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It’s still a shame that the tragic side of the Caitlin’s transformation as seen in Season 3 has basically been flushed down the toilet in the two years since.
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And little by little, the show seems to be finding a better hook with the Caitlin Snow/Killer Frost dynamic. This episode’s premise - with Team Flash bringing together dozens of metahumans to protect them from Cicada’s wrath - worked well enough.The fact that so much of the conflict boiled down to metas learning to put their faith in others didn’t hurt. As it is, it often feels as though the writers are bending over backwards to find ways to justify Cicada continuously gaining the upper hand against Team Flash and escaping to fight another day.
#THE FLASH SEASON 5 EPISODE 23 SERIAL#
A serial killer who targets metahumans is fodder for a solid story arc, but not half a season or more on a show where all the previous big bads have either been speedsters or unstoppable super-geniuses.
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It’s not so much that Cicada is a poor villain as the fact that he already seems to be running his course. “Seeing Red” did little to counteract that perception. At this point, Cicada comes across as little more than a stalling mechanism until the show is ready to dive headlong into the far more compelling Nora/Eobard Thawne alliance. What initially seemed like a dramatic final battle between Team Flash and their current nemesis instead became one more skirmish in an ongoing war. Looking back, the most frustrating thing about “What’s Past Is prologue” is that it didn’t take the opportunity to neatly wrap up the Cicada storyline. The Flash’s recent 100th episode wasn’t quite everything it could have been.