WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for "The Speed of Thought," the latest episode of The Flash Season 7.
The Artificial Speed Force has given The Flash an all-new superpower: speed thinking. However, as revealed by "The Speed of Thought," Barry had to pay a heavy price for it. The more he used his speed thinking, the less emotions he experienced, causing him to make one heartless decision after the other. Soon, he almost became a supervillain in his own right, leading his team to try and stop him.
When "The Speed of Thought" opened, Team Flash was still reeling from the death of Nash Wells, who sacrificed his life -- and the lives of the entire Council of Wells -- to give Barry his speed back. As they memorialized the Wells of the Multiverse, Barry confessed to his adoptive father Joe West that he felt his heart was to blame for his friends' suffering. "Ramsay infecting me, Eva using a copy of Iris to my emotions -- lately, it feels like my heart is my enemies' greatest weapon," he lamented. Soon, though, Team Flash would realize his emotions were also one of his greatest assets.
Following the memorial, Barry re-teamed with Cisco to think up a new way to save Iris, Kamilla and David Singh from the Mirrorverse -- and this is where his speed thinking manifested. When Cisco pulled out a whiteboard to explain the problems he faced, Barry experienced a flash-forward that revealed all of Cisco's deductions to him. He finished Cisco's sentence for him, then had another flash that completed Cisco's calculations, rattling Cisco.
True to his character, Cisco quickly pulled Barry into the speed lab to run from tests, where he made a startling discovery. "His neurons are firing at super speed. Synaptic connections are off the charts! The quantum computers can't even keep up processing his results!" he crowed, and they arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously: the Artificial Speed Force had caused it.
"It didn't just give you your old powers back. It gave you a new one!" Cisco confirmed. "Enhanced cognition by way of a Speed Force booster shot! Barry can think fast now." He put Barry's speed thinking to the test by using a quantum ball, which Cisco described as completely "unpredictable" once in motion. When Barry announced he was ready, Cisco let it fly, while Barry predicted everything in the lab it would hit -- and then caught it without looking. With that, he announced he knew how to rescue their friends from the Mirrorverse.
Immediately, Barry got to work and devised a way to rescue Iris, Kamilla and Singh. What's more, he deduced locations of the remaining Black Hole warehouses, including the one Mirror Mistress was sure to hit. He rushed there with Cisco and Frost to get the mirror particles they'd need to break their friends free, but he didn't fill either of them into a key component of his plan. For it to work, though, Mirror Mistress would hit and injure Frost, which is exactly what she did. He even stood by and let it happen, while Cisco leapt in to help their friend. "You let her get hit," Cisco realized in horror.
Together, they whisked Frost back to the speed lab, where Barry devised a cure for her wound and injected it -- untested -- into her arm despite Cisco's protests. The cure worked, but Cisco was disturbed by Barry's actions and explained to Frost that Barry had intentionally let her get injured. "Let me explain," Barry said coolly when Cisco announced he could have stopped that from happening. "There was a .0002% chance of the tachyon enhancer getting damaged in that scenario. I couldn't risk that. I also knew I could reverse any ill effects Frost received from Eva's blast."
From there, Barry set his mind to distracting Mirror Mistress long enough for them to pull Iris, Kamilla and Singh out of the Mirrorverse. Again, he made a move without consulting the rest of his team when he hacked into McCulloch Tech and broadcasted footage of Eva's death, outing her to the world as a mirror duplicate. This sent Eva reeling, spiraling into her existential crisis as the world looked on. While this sufficiently distracted her, Cisco and Frost were flabbergasted by both his cruelty and his inability to see how this could make things even worse for them. "I'm not sure emotionally wrecking an already wacked-out villain was 'efficient,'" Frost pointed out.
"Historically speaking, when our enemies are upset -- which is exactly what I accomplished -- they make mistakes," Barry shot back. He then moved on to the next stage of his plan, prepping the portal, leaving Frost and Cisco with the realization that something was wrong with him.
Unperturbed, Barry set to work on the portal. After a series of calculations, he came to a devastating conclusion. "We cannot save all of them. We have to choose," he confirmed to Gideon. He then ran through a full scenario in which he relayed this information to the team, explaining, "Simply put, the longer the person is in the Mirrorverse, the more dark matter photons are required to pull them out. Kamilla and Singh have been trapped for less time. Therefore, they can be retrieved together. With Iris, it would take everything we have to retrieve her."
However, in this scenario, the team voted against him. They wanted to save Kamilla and Singh, while he thought saving Iris was the logical choice: "Iris has knowledge of Eva, which could give us a tactical advantage." As a result, Barry chose not to fill them in on this part of the plan and forged ahead on his own.
As Barry prepared to save Iris, Cisco came to a few conclusions of his own and discovered a problem with the Artificial Speed Force. "You remember how Thawne used negative emotion to stabilize his Speed Force machine? Well, since we didn't want to make the same mistake, we used an inert substance -- an argon-xenon hybrid that would generate no emotional fallout," Cisco told him. "But I think that was a mistake. Yes, the ASF gave you increased cognitive function, a thousand times over, but it has done the exact opposite to your emotional response."
Barry pushed back on that, insisting the team was safer this way. Cisco launched into a spiel about how his heart made him human, only to stop short when he spotted Barry's calculations on a monitor nearby. Barry explained his scenario to Cisco; Cisco claimed he would never have acted this way. In response, Barry informed him that his emotions made him weak, so he couldn't see Kamilla and Singh were "expendable" in the grand scheme of things.
That was the last straw for Cisco. He summoned Allegra and Frost, with all three of them attempting to put an end to Barry's plan. Cisco pulled a speed-neutralizing weapon on Barry, while Allegra armed up with Nash's tech and Frost injected herself with Velocity X to give herself temporary speed powers. In the end, though, their plan failed. "You lost this fight before it even began," he informed them coldly, as the quantum ball he threw knocked all three of them out.
Uninhibited, Barry exacted the final stage of his plan. What he did not count on, though, was Iris. When he appeared to her, he told her he couldn't take all three of them back, even as she struggled to help them in their Mirrorverse sickness. "Barry, they could die. They need you to save them," she said, stunned. Nevertheless, he continued to insist, with Iris refusing to leave their friends behind.
When she didn't come willingly, Barry attempted to force Iris to leave. "Your resistance is destabilizing the portal's energy," he informed her, even as she resisted and screamed for him to let go. Eventually, the pull was too great, and Iris tumbled through the portal. Almost immediately, she collapsed to the ground and began to seize, choking on her own breath.
Iris' physical distress seemed to break the Artificial Speed Force's hold on Barry. He shook free of his reprieve and bent down to help her, only to realize he didn't have the knowledge required to help her. Worse, the people who could help -- his friends -- were still unconscious from their fight just moments prior.
With a devastated cry, Barry launched lightning at the Artificial Speed Force, shorting it out. As a result, the speed was pulled from his body, neutralizing all of his powers -- including the speed thinking. He fell to his knees beside his wife, who lay twitching and writhing in pain on the floor, and the episode rolled to its close.
Although Iris is free of the Mirrorverse, Team Flash has several conundrums ahead of them. For one, Barry might have shattered the trust his team has in him after this stunt, where he actively fought against them and sacrificed two of their friends to bring his wife back. For another, Mirror Mistress is still active, and she is perhaps more unhinged than ever. More immediately, Iris is suffering ill effects from leaving the Mirrorverse, while Barry is unable to run for help or receive assistance from their friends. Hopefully, next week's episode will pick up where this one left off, as Team Flash remains in dire straits.
Airing Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, The Flash stars Grant Gustin, Candice Patton, Jesse L. Martin, Danielle Panabaker, Carlos Valdes and Tom Cavanagh.
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