The Flash S06 EP01 spoiler review

It feels like it has been forever but the show that I watch every year has finally come back with a really fun episode that sets up a few things for the season. If you ready my reviews of season 5 you remember I wasn't too thrilled about how that season ended up. it started with a lot of promise and I did like a lot of the components of the season, but overall it just fell flat and I found myself uninvolved in a lot of what was happening. This season is starting out on a good note, and hopefully it stays that way!
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We pick up shortly afer the end of season 5 with Nora's message being destroyed, then flash forward to present day where Barry is in a heated race against Godspeed! After capturing the villain they determine that it is just another mute copy with August Heart nowhere to be found, letting the viewers known what the team has been up to, and setting up a Godspeed story line for further down the season. I think it was a really fun way to open the show and bring in a villain that fans definitely wanted to see more of, and to let fans know that they will see even more of that villain down the road!

We get snippets of where everyone is. Joe and Cecil still have their baby, Cisco has brought his girlfriend fully into the mix of the team, Ralph is away pursuing a missing persons case, Caitlin is chillin, and Barry and Iris are both still dealing with the loss of Nora. At the same time, a new character named Ramsey Rosso is attending a funeral for his mother who died of HLH, and Catilin attends having known Ramsey from medical school. We get a few interactions between the two of them, with Ramsey ultimately revealing that he potentially has created a cure for HLH and only needs dark matter to trial it which STAR labs has. Caitlin refuses, stating that it could turn people into metahumans, and this is the biggest problem I have with the episode. This man has potentially created a cure for a cancer, plans to do test trials and everything before administering it to the public, but Caitlin is worried about the potential to turn people into metahumans. Every drug and medication has potential side effects, and last season had a huge arc focused around creating a metahuman cure! So if the HLH cure turns them into metahumans, give them the metahuman cure and now they're fully cured of everything! Ramsey was rightfully annoyed in my opinion.

Meanwhile, Iris loses Nora's future jacket to a sudden black hole, followed by another black hole nearly swallowing Caitlin in the coffee shop. They investigate, and this leads them to Chester Runk who seems to be some kind of internet video personality who builds different science machines in his garage. One such machine turned his mind into a black hole leaving his body in a catatonic state, definitely giving us one of the wilder "villains" of the show, and definitely a step up from Gridlock of season 5. This is the main storyline of the episode, and it comes to a head in the final moment when a massive black hole cracks open above Central city and the team comes to grips with how to handle the catastrophe. The solution ends up being that Barry is given a beautiful new suit, establishes that he has super durability thanks to a speed force aura, and runs straight into the black hole to bring Chester's consciousness back to his body. All this while Cisco turns on the Flash Gordon theme by Queen for an epically orchestratel scene! With his consciousness back in his body, Chester bursts back to life with an explosive, "Whats up party people!?" before quickly orienting himself to his surroundings and freaking out about the Flash's presence. I really like his energy, and Cisco said that Chester must remain in the energy chamber for 4-6 weeks in order to stabilize, which means we'll have him around for another 4 to 6 episodes! I have no qualms with that, the character seems to be very fun so far! Wrapping up the other points of the episode, Barry reveals that he found Nora's lost jacket while in the black hole, and he and Iris come to acknowledge that they will never have the version of Nora that they lost, even if one day they have a daughter. Caitlin contacts Killer Frost who has been out of the loop for the whole episode whenever Caitlin needed her, and turns out Killer Frost just felt like she was only being used for fighting and wanted to live a life just like Caitlin. I feel like the Killer Frost stuff is getting a bit hammy and separated from the kind of Killer Frost I know from the animated movies and comics; especially with her stated desire to drive every so often.

We catch up with Ramsey a couple times with the episode. We see him paying for an energy gun off of the black market, and while it looks as though he may try to break into STAR labs it turns out that the gun runs on dark matter and he uses that for his cure trial. I thought that was a really neat show of character in that he's a villain who goes through the most passive routes possible at the start to achieve his goal, he didn't jump straight to breaking into a building or anything. Having 99% of the biomarkers for HLH, Ramsey injects himself with the cure and while the biomarkers begin to disappear, his arm bleeds over with a TON of blood that he then hurls towards the camera with a loud scream; thus, is the beginning of his villainous career.

Finally, the episode ended with Barry and Iris being visited by the Monitor and being informed that he is going to die on December 10th of this year, rather than having 5 more years to prepare like they previously thought.

Like I mentioned before, I thought this episode was a very fun start to the season. We got a very unique villain who looks like he'll be sticking around as a character for the season, and I really like him so far. He's very charismatic! Ramsey was the other character we were introduced to and I felt like he was also handled well, definitely has a temper, but is just trying to do good and trying to cure cancer is one of the more altruistic motivations a villain has had on the show. It'll be interesting to see how he devolves into an actual villain. I didn't care much for the Killer Frost stuff, but the Barry and Iris stuff I really enjoyed because the death of their daughter really should have a huge impact on them! Both of the characters responded appropriately. The Godspeed stuff was just a small portion mentioned at the beginning of the episode, but definitely obviously set up for a future portion of the show, and potentially even the focus of the second half after Crisis? This episode dealt with Boodwork's origin, Godspeed's set up, and the overall plot line of Nora's death with Chester's black holes, yet, the episode juggled them pretty well and it felt like a fulfilling hour of the Flash! I'm excited for this show to be back, and to be one episode closer to Crisis on Infinite Earths!