Just when you thought you had it solved, a “Time Bomb” explodes on The Flash. Last week, Cicada OG, aka Orlin Dwyer (Chris Kline) took the meta cure with every intention of giving it to his niece Grace Gibbons (Sarah Carter). That’s when Cicada 2.0 showed up, taking Orlin and hiding him away. By the end of the episode, we learned that Cicada 2.0 is actually a grown-up Grace from the future. This messes up everything Nora (Jessica Parker Kennedy) thought she knew and was trying to fix. So what now?
RELATED: Read the Latest Recap of THE FLASH, “Failure is an Orphan”
The first thing Nora does is run to Eobard Thawne (Tom Cavanagh), but he has no answers. They knew messing with the timeline would have dire consequences. Thawne says it’s too late, he can’t help her anymore. His last piece of advice is for Nora to tell her father everything.
Nora goes back to 2019. She goes with Joe (Jesse L. Martin), Cecile (Danielle Nicolet), and Barry/Flash (Grant Gustin) to the hospital to ask around about Dr. Ambres. She apparently kept to herself and close to Grace. No one knows anything else, or if anyone else visited Grace.
Orlin wakes up and meets the future version of his niece Grace. She says she came back to work with him. She wants to figure out a way to get his power back. First, she has an errand to run.
Sherloque (Cavanagh) has finished translating Nora’s journal but isn’t getting any relevant information from it. The team cleaned up the lab and got the satellite up and running. They turn their attention back to finding Cicada 2.0.
Time Bomb
Team Flash gets an alert that someone was at Starchives, a storage facility of all of the dark matter instruments and things that they’ve collected since Team Flash day one. Cisco (Carlos Valdes) thinks that someone took something really bad. Iris (Candice Patton) and Ralph (Hartley Sawyer) look around inside the facility as Cisco and Sherloque look around outside for Thawne’s Time Sphere. Cisco and Sherloque find it in the woods outside the building, but Iris and Ralph also find it inside the Starchives. Someone in the future used it to travel to 2019. That someone has to be Cicada 2.0.
Cicada breaks into the police archives. The guard on duty tries to stop her and she uses her dagger to kill him, takes a file and leaves. The file is from 2017 about a meta attack at an ATM machine that killed two people. They think Cicada is going after that meta. Barry asks Cisco to vibe the crime scene and he finds that the two victims were Grace Gibbons’ parents. The team finally figures out that the new Cicada is Grace Gibbons from the future.
Back at Cicada HQ, Grace is angry that the police did nothing to catch the meta who caused the explosion. There is charred dark matter residue on some of the debris. Grace has future technology that gives her the ability to track the meta who left it. Orlin questions what Grace is up to. She explains that in her time, the metas are a plague. Now that she’s with him, they can change the future by completing their mission. She wants to kill every living meta, starting with the one who killed her parents.
The Past Always Catches Up
Joe’s team tracks down a meta named Vickie Bolen (Catherine Lough Haggquist) at her daughter’s soccer party. She is jumpy at first but then explains that she didn’t intend to blow up the ATM. When she touched the ATM, she saw sparks and felt something turn on inside of her. She got scared and ran away because it looked like she tried to rob the bank. She doesn’t know that two people were killed. Barry tells her that she is being targeted for her abilities and they want to put her and her family in federal protection. Vickie refuses because her family doesn’t know about her meta abilities. And she wants to keep it that way. She asks them to leave, but Joe says they are staying.
Meanwhile, Sherloque continues his investigation and finds the schematics on the time sphere. He finds the phrase “the timeline is malleable.” Hmmm…where have we see that before? He goes the Starchives, Sherloque looks around, trying to get into the mindset of Eobard Thawne when he was pretending to be Dr. Harrison Wells. He finds his wheelchair and a secret compartment under the arm. There is a small flash drive hidden in the compartment.
Sherloque goes to Gideon to watch the flash drive he found in the chair. It’s a video of Eobard talking his way through is research. He determined that as the body is made up of DNA so too is time made up of its own source code. That code is the language that Nora writes in. Eobard cracked the code and the timeline is malleable and his knowledge is intractable. Sherloque sees the source code and has Gideon compare the handwriting to Nora’s journal. Gideon confirms the handwriting belongs to Dr. Harrison Wells…aka Eobard Thawne.
Secrets Don’t Make Friends
Vickie Bolen didn’t know about the two victims at the ATM because the mayor at the time wanted to keep all meta activity on the down low to avoid causing a panic. Nora questions why Barry got upset that Vickie didn’t tell her family. It’s her choice, but Barry thinks it’s dangerous to keep secrets between family, even if it’s keeping them safe. It robs their family of making their own decisions. He says secrets are like walls and you can’t really know someone with walls between you.
Nora gets an intense headache and her eyes turn dark. She can see Grace outside of the building. She’s coming for Vickie. The speedsters run into the party and pretend to be there for a special appearance. Flash takes the kids outside with Joe, as XS tries to get Vickie to a safe location. Cicada is already inside and attacks XS and Vickie.
Flash returns to help, telling Cicada that her parents’ death was an accident. Vickie grabs a soccer ball and powers it up. Her daughter sees her in trouble and runs to help. Vickie throws the ball at Cicada and creates a blast of power that hits the girl. With Cicada down, XS and Flash are able to get Vickie and her family out of harm’s way.
Not Meant to Be
Team Flash is at the hospital with Vickie and her family. They check in on young Grace (Islie Hirvonen) who’s still in a coma. Cecile feels her intense hate. Barry explains that Grace could hear Orlin and felt his hatred. Meanwhile, Vickie’s family want nothing to do her because she kept the truth from them. Barry tells Nora that they did the right thing, but she says things are much worse now.
Grace returns to Orlin, angry that she didn’t get her parents killer. Orlin says he read the file and her parents death was an accident. Grace refuses to believe that. Her head starts to glow so Orlin suggests they go see Dr. Ambres. Well, they can’t because Grace killed her because Dr. Ambres took away Orlin’s powers. Orlin says he wanted the cure for himself and Grace. She doesn’t believe him. He says he only wanted her to be happy and would do anything to save her. She comes up with a new idea and leaves, pushing Orlin out of the way.
Social Media Official
In other Flash news, Cisco and Kamilla (Victoria Park) make their relationship SMO-Social Media Official. Ralph meets them at Jitters and asks when the team gets to meet her. He also throws out some very vague hints about their superhero gang, making Cisco very uncomfortable.
Later Ralph texts Cisco to meet him at his office. He set up a job interview for Kamilla with the Central City Citizen. Ralph is very excited about adding Kamilla to Team Flash. Cisco…not so much. He gets angry with Ralph for trying so hard to expose the team. Kamilla and Iris catch their interaction, but they play it off well. Iris does hire Kamilla and Cisco takes her out to celebrate.
Ralph tries to apologize to Cisco for interfering with his relationship. He thinks it’s because Cisco is embarrassed by him. Cisco says he’s not embarrassed. Kamilla is unaware of what they do at STAR Labs and that he has meta powers. Being with her is easy and makes him feel like with a normal guy with a normal life and a normal girlfriend. Ralph says he can respect that, but how long can Cisco keep his worlds separate? If he keeps Kamilla out his superhero world, then he will always be turning off a part of himself from her.
Cicada Showdown
Grant Gustin as Barry Allen and Jessica Parker Kennedy as Nora in The Flash — “Time Bomb” — Photo: Katie Yu/The CW — é 2019 The CW Network, LLC. All rights reserved
Back at the hospital, Vickie and her daughter are better. Nora watches and it makes her want to talk to Barry at that moment. Cecile screams. She can feel Grace again. Nora can see her outside of the hospital. Cicada throws her dagger at the hospital and the Flash pushes Vickie out of the way. Cicada has Vickie’s husband and is threatening to kill him if Vickie doesn’t surrender. Joe and Cecile take Vickie’s daughter to hide her. XS takes Vickie and is instructed to keep running. The dagger follows them. Team Flash is alerted to the problem. Cisco and Ralph leave to help.
Flash goes outside to try and reason with Grace, but she is determined to kill Vickie. She lets Vickie’s husband go, he is human after all. Her mission is still to kill all metahumans. She attacks Flash, rendering him powerless. Cisco and Ralph meet XS in an ally and open a breach to send Vickie to STAR Labs. They try to breach to the hospital, but Cicada stops them.
Cicada is about to kill Flash, but Orlin stops her. He says killing isn’t the way to make the world better. His hate was wrong. She doesn’t have to continue down that dark path. She lets Flash go. Orlin pleads with her to let it go before it’s too late…like it is for him. She says he’s right, it is too late and stabs him in the back. Cicada takes her dagger out of his back and leaves. Orlin asks Flash to save his Grace and then dies.
The Truth
Team Flash meets back at the lab and assesses the situation. Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) joins them and explains that she ran some tests on Grace at the Tannhauser research site. Grace has some kind of binding quality with the dark matter in her head, making her power extremely dangerous. She can telekinetically manipulate any dark matter…including the dark matter in the members of Team Flash. And Nora’s psychic connection to Grace may be because of the time that Nora spent in Grace’s brain.
Grace disappeared. Vickie and her family are in federal protection. That’s all they can do for now, so the team decides to go out for a drink. Nora freezes up though. Cecile senses that she wants to tell them something. Before she can even speak, Sherloque reveals his findings from his investigation of Nora West-Allen.
Nora’s motives were pure and innocent at first. Nora did her best to not interfere with her parent’s lives but left behind a tiny footprint. Her motives changed when she helped Flash destroy the Enlightenment satellite, but why? He says someone told her to do it, someone, who’s been writing in her journal and wrote: “the timeline is malleable.” The same person who has been directing her every move, making puppets of the rest of the team. So he can alter the timeline for his own purpose. Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash. Her teacher. Her partner.
The team is shocked. Barry knows everything Sherloque said is true and looks at Nora with tears in his eyes. He grabs her and puts her in the pipeline. Barry is angry and starts to walk away. Nora apologizes for lying to him. Barry says he’s sorry too and walks away.
RELATED: Read All of THE FLASH Season 5 Recaps Here!
Thoughts
It doesn’t matter the intentions, or how long it takes to tell the truth, the truth should have come from Nora, not Sherloque. I’m a little angry with Sherloque for showing off when he told Nora’s truth, but at the same time, Nora wasn’t going to do it herself. She had plenty of opportunities since she arrived. Now…what’s next? How do Barry and Iris get past this? How will Nora’s betrayal alter her own timeline? And what will she do to try and fix it? SMH Nora…
News Editor, Senior Contributor, and Press Editor. Coordinate breaking news, trailers and press releases. I also contribute reviews, recaps and interviews. Creator of the Indigenerd Wire, a column dedicated to the Indigenous creatives in pop culture.
GGA's resident Indigenerd, a little bit rez, a little bit classy...with a love for all things Star Wars, zombies, science fiction, and Indigenous. My ultimate goal is to start my own podcast.
