The Flash S01E17: "Tricksters"

And here I thought I would just get to talk about how awesome it was to have Mark Hamill back as the Trickster and then call it a night!

"Tricksters" was a busy episode, but still a pretty fun one. At times, the episode's impulses of hamming it up and paying homage to the 1990 The Flash series clashed with Barry's concerns about Harrison being involved with Nora's murder and the FLASHbacks regarding the...origins, I guess, of "Harrison Wells," which ended up giving us a lot of tricksters in an episode with two already bearing the moniker. It made for an occasionally discordant episode, but it also had really solid pacing thanks to Andrew Kreisberg's script and Ralph Hemecker's direction (he also directed "The Man in the Yellow Suit") that the episode moved at a nice enough clip that I didn't mind the tonal mishmash too much.

The first half of "Tricksters" worked as really nice love letter (or extended fanservice, if you're feeling ungenerous) to this series's predecessor, right down to the Trickster's warehouse's shutter door having a similar painting on it from the episode "The Trickster." However, it was a love letter if you only knew "Tricksters" was doing it. I loved all the sly nods to the earlier Flash series, fitting as Hamill originated the TV version of James Jesse on that series. Even Joe's line "Like Jesse James but twisted" is a paraphrased line from the '90s series!

So I grooved on those little references, but they're also things that worked even if you didn't know that they were in-jokes, which is really how I like these sorts of bits to go. Too many overt references to the earlier series might've isolated viewers unaware of the history "Tricksters" was playing with, lessening everyone's fun. So the homages also functioned as nice bits of set design that told us what kind of psycho James Jesse was 20 years ago and gave gentle mocking of Hamill in a really embarrassing unitard that he wore with gusto back in the day.

If the nods to the old Flash weren't registering, then it's likely you only picked up on the Star Wars gag to explain why Jesse selected Axel (Devon Graye) to be his heir and the fun little The Silence of the Lambs riffs during Barry and Joe's first meeting with Jesse. Again, good in-jokes for those who will pick up on it—though I found the "I am your father" line a little too on the nose, personally, and I say that as a Star Wars fan—but still worked to give the episode both some real fun and some stylistic pleasures. When these sorts choices get made, it avoids a piling up of references for the sake of references and instead serves the episode.

Sad truth is that I've never really cared for Hamill's work in Star Wars, and the less said about Corvette Summer the better. After he put Star Wars behind him, however, he loosened up a lot. He's great as James Jesse in the 1991—it's an unself-consciously bonkers performance that laid the foundation for his voicing of the Joker in various animated projects for the next 20 years—and he's great as James Jesse in 2015.

I think it's best to compare it to what Wentworth Miller is doing as Captain Cold. Miller loves to chew that scenery, and I've discussed how it feels like Snart is performing Cold as a villain in a way that ends up making Miller's performance seem like a performance. It's great and interesting to me, so that's not a dig at all. Hamill veers the other direction here, playing up the crazy and the venom over the "schtick stealer" in a way that is totally convincing for Jesse to be feeling that way—Hemecker's staging of Jesse in his cell really helped this along, too, between Hamill's blocking and the lighting choices—except that it was all just sound and fury to get everyone off his trail. It's a performance that you don't know is a performance, and that's very sly work from Hamill.

The ultimate plot of the two Tricksters—robbing a bunch of rich folks at a campaign gala—was a little underwhelming, but it also generally keeps The Flash's pattern that its villains don't have really huge ambitions. I guess it was just more underwhelming in the sense that it wasn't, well, flashier. Poisoning folks with champagne isn't visually interesting, so while the kinetic bracelet bomb was a nifty idea, I wanted something nuttier with two Tricksters at the helm there.

That leaves us with the episode's other tricksters, namely Eobard Thawne and, well, "Harrison Wells," I guess. Given the episode's emphasis on bait-and-switches, I understand why the show opted to have this reveal occur in this episode, but it still ended up feeling out of place and giving the episode perhaps a little too much to do.

As I skimmed the comments that you all left regarding "Rogue Time," I noticed that a few of you felt like Barry turned a too quickly on Harrison, and I couldn't agree more. This episode doubled down on it in ways that really demonstrated that giving Barry's suspicions one more week to develop would've benefitted everyone, including the FLASHbacks we got here. Don't get me wrong: I love a Barry and Joe Talk as much as anyone and I like the idea of Barry lying to Harrison, but I wasn't buying it just yet. And, like I've alluded to, the comparative heaviness of it just didn't gel with the rest of the episode's emphasis on chaotic but silly violence.

I acknowledge it's a delicate balancing act as we're about to enter the final run of episodes of the season, and the The Flash is a show that loves giving its audience lots more information than its characters have to ratchet up the tension, so they want to get us all amped up about what's to come. This is just a bit of corner-cutting, albeit an understandable one given the reveal/confirmation we got in "Out of Time."



All that being said, I can and did still enjoy the sheer WTF-ery of the early parts of the FLASHback—loved the slo-mo fight sequence a ton—as Reverse-Flashed revealed himself to be...Matt Letscher?! The dad from The Carrie Diaries?! Billy Chambers from Scandal?! It was a very fun wrinkle in how the show has presented Harrison/Eobard, and the whole body-snatching/Lost Ark body-melting thing was cool and gross AND explained the difference in the blood at the crime scene! I guess the question now is...do I call him Harrison, "Harrison," Eobard, or some amalgamation? Harobard? Eobarrison? I sort of like Eobarrison.





LEFT IN THE DUST



– Oh, right, Mason! So, after THE TV NEWS made a big deal about Mason being missing last week, Iris tried to get Eddie to look into it, and Eddie's all, "Eh. He's a reporter, he's cool on his own." It was all very weird, but made up for by the fact that Eddie does not appear totally on board with the whole "We're lying to Iris to protect her" stuff. That alone gets him some props from me. Also: Eddie knows Barry's the Flash and I wish that scene ran a bit longer so Eddie could ask, "Lightning psychosis, huh?"

– "I can smell them in your pocket."

– "My Mona Lisa. My Breaking Bad Season 5. They gave me cable in prison so I would stop killing the guards." Really, Jesse? Season 5? C'mon. Season 3 is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better.

– That speech from Eobarrison about Barry channeling the speed-force was great, and nicely edited together. I wish that speech has been what sent Barry over the edge on suspecting Harrison because that would've made a lot more sense.



– Nope, don't like Eobarrison. Never mind.



– Many, many thanks to MaryAnn for filling in for me last week! Given her undying love for Mark Hamill, she's probably a little annoyed I didn't take this week off instead! For this reason, I offered MaryAnn some space to share her thoughts on this episode:

Oh. My. Glob. Mark Hamill was fabulous, of course, and we rewatched the "I am your father" scene at least three times tonight because it was just so cheeky and silly and despite the gravitas that dominated the rest of the episode, at no point did "Tricksters" feel particularly "dark." You know, except for the part where Eobard Thawne totally murdered the real Harrison Wells and his wife, stole his body or DNA or something crazy and comic-booky, and got to work launching STAR labs a few years early in order to get home or kill Barry or probably both and probably Cisco too. It was such an intense episode that I momentarily forgot to be sad because I would have liked to see more of Mark Hamill playing a lunatic and less of "phasing" being a thing because that particular speedster power has always been kind of dumb to me. I loved almost everything about this episode though, and I'm sad that we're going on hiatus AGAIN and I'm sad that my CW channel isn't HD because...I don't know why. It's 2015 and I live in a moderately sized city. Gimme freaking CW in HD, dammit.

– As MaryAnn mentioned, The Flash is taking a quick breather next week, but after that it should run uninterrupted to the finale! I'll see you all back here on April 14 for the homestretch of Season 1!





What'd you think of "Tricksters"?



