Related The Flash Review: Family Matters Part 2 (Season 7 Episode 11)Īt this point, do we even care how it’s over – as long as it’s over? 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.
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. The Flash - “Legacy” - Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW - © 2019 The CW Network, LLC. 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. 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. The villain never lived up to his original hype as a faceless, uncatchable killer who was basically a meta Jack the Ripper.
The show was always going to struggle with tying up the Cicada plot, largely because everything about it was pretty much terrible. 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.īut 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. 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.