Catching Up: The Flash Episode 204, "The Fury of Firestorm"

Okay, Flashophiles, there's a lot of story happening in this episode that pre-empts a lot of the "How do we take down the bad metahuman" game. However, it's definitely worth the time -- and the closing 30 seconds is probably the biggest OMG moment since Harrison Wells stood up from his wheelchair and showed us his newspaper from the future.

For the past few episodes, Martin Stein (Victor Garber) has been declining in health. With Ronnie Raymond out of the picture, there's no stabilizing factor for his half of the Firestorm persona, so he's breaking down. Doing some of their patented superspeed research, Team Flash finds two people affected by the Dark Matter Explosion of two years ago in such a fashion as to be potentially a match for Stein to merge with -- which isn't creepy at all.

The two potential candidates are Jefferson 'Jax' Jackson (Franz Drameh) and Henry Hewitt (Demore Barnes). And for everyone who didn't do a quick DC Wiki search on the names, I'll save you the hunt: Henry Hewitt is the civilian identity for a Firestorm villain called Tokamak. Jackson was a high school quarterback with a shot at college when the DME hit and injured his leg, while Hewitt is a physics professor. Naturally, Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) thinks Hewitt is the better match -- two professors can work together, right? -- but she's unaware of his sealed criminal records for violence! And Jax, he wants no part of this crazy scheme.

Joe West (Jesse L. Martin) continues to deal with the arrival of his estranged wife, Francine (Vanessa Williams), who has come back to see her daughter, Iris (Candice Patton). Iris doesn't want her back, so Francine confesses that she's dying. This is almost enough for Iris to give her another shot, but she's an ace reporter now and background checks are kind of her thing. (Note to Caitlin Snow: get Iris to run your checks for you in the future.) And because she knows Francine is hiding another secret, she stands by her decision that Francine should hit the bricks.

Joe's also working a new case -- a robbery, reported by Dr. Tina McGee (Amanda Pays). But it's not so much what was stolen, as who stole it: Dr. Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh), who's well and truly dead, except for that bit where he's alive and walking. Joe tells his partner, Patty Spivot (Shantel VanSanten) that she can't tell Barry about any of this, because Wells is the man who killed Barry's mother. But Patty -- well, she's not that great at keeping secrets, and she's also a bit preoccupied with reports of a Man-Shark roaming the back alleys of Central City.

Okay, let's speed things up here a bit. Stein and Hewitt can't merge, but it does awaken Hewitt's latent abilities. Jackson does merge, and when Hewitt sees what he could have been a part of, he blows his top. It takes the combined abilities of The Flash (Grant Gustin -- remember him, the titular star of the show?) and Firestorm to put Tokamak down, after which they presume his abilities have been burned out, so they throw him into their homemade holding cells until he agrees not to talk about what he knows. Which is another word for extortion and wrongful imprisonment, but they're the good guys, so we have to trust that they know what they're doing.

Things to take away from this episode:
-- There's a new Firestorm in town
-- Iris has a brother that Joe doesn't know about
-- The Harrison Wells from Earth-2 has a plan
-- Jay Garrick must have a place to stay because he's nowhere around
-- KING SHARK!