The Flash: Five Things You Might Have Missed In “Paradox”

Tonight’s episode of The Flash wasn’t the Easter egg bonanza that last week’s episode of The Flash was — or last night’s episode of Supergirl, for that matter — but that, of course, doesn’t mean that there isn’t at least a little bit there to see.

Joined by John Wesley Shipp as Jay Garrick, Barry dealt with the problems created by the Flashpoint timeline (and its end) tonight, including villains from Flashpoint who are being given their powers in the main timeline by Dr. Alchemy.

The episode moves fast — faster, arguably, than the Flashpoint story did last week…and that’s part of why there wasn’t a lot of chances to wink and nod at the audience.

So…what did we see? What did we miss? Read on, and comment below.

THE AFTERMATH — Barry (Grant Gustin) realizes the effects from Flashpoint are much greater than he thought.

Meanwhile, Barry meets new co-worker Julian Albert (Tom Felton) and is surprised by Julian’s immediate disdain for Barry.

Ralph Hemecker directed the episode written by Aaron Helbing & Todd Helbing.

The Flash airs on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

“PARADOX”

Like last night’s episode of Supergirl, the title of the episode itself is a little wink and a nod.

When the first episode was called “Flashpoint” and the second “Paradox,” it clearly becomes a reference to Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, the animated feature film that adapts the same story as the first episode of The Flash Season 3.

JOHN DIGGLE, JR.

As we already discussed, arguably the biggest revelation of the episode is that Barry’s tampering with time somehow created the environment for John Diggle and Lyla Michaels’s child to be born as a boy and not a girl.

This is particularly interesting since in the DC’s Legends of Tomorrow episode “Star City, 2046,” John Diggle, Jr. went by the name of Connor Hawke and, as the second Green Arrow, defended a post-apocalyptic version of the city.

ALCHEMY

In the comics, Doctor Alchemy is generally Albert Desmond, a villain who uses an item called a Philosopher’s Stone (for you Harry Potter fans out there) to transmute matter.

At one point during Mark Waid’s beloved run on The Flash in the ’90s, though, Doctor Alchemy was out of commission and a successor — Curtis Engstrom, The Alchemist — appeared wielding Desmond’s Philosopher’s Stone.

An interesting element of the Engstrom version of the character is that while Desmond was a common criminal before he came into possession of the Philosopher’s Stone, Engstrom was a gifted biochemist who worked at S.T.A.R. Labs. His life of crime actually began after he came into possession of the Stone, when he used particles of it to perform medical miracles and decided that in order to get what was coming to him, he would steal his revolutionary development and ransom it back to his employer.

The thing about The Flash‘s big twists so far is that they’ve been deceptively simple. Going into The Flash‘s first season, everyone assumed Harrison Wells would turn out to be the Reverse-Flash, and while the writers deftly misled enough of the audience of the course of the season to make it a genuinely entertaining revelation when he came out as Eobard Thawne, the “slap” of thousands of viewers collectively smacking themselves on the forehead and saying “Of course!” could be heard around the world. Ditto Jay Garrick, who came to Central City and made both audiences and even Barry himself immediately suspicious. Give him a few really heartfelt scenes with Caitlin, though, and suddenly when he’s the bad guy it’s mind-blowing.

So the idea that Felton could be Doctor Alchemy is one that immediately got into the fan-theory network. What if he were, though — but not the Doctor Alchemy everyone is expecting, and perhaps not even the first one we encounter?

After all, if he’s a version of Engstrom, he’d have to get the stone from somewhere to be tempted by its power.

VIBE

This is the closest we’ve yet seen to Cisco actually being Vibe.

While he kind of started to use the name last year, it wasn’t until after he saw Earth-2’s Reverb that Cisco started to think about different ways he could focus and use his powers. This time, he’s got the glasses and the gauntlets, and he’s using his “vibes” as an offensive weapon. 

KILLER FROST

Killer Frost, the Earth-2 identity of Caitlin Snow, seems to be surfacing a little bit in her Earth-1 counterpart.

When Barry left, having just said that Caitlin was the person least changed by the events of “Flashpoint,” her hands started to steam — and it sure looked to us like it was a manifestation of Killer Frost’s cold manipulation powers.

LAST WEEK

Yes, yes. Things from last week are omnipresent here.

We have The Rival/Edward Clariss, the Reverse-Flash of Earth-2 (Jay Garrick’s nemesis in the comics).

We have Williamson Street — named after the current writer of DC Comics’s The Flash.

There were even structural differences, like having Iris pull Barry into that same hallway to have a heart-to-heart.