This week on The Flash it’s time for the annual Gorilla Grodd episode! Barry is still grappling with all the change that has happened since Crisis. He can’t find his parents’ graves, Cisco is out of town, Chester and Kamilla are the ones on the coms, and to top it all off, Hartley Rathaway a.k.a. Pied Piper is back and now he can fly! It’s a lot of change happening very fast.

At S.T.A.R. Labs, Barry is trying to improve his Gideon device. Chester tries to help but Barry doesn’t want his help and snaps at him. A little while later, Barry tries the device again and passes out. He wakes up in a cage looking at Caitlin and Eobard Thawne who look at Barry like he’s a science experiment. When Barry sees Grodd looking back at him as his reflection in a bucket of water, he realizes that he is in Grodd’s mindscape. Grodd tries to convince Barry that he has changed and he is good and wants to live in Gorilla City instead of in a coma at A.R.G.U.S. But Barry doesn’t trust him after everything Grodd has done over the past six years. Did we really think Barry is going to forgive Grodd for an army of gorillas marching on Central City? Grodd tells Barry that the only way out is through the gate guarded by Solivar. Grodd eventually frees Barry and lets him try to escape but Solivar easily defeats him.

Back in the real world at S.T.A.R. Labs, Kamilla, Chester, and Killer Frost find Barry unconscious. Frost realizes that Grodd’s mindscape can’t handle both Barry and Grodd’s consciousness and it will crumble and collapse, killing them both. Chester realizes that he did this to Barry when he was trying to help fix Gideon. Ashamed and embarrassed he runs off. Frost gives him a blunt talking-to, as she often does, telling him all of Team Flash have put Barry’s life in danger at some point but then they have to fix it. Chester says he doesn’t deserve a second chance because a teacher once told him “people like him” don’t get second chances. Frost pauses, acknowledges that this is about his race, and tells him everyone deserves a second chance and gives him the opportunity to fix it. 

Back in the mindscape, after Grodd gives a long speech about how much he has changed and letting go of the past, Barry decides to trust him. The two of them return to the gate ready to fight Solivar again. Barry and Grodd fuse minds, I won’t even pretend to understand how they did that, giving Grodd Barry’s speed and Gorilla Grodd Flash defeats Solivar. Chester successfully tweaks Gideon enough to separate Barry and Grodd’s minds and they return to the real world alive and unharmed. Barry is back with his team and off to fight Pied Piper again and Lyla lets Grodd go to Gorilla City.

While all of this is going on, Iris is still trapped in the mirror with Eva. But it turns out Eva is an excellent actress. Eva seems to know how to get out of the mirror but she wants to keep Iris trapped there. She reaches through the mirror and burns her and Fake Iris’s forearms. She did that to buy some time. It appears as though she created Fake Iris and is controlling her in the real world. 

The episode concludes with Sherloque, with the Reverse Flash red eyes, confronting Nash before Nash talks to Allegra about his daughter/ex-employee that “He is coming.” 

Featured image from flickeringmyth.com