The Flash recap: Cisco faces a crisis of confidence amid a murder mystery
The Flash isn’t wasting any time putting Cisco in the team’s driver’s seat. In last week’s episode, Barry chose Cisco to succeed him as team leader (isn’t Iris technically the team leader?), and in this week’s episode, Cisco is prematurely thrown into the position when Barry and Iris speed off for a pre-Crisis vacation, leaving him behind to deal with a murder mystery.
At the top of the episode, Breacher, well, breaches into Cisco’s bedroom to break some terrible news: Gypsy was murdered tracking a criminal named Echo. For the record, Breacher drops this bomb on Cisco while the latter is in bed with his new girlfriend, Kamilla. Thankfully, though, the show doesn’t go the most obvious route and use this to drum unnecessary drama for Cisco and Kamilla’s relationship. In fact, Kamilla is more than happy to help Cisco investigate who killed his ex. We love a mature romance!
Cisco and Kamilla check out the crime scene, where they meet Earth-19 collector agents. The head agent, Zack Zeal, rubs Cisco the wrong way and immediately becomes a lead suspect in the murder. To confirm who did it, Cisco uses the recovered bullet casing to create an artificial vibe that would show Cisco and Breacher what happened right before Gypsy died. Plot twist! The vibe reveals that Cisco (or someone who looks like him) murdered Gypsy. At the same time, Kamilla successfully uses S.T.A.R. Labs’ satellites to track the murder weapon and finds it in Cisco’s workshop.
Breacher initially goes into full rage mode, but he backs down when he realizes that Cisco must have done it because he’s suffering from breach psychosis, which is what happens when someone suppresses their powers. And there’s evidence that Cisco has been sick because he started sleepwalking. Even though Kamilla refuses to believe he could do this, Cisco agrees to hand himself over to the collective.
Before that, though, Kamilla confronts him about losing faith in himself, pointing out that this started the moment Barry asked him to become the team’s new leader. (Another sign of Cisco’s confidence crisis? He created a decision-making algorithm based on Barry’s passed decisions as leader, clearly forgetting all of the times Barry has screwed up). That’s enough to shake Cisco out of his funk and he decides to fight back and figure out who was really responsible for Gypsy’s murder. That’s when he discovers that someone hacked into his white noise machine. Not only that, but he recognizes the code, which leads him…
Right back to the crime scene, where he finds Echo, who turns out to be one of Cisco’s multiverse doppelgängers. This evil version of Cisco specializes in hacking the multiverse and essentially giving people fake identities by swapping their fortunes with someone else. It doesn’t completely make sense, but whatever. What matters is that Valdes is unsettlingly creepy and cold as this alternate version of Cisco; it’s a true performance flex on his part. Short story shorter, Cisco outsmarts his shadow self and traps him in a forcefield so that the collectors can arrest him.
Throughout this entire case, Cisco was concerned about how Kamilla would feel about him putting so much energy into finding Gypsy’s killer, especially because he’d been trying to muster up the courage to tell her he loved her. In the end, he gets over that and finally says those three words and eight letters to her. Even though part of him feels guilty for moving on from Gypsy, he knows it just means he’s just very much in love, as Iris and Barry point out once they return.
While Cisco was busy learning to have faith in himself, Joe was busy teaching Nash how to have faith in others. After Barry alerted Joe to Nash’s presence on Earth, Joe started tailing him, which leads to both of them getting trapped in the tunnels beneath Central City. As their oxygen starts running out, Nash becomes desperate to escape, while Joe simply chills because he has faith that someone, his team or the cops at the precinct, will notice he’s missing and come looking for him. In the end, he’s right, because Elongated Man shows up and frees them from the tunnel.
Newly freed, Nash, who learned that the Monitor has made contact with Team Flash, promises to show them how to save Team Flash. For some reason, I don’t think we should trust him.
Overall, “Kiss Kiss Breach Breach” was a pretty okay episode. I loved that Valdes had an opportunity to shine even though I wished there was a bit more to the story. I just didn’t feel Gypsy’s off-screen death was a particularly strong inciting incident. But, I’m very happy that the episode reflected on how much Cisco has evolved over the past six years and left him in a place to continue said growth, especially in his relationship with Kamilla.
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