Well, this was a surprise. Unless the episode counts I’ve seen for this season are wrong, this is the penultimate episode of The Flash Season 8, but you would not know that from watching the ep itself.

Not only is this a standalone story, it’s such a classic style Flash standalone story, I feel like it had to be a deliberate throwback (return of Singh helps with that). Ignore the cast changeups, and you could slot this into Season 1 or 2 without missing a beat. We even open on Barry doing random acts of good around the city, which makes him a little late for a social engagement, which is something we haven’t seen in a long time.

And it made for a nice little time! I am kinda concerned that we didn’t touch on any of the ongoing subplots until the very last scene, given that we’ve only got one ep left to give this season a satisfying ending. But taken on its own merits, this was a good, old school Flash adventure.

And I appreciate that they handwaved away not giving Grant Gustin any old man makeup. I don’t see any way they have the budget to do that well.

P.S. Huh, I’d been seeing online that this season was only going to be 17 episodes, but I just checked Wikipedia, and it says there will be 20, so four more after this one. That shut my mouth.

Question of the Week: Overall, do you prefer when the Arrowverse shows focus on standalone adventures, or do you prefer stuff focused on the big story arcs?