The Flash Season Four Premiere Recap: “The Flash Reborn”

The biggest problem with “The Flash Reborn,” is that it feels like a retread of the Supergirl premiere yesterday.

Everyone is still grieving from the loss of Barry last season, but no more than Iris who is still reeling from the loss of her fiancée.  Like Kara, she has become cool and efficient at her job but withdrawn from all of her friends as she tries to push down her grief.  Hopefully, The Flash follows the same suit as the other CW show and tries to brighten up this season after last year’s gloomy endings.

Back in Central City, Kid Flash and Vibe have done a decent job at keeping crime in the city down. While they’re keeping on a happy face and joking around with Joe, Iris wants everyone to just focus on work. Fortunately, a samurai demanding The Flash shows up to force the team to finally reckon with their loss of Barry. “The Flash Reborn,” spends the first half setting up Cisco to create a plan to get the scarlet speedster back from the speed force. Everyone is on board with the plan, with the exception of Iris who thinks that everyone should forget about Barry and instead try to devise a way to stop the samurai. Of course, Cisco defies that order and hunts down Caitlin for a little bit of help.

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Killer Frost seems to have disappeared in, “The Flash Reborn,” and Caitlin is working at a pretty sketchy bar. She’s monitored by a creepy criminal, but nevertheless, she gets to have a long-awaited chat with Cisco. The two former best friends decide to team up to save Barry and it also forces her to reconcile with the rest of the group. While they fix the speed cannon, it initially appears like the attempt to get back their friend failed. Iris is livid that everyone went behind her back, but thankfully it turns out that Cecile has apprehended Barry at the CCPD. However, it’s not actually The Flash, but instead, a bearded Barry who is muttering nonsense while drawing weird shapes all over the walls.

While The Flash is still incapacitated, Wally decides to don the scarlet persona to appease the samurai with little success. After he’s taken down, Iris hands herself over in hopes that it will spur the old Barry to return. It turns out that is enough to bring him back in, “The Flash Reborn,” and grabbing Cisco’s new suit on the way out he manages to save his fiancée. Unfortunately, it turns out the samurai was nothing more than an android being piloted by someone more sinister. With a new villain in Central City, it’s good that Barry is back but he doesn’t actually remember any part of his mental breakdown. Cisco was able to translate the weird symbols he had been drawing to, “THIS HOUSE IS BITCHIN'” but so far there are no clues as to what that means.

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By the end of “The Flash Reborn,” two new villains are unveiled, The Mechanic (Kim Engelbrecht) and “The Thinker” (Neil Sandilands), who are the true masterminds behind the samurai. Who are they and what exactly do they want with The Flash? Their motive is still unclear but at least Barry is now officially the fastest man alive with a suit much closer to his current comic book costume. Hopefully, The Flash will be back to its happy self rather than a lot of brooding like the past two season has been full of.