The Flash season 1, episode 7, “Power Outage,” tried to fake us out with the loss of Barry’s powers, but it didn’t work so well.
Power Problems
The episode starts with a flashback from 10 months ago, when the accident and storm happened. Some idiot decided to climb a power line when the accelerator explodes, and gets electrocuted and falls off.
At the crime scene of the week, there’s a dead body and it was electrocuted. Cisco manages to ID the victim, and it turns out someone actually used his ID to access a power grid in the city. Who’s responsible for it? The idiot who got electrocuted, of course! Barry ends up in a fight with the guy, who electrocutes him and actually ends up slowing Barry down when he gets shocked. He can’t run away from the guy but eventually the guy (who’s feeding off Barry’s electrical current/energy) gets enough and stops. Barry then tries to get back to the lab but realizes his speed is now gone.
He finally gets back to the lab so they can figure out what’s going on, and they say they have to run tests to figure out if it’s permanent. It isn’t though, so no worries (not that they know that).
Cisco says the guy who took his powers is named Faruk, and as he says this Faruk ends up visiting the lab to talk to Wells. They won’t let him in, obviously, so he siphons the electricity from the lab and forces his way in.
Barry needs his powers, and Wells has a theory: He needs a jumpstart, so they decide to use a generator to get enough wattage to do so. But before they start, Barry goes to talk to Faruk and see if he can just talk it out. Obviously it doesn’t go well, so he gives up and goes to the treadmill while Wells goes to deal with Faruk. How? Wells visits Tony (the last guy they captured) and offers him his freedom if he kills Faruk. As naive and young as Tony is, he agrees and fights Faruk, but dies in the process.
Caitlin turns on the treadmill that shocks Barry with basically a billion watts, and luckily it doesn’t kill him: It gives him his powers back! It took a while, but it definitely worked. Barry gets his regeneration back but not his speed, because he doesn’t believe in himself. Caitlin helps him and tells him there’s a reason the lightning chose him, and that gets Barry to believe in himself and get his powers back. He ends up fighting Faruk, who tries to suck Barry’s energy again and actually ends up dying because he sucked too much.
Tick Tock
During all of this power outage stuff, William Tockman (The Clock King) is going through a prison transfer at the precinct and manages to get out of his cuffs, and takes everyone there hostage (including Iris and Joe). Eddie manages to not get caught up in the midst of it and ends up trying to take a shot at Tockman. But of course Tockman is wearing a bullet proof vest and shoots Eddie in the arm, which almost makes him bleed out.
Tockman’s demands were for a helicopter, and when it arrives he decides to take Iris with him. Joe fights for her, and tells Tockman to at least let her tell Eddie goodbye since he won’t make it. When she does, she takes Eddie’s gun and manages to shoot Tockman and get everyone in the precinct out of their deadly situation.
Creepy Wells
Throughout the episode Wells is being his creepy self and goes to his secret room to enter new voice logs about Barry. After he logs his latest information about Barry at the beginning of the episode he goes and speaks with him alone. Wells tells Barry that in exchange for letting him fight crime they agreed to let them research him, and Wells wants to research his speed.
Why? Because Barry’s speed is a huge factor in the headlines that we saw from the future. When Barry lost his speed for the short amount of time Wells went to his room to look up references to the Flash and there were none. That doesn’t last long, though, because in the end Barry gets his powers back and he actually ends up being faster than he was before. Wells then realizes that Barry’s connection to humans is what makes him so fast in the future.
Then the episode ends, as it always does, with Wells being creepy – again. He goes to the makeshift prison in the particle accelerator and takes blood from Faruk’s body, because he wants to figure out why he was able to steal Barry’s powers.
