With the mid-season finale under wraps it looks like Barry and the team are safe for now.  For the past three weeks we have seen Team Flash pushed in all different directions.  This episode took all the cast in different direction with how to deal with Alchemy and Savitar. There were two climatic scenes that didn’t deliver as well as they should have.  The reveal of Julian being Alchemy wasn’t a big surprise even with his Indiana Jones backstory.  The glimpse of the future where Barry witnessed Iris being killed by Savitar is something we have already seen with the story line of Arrow last year.  Unfortunately when sharing writers between shows we tend to get similar stories.  A major positive from this episode was the lack of a throw away meta-human.  Listed below are the three biggest observations from last nights episode. 

1.  With everything that has happened on this show I really want to know what in the world Barry does in the future that causes all of this hatred and distrust.  There are three major events that are in the works that will result in affecting Barry’s life: 1. Barry will do something to Reverse-Flash which will cause him to hate Barry so much he will travel back in time to kill his mom.. 2.  The message he leaves for the Legends makes it seem that future Barry will do something in the future to lose Barry’s trust. 3. Savitar is driven by hate from Barry’s actions in the future.  We keep getting small clues that Barry’s actions in the future has profound affects in his life and the others.  I am holding hope that we will get to see the big Crisis on Infinite Earths play out on these shows.  Maybe this will be the event that causes the chain reaction to Barry having his life changed so much.

2. After this episode it seems that this season is building up to a big showdown with Savitar in the season finale.  My guess is that there will be a big team-up of speedsters of Barry, Wally, Jay and Jessie Quick.  If Savitar is truly more powerful than Barry it will take more than one speedster to take him down.  With the team up of Barry and Jay we saw that wasn’t enough to take him down.  Neither was the team up of Barry and Wally.  With Savitar being the destroyer of all Speedster’s it will be important for all of them to work together to take him down.  With the big cross-over done with this will be the big event to look forward too.

3.  The glimpse of the future showed that Barry will endure another major loss in his life.  Just like Oliver’s journey becoming the Green Arrow Barry has endured major life events as he becomes The Flash.  Both men have witnessed the death of their parents and other people close to them and those events have profoundly impacted their lives.  With Barry witnessing the death of Iris by the hands of Savitar it will be an event that haunts Barry and make him second guess every action he does.  Although Jay Garrick expresses his advice that the future is not set in stone you could see in Barry’s face that this was an event that won’t be something that can be avoided.  Seeing this future sets up the second half of season three that this will be the event that it will be building up too.  Although we have seen events like this before with Barry’s mom, this one feels different since it is Iris.

Overall since this show started to focus on Savitar it has been going in the right direction.  The teaser at the end of the episode with Iris dying at the hands of Savitar sets up a tense second half of the season.  While this season has had its ups and downs it looks like the writers are on a roll with how the previous couple episodes played out.  It was also great to see John WeslelyShip and Mark Hamill reprise their old roles as The Flash and The Trickster.  While some of the younger audience may not have understood the significance of that scene but for an older guy like me who watched John Wesley Ship play The Flash it was cool for me.