'The Flash' Season 6 Episode 17: Emotion is Barry Allen's strength and he used it best to defeat Mirror Iris
Season 6 of 'The Flash' has been perhaps the most emotionally turbulent time for Barry Allen(Grant Gustin), as well as for the viewers of course. Barry has always been an emotionally impulsive superhero, to the extent he has let his feelings take control of him. Yet, it was this season, where this side of him reached its peak. Crisis, dying powers, fractured relationships all contributed to this.
While the intense action sequences and taking down baddies remain as gripping as ever, it's the complexities of relationships that have shone through the season. Before the multiversal Crisis, we saw Barry struggling to come to terms with his impending death in the 'Crisis On Infinite Earths'. He had to prepare his family and team for the devastation that was to come. He knew he could not win against it. He had to save the world, even if it cost him his life. The first few episodes were peppered with tearful moments between him and Joe West (Jesse L Martin), Iris West (Candice Patton) and Cisco Ramon. Barry struggled with these thoughts and almost succumbed to the dark side for a while, when Bloodwork (Sendhil Ramamurthy) managed to infect him. Yet everything turned out well and he didn't die in Crisis. He was alive and with his family.
But not for long. Iris was zapped into the Mirrorverse and till the latest episode, Barry had no clue. It took him to be kicked out of his own house to realize that something was off with his wife. In the episode titled 'Liberation', Barry realizes that he has been living with a mirror clone of Iris. With his dying speed, he struggles to fight her, but is unable to do so. And then finally, he discovers that Mirror Iris wants just one thing, to be alive. To be her own person. So, he stops fighting. He tells her that he knows that she doesn't have to do any of this, because she isn't just a cold mirror clone as she has been made to believe.
He says, "I won't fight you anymore. You were made from Iris. A part of her is inside you. I know that wasn't all a lie. I've seen you be kind, and I've seen you laugh. You can be more than this." He asks her to choose, and she says that she chooses herself. She tells him to go get Iris. And then, unfortunately, Eva McCulloch kills her, and she bursts into pieces.
You don't need speed and power to kill your foes, sometimes you can just kill them with kindness which is what Barry inadvertently did.
'The Flash' airs on CW Tuesdays, at 8 pm.