DC Recap Round-Up 3, Week 2: Running Out of Time Fast!

19 Oct

Welcome back! We got a full slate of recaps to do, with The Flash, Supergirl, Black Lightning, and Batwoman. Let’s see if things have improved for our heroes since their respective season openers (SPOILERS: they don’t)…

“A Flash of the Lightning”

With the news Barry has not very long to live, of course Barry and Iris try to think of a way to save Barry AND the multiverse without sacrificing the former for the latter. He tries to time travel to a day after his vanishing, but can’t due do a field of antimatter blocking time travel any further, which is not good. So, with the help of Jay Garrick from Earth-3, he gets to see beyond the antimatter field, and, it’s even worse. He sees all the possible futures, and they all end with his Earth being destroyed, except one…and it’s the one where he dies stopping it! As you can imagine, this puts Barry into a massive funk.

Luckily for him, he gets pulled out of that depression long enough to help out on the big metahuman case of the week. A metahuman ne’er-do-well is busted for murder, seeing to use a superpower she shouldn’t have. I’ll just save you the trouble of explaining it and give you the short answer: it’s her evil cousin. Also, Ramsey seems to have murdered someone with his new goop powers, and unknowingly turned said victim into a zombie! Messing with dark matter will tend to do weirdness like that.

“Oh crap.”

–So, if you have been watching Arrow this week, you would know Oliver Queen has seen that deadly antimatter wave up close, just as it destroys Earth-2! I have no clue if Harry Wells and Jesse Quick were around when that happened, but if they were…that’s going to be a whopper of sad news for Team Flash.

–Cecile looks like she’s leaving the District Attorney post to start representing metahumans. I mean, after the mess she gets herself into protecting Allegra, maybe best to consider a career change.

–Killer Frost learns about art at Kamilla’s photo exhibit, how to be an art critic, and how to feel guilt about being way too harsh in your art critique.

–There is that weird runner that Barry is weirded out that Jay is now married to…a woman who looks like his dead mom!

–Its a brief thing brought up and left aside, but some secret organization was responsible for Allegra’s cousin being turned all evil. I’m sure we’ll learn more later.

–The speed of light is faster than Barry. Fun science fact for you all.

–“Calling all White Walkers!”

–“Lady Gaga usually works for me.”

“Stranger Beside Me”

Our heroes find J’onn after his encounter with his brother, only he doesn’t know anything about ever having a brother. Kelly helps here with that fancy new Obsidian technology, and we learn there’s a reason why he doesn’t remember a brother: his mind was messed with! His brother betrayed his people to the White Martians, and then got exiled to the Phantom Zone as punishment, which is a pretty big thing to have wiped from your brain. Also, J’onn’s brother has plans for him, and that involves sneaking around his extended Super family. That ends with J’onn’s brother escaping, but maybe finding a way into getting J’onn to help him through that Obsidian tech.

Speaking of Obsidian, Andrea Rojas is making work at CatCo difficult for Kara by forcing her to turn up on time (gasp!) and stay on schedule (double gasp!). And Andrea also is not cool with Lena using her technology without permission for Lena’s weird experiments…and would be a little more surprised if she knew what we discover earlier, in that Lena’s the one who kidnapped Eve Tessmacher! Lena wants to cure people of their evil impulses via technology, and when Andrea puts the kibosh on that approach, Lena decides to upload her Hope AI into Eve’s brain! Well, that’s one way to cure Eve of her wicked ways, but man, that is SO MUCH the wrong way…

“I did not think there was this much extra space in my memory palace!”

–James has had some job offers since he left CatCo, like working with the Smithsonian and…running for Senate? That’s a comically massive spectrum of options.

–Brainy believes getting Nia lots of her favorite food at a constant rate will keep her interested in him. Well yeah, that’s not wrong, but best to limit food to enough for at least one person in this plan as opposed to the entire office!

–Kelly is apparently very allergic to blueberries, which is a good thing for Alex to know in the relationship eventually.

–Did we really need a creepy cover of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”? I don’t think we did.

–Kara’s new reporter buddy may be a power seeker, but he also works at a soup kitchen, which…I’m sure there’s more than altruistic reasons for that.

–“Well, no time like the present to create the future!”

“The Book of Occupation, Chapter Two: Maryam’s Tasbih”

Best to just break down how the Pierce clan is doing by a character by character basis. Jefferson is convinced the ASA is up to something shady, and his private chat with that Muslim girl from last episode (who is also dying) only confirms that. Lynn is trying to hide Jefferson’s growing power level from Agent Odell (more on why that might be pointless), and when hearing Jefferson basically interrogated one of her dying patients, well, things are a bit icy between husband and wife right now. Anissa ends up with that odd metahuman community we ran into last season, making a very tense agreement to leave the metahumans she freed with them, and dealing with Markovian mercenaries. Yeah, there’s a huge amount of Markovian agents in Freeland now.

Jennifer busts up a fight at school, and maybe inadvertently reveals she has powers, which can’t go over well with that agreement with Odell. Lala is back and taking control of what’s left of The One Hundred gang, and also trying to be a more sympathetic gang lord when it comes to giving out food to the needy. And remember Khalil, who we thought was dead but was just being kept on ice by Odell and the ASA? Well, he gets resuscitated and brainwashed to be an ASA hitman, and the first target he has to kill to prove the brainwashing works is…Khalil’s own mother! And it works. Damn.

When you go to sleep knowing both of you were right in that argument, and oh so wrong too.

–Anissa does seem to be letting her new hero role get to her head, because she gets real bossy with the Purdi down in South Freeland over their arrangement. They didn’t have to save you, you know.

–That mean ASA Commander has his post where The One Hundred used to hang out, and now he’s just arresting detectives out of Henderson’s precinct under suspicion of being metahumans. But does he get a little disgusted realizing Khalil is being sent to kill his own mother, or is it just me?

–Speaking of odd inconsistencies, I’m starting to wonder what Odell’s big plan is, as it seems to be all over the place. He’s protecting the Pierce family, BUT he’s sending a metahuman to kill one of their own parents. Just odd, is all.

–“Do you ever run out of weird ass tech?”

“The Rabbit Hole”

Kate believes the evil Alice is in fact her presumed dead twin sister Beth, and she’s out to prove it, despite everyone in her orbit not believing that. She tries to get that knife she took from Alice to be DNA tested at Crow Security, only to have it nabbed by Alice’s gang (or that’s what we believe at first…). Kate takes a big risk by sending a message to Alice to meet and find out the truth, and unfortunately, Kate also told Sophie about this, so when the sisters meet, they take Alice into custody instead of killing her. Before Alice can be taken to Arkham, she lets Kate know she sent her turncoat Crow soldier buddy from the pilot to go kill Mary at her clinic! Alice just can’t stand sister competition!

After solving that problem and saving Mary, Kate has to then rush to save Alice, after her police van is blown up and sent into the river. In the confusion, Alice disappears and Kate is left wondering if any of what Alice said was true. And that theft of the knife we learn was not orchestrated by Alice, but by Kate’s stepmom, Catherine! Does she know the truth or just a little bit more than that?

Oh, that river water can not be clean to be trading off mini-breathers like that…

–So, a piece of trivia I forgot to mention last week: the voice of Vesper Fairchild is Rachel Maddow, who also contributed an introduction to one of the Batwoman comic book collections.

–So Catherine has investigators searching for Beth and never found her, then Jacob maybe lies about finding Beth’s remains to get young Kate to stop looking for her sister? I mean, we got some insidious and/or questionable stuff going on here.

–That Crow soldier working with Alice we last see about to be interrogated by Kate in the bat suit, which…I wonder how that will turn out.

–Luke becomes helpful after all, helping resuscitate Kate after that attempt to save Alice in the river. Maybe he can teach her more about all the Bat-gadgets now.

–So, based on that ominous note and package at episode’s end, did Alice just say she knows Kate is Batwoman?

–Sophie says she’s totally done with Kate, but…I don’t know based on how long it took her to answer that question of whether they were done from Kate. Done-ish?

–“You know what this is?” “A Bat-weapon?”

–“If I was going to dress up to save you, I would dress up as Wonder Woman.”

NEXT TIME: The Team hunts a super zombie on The Flash, a spider-woman kills on Supergirl, Jefferson is needed to stop a deadly metahuman virus on Black Lightning, and our heroine finally gets a wig for her bat suit on Batwoman!