Last week on The Flash, Barry Allen/The Flash (Grant Gustin) got briefly trapped in the Still Force when looking for Iris West Allen (Candice Patton) who had disappeared due to her Time Sickness. With a little help from Nora West Allen/XS (Jessica Parker Kennedy) he managed to get back to reality and while Iris remains missing, hope hasn’t been lost and the Team is just taking a different approach to finding her. This week, however, there’s another challenge that Barry and the Team have to face when Barry suddenly finds himself rapidly aging and they have to figure out how to reverse it before time runs out. Need to find out what happened on this week’s episode of The Flash? We’ve got you covered with our recap, but just know that there are full spoilers for “The Curious Case of Bartholomew Allen” beyond this point.
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Racing through the city on the way to something else, The Flash fights some crime and saves some people, including an older lady who rewards him with a butterscotch candy. The emergency Barry is racing to? The group D&D game. Joe doesn’t get it at all. Iris is still missing, though Nora reports she’s okay in the future, so they know they are on the right track. Barry gets called to CCPD where Singh is waiting for him. He has a case at Mercury Labs for him – a gamma absorption array was stolen and needs to be recovered so they have to catch the thief.
The Flash races off and finds a van with the stolen tech but before he can take it to the lab, a scientist (the bad guy) comes out and hits him with the array, a sensor on the bad guy’s watch reading “energy absorption complete”. At STAR labs, Barry isn’t feeling great, so they scan him and discover that he’s literally aged 30 years overnight. His powers have also been impacted.
Cecile tries to convince Barry to let the team handle this situation, but there’s another lab robbery so The Flash goes to investigate. Sure enough, it’s the scientist. He’s trying to obtain a power “more precious” than any a superhero has. The Flash is unable to stop him and is hit with a blast which takes him down. Back at STAR, Barry has started aging on the outside now, too. Turns out that the more The Flash runs, the more he ages. They identify the criminal as Dr. Pytor Orloff.
Singh observes that Joe is really frustrated being at home and retired. Joe admits that he’s frustrated, and Singh takes him out for coffee. Meanwhile, Cecile and Barry investigate at Dr. Orloff’s old job and find his laptop, but it has facial recognition security, and it will wipe in just a few seconds so Barry wants to run it to the lab. Instead, he runs them to the Great Wall of China — and then Barry loses his memory. When they get back, the team has a major intervention with Barry, telling him that if he uses his speed like that again, he’ll probably die. They did manage to stop the countdown on the laptop, though.
Joe chats with Singh who came to visit and confesses that he’s feeling his age and struggling with how things have changed. Singh tells him that the real problem is Joe doesn’t want to move forward and doesn’t want to embrace anything new. Singh reminds Joe that he is the person who gave The Flash his true powers all because he embraced something new in his life when he took on raising Barry. It’s the pep talk that Joe needs to hear.
Cecile finds Barry struggling. He forgot where he was. He opens up to Cecile about being scared about his situation and how he can feel himself getting older and weaker, his memory slipping more and more. Cecile tells him about her grandmother and how she didn’t fear getting old and running out of time because she knew that no one can outrun time, but we can embrace it. Cecile tells him not to let his fear cloud is ability to find the right way to fix things.
Chester gets into Orloff’s laptop and find his plans. He plans to make everyone old so that he can use their youthful energy to make himself younger. Once he finishes connecting his devices, everyone will age hundreds of years in an instant while Orloff will become immortal. Elsewhere, Orloff starts to set up the machine and begins charging it. The solution is that the team has to essentially speed up the machine and burn it out. Barry realizes that he has the ability to do that, even though it might be the last thing he does. The Flash speeds off. He arrives as the machine is fully charge and he hits the button. The Flash races around the blast to stop it from expanding. However, he starts to have a heart attack in his attempt to supercharge it and stop things and ages dramatically. However, he pushes forward and successfully destroys the machine. It also reverses the aging for Barry and he’s back to himself, but Orloff reverts back to his old age.
Barry actually de-aged in the process, shaving some time off so now he’s actually 29. One week later we’re back to D&D night with Singh joining in. Singh asks Allegra what her heroic name is, but she doesn’t have one. Joe shows up to game actually in costume, having fully embraced the game. Barry gets a call from Carla, and he realizes that Caitlin hasn’t been with her mom. He goes to apartment to check on her, but when no one answers, he phases in and finds her lab. Barry confronts her about the lab and soon realizes what she’s up to. Caitlin reluctantly explains that she thinks she can bring Frost back and tries to sell him on the idea by asking what he’d do if he could bring back his parents. Barry isn’t swayed and to stop her from continuing, he destroys her lab and her work.
The Flash airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
