5 Point Discussions – The Flash S4.21: “Harry And The Harrisons”

The team has to track down Amunet Black to help foil The Thinker’s plan! And Harry gets in touch with the Council of Wells to recover his intelligence. Remember, if you like this article and 5 Point Discussions, please share it on Facebook or Twitter! It really helps. And if you’ve got any comments or questions, please hit me up @SageShinigami.

1. With Harry losing his intelligence, he makes an attempt to return to the Council of Wells in the hopes they can solve his problem. But once one of the members realizes he’s lost his intelligence, they eject him from the Council and refuse to help altogether. We’re supposed to pretend this was a big deal, but in reality the Council was completely worthless to begin with: they were assembled to help Harry figure out a way to stop DeVoe and his plans, and their collective genius failed. DeVoe’s got a dozen different meta powers, all the tech to accomplish his goal, and the only thing they did was show how many different versions Tom Cavanugh can play of the same person.
But even that runs dry, as Cisco gets the bright idea to contact more Wells for a new council. This one includes Sonny Wells, a mob guy from Earth 24 who believes in the power of positive thinking. The playboy Wells from the original Council, who got ejected for being too…playboy-y. And a French guy, Harrison “H.P.” Wells, who likes to write poems.  This council is even more useless than the last, partially because the writers at this point have obviously given up, and also because everything’s so focused on Team Flash outside characters can’t do much of anything this late in the game.
They give him the advice to look within and think about what they might do if they were DeVoe, setting up a plot point for next episode/the end of this one.

2. Katee Sackhoff is back for one more episode as Amunet Black, and her natural charisma means she still manages to work with the awful, awful material she’s being given.  This time they need her because someone has to destroy the satellites DeVoe wants to send into the sky, and since they can’t use technology thanks to Kilgore’s ability to control technology, Killer Frost isn’t around, and they’ve forgotten both Barry and Cisco have long range attacks.
Amunet’s unique metal is capable of destroying the satellites, but first they’re forced to hunt her down. They work backwards by first figuring out her old job before she got her powers, and learn she was a flight attendant with no prior criminal record. And somehow gaining meta abilities took her from being a humble flight attendant to running a human trafficking ring and being a murderer. Uhm. Maybe superpowers do make you evil on this Earth.
They find her working as a bartender in an underground gambling ring, laying low after the deal with DeVoe went bad. She agrees to help, but she needs a larger supply of her metal, which forces them to hunt down her former associate Novak. Novak was attempting to sell all of her special metal, which leads to Amunet attempting to kill him for the betrayal.  Caitlin convinces her she’s better than that (even though Amunet literally tried to sell one of her closest friends into slavery), and though they just narrowly manage to convince her not to take a life, they still decide to let her go. If she weren’t a guest actress, I’d be positive she was going to kill someone eventually, and if she did it’d totally be their fault–this is the third time they’ve allowed her to just get away.
They tried incredibly hard to make Amunet as uncool as possible in this episode, though.  Hardened meta criminal running an empire? Nope, not anymore, she’s a bartender. Does she have a complex network of friends? Well, no–she was a freaking flight attendant before, so she has just the one guy, some creep with a snake in his eye. And most of this episode she’s more like a twisted version of Mary freaking Poppins. Even flies away in a tornado of metal after helping Team Flash while they watch her leave.

3. Caitlin also wants Amunet because she believes Amunet can help her re-awaken Killer Frost. It’s actually hard to imagine the last time a character tried so hard to get rid of something only to want it back right after getting it back. Like, Killer Frost was responsible for betraying the team and threatening the lives of several innocent citizens in Central City–if she’s gone that’s not a bad thing.
Still, we finally learn how she managed to separate the personalities in the first place.  When Caitlin first found her, Amunet handed her a “splicer”  meant to separate Killer Frost from herself. But, because nothing on the Flash is ever simple, the splicer didn’t work–not really. It acted as a placebo to split the two personalities. So it…kinda worked. And if the cryo energy is still inside her, then Killer Frost probably is too. Her powers were inside her all along! …No, seriously, Amunet actually tells Caitlin that. One of the worst, most cliche lines of dialogue ever created and they just played it straight. Okay then.

4. After Harry consults the new council of Wells, he decides to try a more emotional approach to discover why DeVoe hasn’t just struck yet. He’s spanked them every time they battled him, so he’s clearly not bothered by Team Flash. And he’s got the tech and the powers–there’s nothing really stopping him from doing it at any moment. But, Harry realizes it hasn’t happened yet because DeVoe has somehow lost the one thing he does claim to care about: his wife Marlize.
This finally inspires the group to hunt down Marlize in the hopes of using her to help them take him down. Presumably, with only two episodes remaining, this will be the main goal of next week’s episode.

5. The bookend parts of this episode is a plot between Barry and Iris, as Iris decides that if DeVoe is going to do something to affect the entire planet, it might be a good idea if they let everyone else know about it. So she writes an extensively researched article, bringing back the plotline from several episodes back where she said she wanted to be a reporter, and develop her life separately from Barry.
Barry struggles with whether or not they should tell the world such damaging news, and it’s easy to see both sides in this situation. Barry’s right in believing there’s a good chance that if they tell everyone it’ll cause national panic. And Iris is right in that the world deserves to know and decide for themselves. Even better, they don’t come to verbal blows over this–Iris trusts Barry with the information and whether or not they should go public, and eventually Barry trusts her and his fellow man.
She releases the article and the end of the episode is them getting numerous updates on DeVoe’s whereabouts, and now I have questions. For one, why would anyone believe Iris?   She’s not the only person who has had meta conspiracy theories in the wake of the Particle Accelerator’s explosion. And if she’s publishing this with her name attached, how do people not instantly connect her with the Flash? Amunet Black did it so embarrassingly quickly that it was like the show was pointing fun at how stupid secret identities are. And whether they believe her or not, what’s to stop them from constantly trolling? So this information could be useless, setting them back to square one. So many questions, but only two episodes left until they’re all answered.
The Flash airs on CW, Tuesday nights.