The Flash season 2, episode 12, “Fast Lane,” aired tonight, looking at two very different family dynamics: the West and the Wells families.
The core of the episode focused on Iris and Joe’s attempts to integrate Wally into their family. While Joe attempts to be Wally’s friend rather than his father to gain his trust, Iris slips naturally into the concerned older sister role. She knows how dangerous Wally’s drag racing hobby is and tries to convince Wally to stop. Wally, though, says he can quit any time he wants — which is what most addicts say.
Iris goes out of her way to look out for Wally, threatening the man who runs the drag races and coming to two different races. However, it takes until Iris is injured at one of the races and a pep talk from Joe to get Wally’s priorities in the right order.
When Joe needs to meet Team Flash, Wally volunteers to sit with Iris at the hospital. He confesses to her that drag racing reminds him of going on drives with his mother when he was young; they didn’t have much money, but the drives were a way for him to bond with his mother. His addiction to speed suddenly makes a lot more sense, as he’s been dealing with his mother’s sickness and death.
This is also clear foreshadowing for Wally’s eventual destiny in the comic books as Kid Flash and later The Flash. If he is going to continue fulfilling his need for speed and drag racing is out of the picture, then racing through the streets as a speedster would be a quality substitute.
The other family being explored in this episode is the Wells family. Harry’s actions are being driven by Zoom’s kidnapping of his daughter. He drains two percent of Barry’s speed and gives it to Zoom. But rather than continue stealing Barry’s speed silently, he confesses — which shows he’s developed a degree of loyalty to the team on Earth-1. While Team Flash feels incredibly betrayed (especially Joe, who is ready to kill the man threatening his surrogate son), Barry’s kindness and understanding are at the forefront.
He reminds the rest of the team that they would probably do something similar in Harry’s situation. Cisco even revealed The Flash’s identity to Captain Cold when he threatened Cisco’s brother and no one blamed him. So why would they turn their back on someone in the same situation, especially someone who has become part of their team? They’re going to send Harry back to Earth-2, but he’s not going alone.
It’s a bit jarring that Barry’s loyalty to someone that has admitted to harming him is so strong this week when last week his loyalty to Patty, someone who has done nothing but love and support him, was brought into question when she provided him every opportunity to get her to stay in Central City and he didn’t take them. Where Barry’s loyalty and kindness are on display in full force this week, they were seemingly absent in the last two episodes.
This week also featured a metahuman of the week, Tar Pit, who was targeting those who tried to kill him by dumping him into a vat of boiling tar on the night the particle accelerator malfunctioned. It’s not a particularly interesting story; it mostly just moves along the other family-oriented stories, giving The Flash reasons to run and realize he’s losing his speed as well as cause the accident that injures Iris.
A couple of highlights from this episode are Cisco’s newly developed metahuman app and Barry and Caitlin calling Felicity the best hacker on the planet when Cisco wants them to call him the hacking master.
Watch a promo for the next episode
