'The Flash' and the Importance of Being Felicity Smoak
Warning: This review contains storyline and character spoilers from this week’s episode of The Flash.
The enormous fun that is The Flash continued apace on Tuesday night, with a mini-Arrow-crossover episode featuring the only character crucial to both shows: Felicity Smoak, played with horn-rimmed hellaciousness by Emily Bett Rickards.
Oh, the hour was about other things, to be sure. Getting Ray Palmer/The Atom over to Central City. Planting more seeds of suspicion about Dr. Wells/Reverse-Flash/Eobard Thawne. Foiling the buzzy mischief of that silly Bee Lady, who talked like an Adam West-era Batman villain (“You think you understand the sting of betrayal?”). Really, the producers just should have given this role to Eddie Izzard.
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But, truly, the text and subtext of the episode titled “All Star Team Up” was The Importance of Being Felicity Smoak. When Felicity showed up on Ray’s arm at the start of the hour, she delighted in her command of the room: “Barry Allen, are you jealous?” Felicity articulated a flaw of her own series, Arrow, when she said that she wanted to get away from the gloom of Starling City — “the mood and brood.” Looking at the long Flash faces worrying over Dr. Wells, Felicity piped up, “I thought Central City was supposed to be the fun one!”
Indeed, that is precisely what currently makes The Flash the superior show of these two.
Felicity took Barry to the coffee shop — it was like seeing Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper at Pop’s Chok’lit Shoppe — to tell him he should trust Cisco and Caitlin. That, at least, was the dialogue as written; the cameras told a different tale: Framed in a two-shot, Felicity and Barry gave off sultry sparks — there was more electricity, more chemistry, more pizzazz in that scene than a subsequent one between Barry and his supposed true love Iris.
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The fanboy highlight of the hour again belonged to Felicity when she confided to Caitlin that the reason she liked Ray is that “It’s kinda like dating Barry, but in Oliver’s body.” Bingo times three! Felicity is the brainy soulmate of all three superheroes. I’m afraid this hour spelled more bad news for the characters of Caitlin and Iris — The Flash simply has not come up with a woman with that combo of bristling intelligence and smoldering hubba-hubba required of a comic-book opus.
When Felicity left at the end of the hour, Barry gave a long, yearning stare at her back, his cute jug-ears listening for the click of her departing high heels.
I’ll let other scholars parse the particulars of “All Star Team Up.” I just wanted to get in on the record that The Flash is super-fun, but it’d be super-funner if Felicity had a twin sister. Isn’t this something Dr. Wells or Ray Palmer could engineer? If you can split an atom…
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
