The Flash Season 5: 5 Ups & 2 Downs From ‘Failure Is An Orphan’

2. Prioritising The Main Narrative

An episode that primarily focuses on The Flash finally getting his hands on Cicada, utilises the metahuman cure and teases more of Nora West-Allen's scheming with the Reverse-Flash? Where have you been all our lives? No, seriously, what has taken so long to get something of this calibre, because it feels like we've been waiting ages.

Well, after last week's magnificent one-off spectacle showed us that the metahuman cure does work, this week was all about the main narrative as Barry attempted to administer the cure to Cicada by gaining the villain's approval. As a result, it wasn't all about killing metahumans and, instead, we ended up getting a heartfelt monologue from the Scarlet Speedster, who attempted to relate to Dwyer through the love of his own daughter. Surprisingly, it worked.

Speaking of that daughter, it was Nora who was responsible for orchestrating the episode's plot as, following a meeting with Reverse-Flash that revealed she had to up the ante before "something broke through", she pushed for Barry to stop Cicada sooner than ever. However, not even that would have been possible without Joe and Cecile, who interrogated Dr. Ambres and convinced her to set up a meeting with Dwyer - bringing us full-circle and back to Barry's speech.

The beauty of 'Failure Is An Orphan' is that every single action led to a reaction of some kind. Every scene moved the overall story forward because the whole episode neatly tied all of this show's main plot threads together. There were no side arcs or secondary storylines as every moment revolved around the team's Cicada predicament and, as a result, we got what was perhaps the most important episode of the season so far.