The Flash Season 5: 6 Ups & 2 Downs From 'King Shark Vs. Gorilla Grodd'

1. Forced Conflict

The introduction of the metahuman cure brought with it the opportunity for the show to delve into deeper territory by relaying the importance of giving people a choice. This is something that, up until this point, had been handled with the subtlety that it needed to be, with subtext and debates always highlighting that choice is what truly matters. Unfortunately, Barry's actions in this week's episode undid all of that subtlety.

After the Scarlet Speedster injected King Shark with the cure to save Cisco's life, turning the creature back into human form, he received a ton of backlash from both him and Caitlin, who rebuked him for taking the choice away from King Shark. This was unbelievably problematic because he did it to stop his best friend from literally getting eaten alive, and it's almost as though the writers saw this defense of Barry coming, so they wrote a throwaway line of dialogue for the character at the beginning of the episode where he wanted to "rethink his approach" to capturing Shark, suggesting that this was his intention all along.

Not only was there no grounds for his sudden change of heart, it completely contradicted everything he ever stood for. Moreover, moment of weakness or not, we knew that he said it, but Cisco did not - so for the character to randomly accuse him of always feeling that way, even though he was unaware of Barry's earlier internal crisis, was reaching a little too far.

This was intentionally done to vilify Barry from the beginning in order to once again get the message across that choice is important. We get that. What we don't get is Barry's out-of-character behaviour simply to justify that point. As a result, the hoops of believability we were expected to jump through and the forced conflict ultimately took away from what could have been a really meaningful debate.

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