cicada melting into glitter dust was a cool visual, even if I’ve rarely been happier to see a Big Bad depart.
• It’s a bit strange that The Flash decides to depower Cisco immediately after a fight sequence that proves how invaluable he is to the team’s overall battle strategy.
• This episode gave us several old school Caitlin/Cisco scenes and my heart is happy. Carlos Valdes and Danielle Panabaker are wonderful together

What did you think of this episode of The Flash? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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