![]() ![]() “The Present” feels like a thematic culmination of the entire season thus far. It’s the Holiday season and he’s hurting after the events of Flashpoint, a time-rift that resulted in this being his first Christmas without his brother, and poor Cisco gives in. ![]() ![]() See, just as Julian claims to have seen visions of his sister, telling him to find the Stone in order to resurrect her, Cisco begins seeing his brother Dante, telling him to unleash the power of the ancient artifact to bring him back from beyond the veil. Savitar may look silly, but everything about him feels truly worthy of a speedster adversary, like the way he man handles the great Jay Garrick, tossing him around faster than he can even process, though he’s defeated when Barry puts the Stone back in its ancient box. No one’s ever seen Savitar save for Barry, but as soon as the Flashes of Two Worlds come up against him, Jay gets more of him than he can handle. Savitar, named for the Hindu God of motion, is believed to be the first speedster, granted powers by the Philosopher’s Stone and, much like Zoom, the kind of speed demon who challenges others like him. back to Earth-1 for both physical backup and some good ol’ Speed Force exposition. After helping Jay Garrick out with a buck-toothed, Joker-esque Trickster (Mark Hamill’s on-screen reunion with a Flash played by John Wesley Shipp, a full twenty-five years later!), Barry brings Flash Sr. While Julian/Alchemy went down easy, Barry had to hop on over to Earth-3 to enlist another Flash’s help for Savitar. The first step to both trusting him and getting him to trust The Flash? Barry Allen finally reveals himself to Julian as the Scarlett Speedster. Rather than an outright villain, he’s more akin to Joey King’s Magenta, someone in need of help as a malicious metahuman force takes control of them and causes destruction. As it turns out, Julian isn’t in control, or even fully conscious when he functions as Alchemy, an extension of the Speed-God Savitar. Tom Felton’s Julian Albert was revealed to be yet another secret bad guy a few weeks back, but through the reveal of his tragic backstory – a dead sister he wanted desperately to resurrect – we learn about the accidental unleashing of the Philosopher’s Stone, and the true nature of this masked, Tobin Bell-voiced villain. Sitar strings mark the show’s journey to India, a severe cliché that doesn’t even have the decency to put an Indian face on screen as it draws from Hindu mythology, but it does give us an instantaneous release-valve for any frustrations surrounding Alchemy. are fighting yet another unidentified speedster from somewhere else in space and time as he sends metahumans-of-the-week to do his bidding, but the storyline changes several key iterations in ways that feel rooted in character, making it one hell of a pre-hiatus entry despite its shortcomings. Meredith is off on Earth-53 again, just as Barry & co. The Flash is beginning to get a tad repetitive, both in its overarching structure and its approach to the micro-arcs that comprise it, but its mid-season finale “The Present” offers a handful of interesting variations on the familiar. ![]()
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