Not much is resolved at the end of “Success Is Assured,” not that anyone involved with The Flash is to blame. As we’ve known for weeks, production shut down before the season could be completed, and we may never know how the final three episodes would have played out. The creative team presumably has a lot more time to think about that now, and whenever the show returns for its seventh season, at least some portion of it will have to be devoted to completing the Mirrorverse saga.
Despite all that, season six ends on a high note. Finally freed of her mirror prison, Eva proves to be a formidable villain, with the power to pass through not only mirrors, but glass doors and television monitors. Evidently, any remotely reflective surface will do. That’s bad news for Carver, who we learn never made any attempt to rescue her after she was pulled into another dimension, instead choosing to sell her tech to the highest bidder. Since then Carver has assembled his Black Hole team of supervillains, the Charlie’s Angels trio of Dr. Light, Ultraviolet, and Sunshine, while also gathering blackmail material on Sue Dearbon’s parents and becoming a high-tech arms dealer. Not many would miss him if he died, but it’s up to Team Flash to protect him anyway because that’s what the good guys do.
Or is it? At one point, Barry has the opportunity to turn Carver over to Eva’s team in exchange for the safe return of Iris from the Mirrorverse. He takes a little too long to think about it for Nash’s liking, so he intervenes and whisks Carver to safety before Barry can decide what to do. Old friend Harry Wells appears to Nash long enough to tell him the Barry he knew would never take that deal, but this one admits to considering it just so we can get another dose of that time-honored superhero trope about killing always being the wrong answer. Ah, but what if Barry knew that Carver would be dead by the end of the episode, anyway? Of course that could never happen, because that would involve time-travel and…okay, let’s just back away slowly.
The decision to protect Carver proves to be a good one if only because it gives us one of the wackiest fight scenes in the show’s history. It’s an all-out super-powered showdown once Eva has turned the light villains against Black Hole and Team Flash battles them at McCulloch Tech in a red-tinted sequence that looks like a misprinted comic book page. My guess is that the editing team had a lot more time than usual to work on this one (given their suddenly empty schedules), and they decided to get freaky with it, mixing in split-screens like Brian De Palma on a bender. The techno-funk take on a retro ’70s action show score only enhances the weirdness, along with some of the best stretch effects of Elongated Man’s tenure. After last week’s endless angst, it’s a relief to see The Flash let the good times roll.
Unfortunately, the good times are cut short. Barry proves he’s still the man Harry thought he was when he steps in the way of the mirror shards heading for Carver, but it’s all for naught. Eva uses her powers to send the shards straight through him and into Carver, killing him anyway. She spares Barry and his team, because unlike most of the Big Bads in the show’s history, she’s not a scenery-chewing force of evil. It’s not hard to see things from Eva’s point of view, which is one reason it’s disappointing we won’t get to see this play out anytime soon.
Here’s hoping that when The Flash returns, this story is allowed to play out for a few episodes, rather than getting an abrupt resolution that clears the decks for the next season’s storylines. Maybe this is the show’s most improbable twist yet: a Big Bad who hasn’t worn out her welcome by season’s end.
Stray observations
- The official CW publicity shots credit the costumed Eva as Mirror Mistress, although Cisco presumably spent the week in Atlantis and was unable to bestow her with an official moniker. Speaking of which, can we please have a season seven episode set in Atlantis?
- I think I laughed harder every single time I saw Danielle Panabaker sitting on that couch. All those weeks spent setting up her pregnancy leave, and now…oh, well. At least Carla and Frost finally got some mother-daughter bonding time.
- Speaking of semi-parental relationships, it appears things are finally okay between Nash and Allegra after he let her borrow a gemstone she used to make her sister relive the worst memory of her life. So that’s…sweet?
- In the Mirrorverse, Iris battles her neural dissonance and develops some control over her new reality, only to refract and shatter into…well, who knows? This one is “To Be Continued,” but nobody knows when. I hope we meet back here when it does.