Catching Up: The Flash 213, "Welcome to Earth 2"

Yes, Flash, welcome to Earth-2, where up is down, black is white and... Wait a minute. I'm pretty sure that would be either Earth-3 or Bizarro World. Either way, the Earth-2 in THE FLASH is a pretty trippy place, where science has advanced enough to make DNA-level detection easy enough to be an app in your smart watch, but style took a sabbatical in the 1940s.

After Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh) tried to steal Flash's speed for Zoom to save his daughter, Barry (Grant Gustin) eventually forgave him and vowed to help him get his daughter back. Sealing all the breaches to Earth-2 except for one, Barry, Harrison and Cisco (Carlos Valdes) enter the breach -- aided by the speed cannon -- and slip to Earth-2. In doing so, we get glimpses of alternate worlds -- one where Henry Allen became The Flash (a nice tip of the hat to what came before), one that has Jonah Hex (who will be appearing on future episodes of LEGENDS OF TOMORROW), one with a version of Green Arrow that's decidedly different than the one we know...and one with the smiling face of Melissa Benoist flying through the air in her Supergirl costume, making this the first unofficial CBS/CW crossover of the two characters.

Oh, and the speed cannon shoots craps after they make it through, so Barry and Cisco are stuck unless it can be repaired.

While Barry and company are through the rabbit hole, where they find a nerdish Barry married -- and on the bad side of his father-in-law to boot -- and the well-publicized evil versions of Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) as Killer Frost and Ronnie Raymond (Robbie Amell) as Deathstorm, back on Earth-1 good-Caitlin and Jay Garrick (Teddy Sears) work to find a way to restore Jay's speed so he can take on the new metahuman terrorizing Central City -- Geomancer.

There's plenty to love in this episode for Flash fans, and there are Easter eggs a-plenty -- the funniest being the fact that Barry's living room not only has a land-line phone in it, but one that is limited to less than 10 speed dial numbers accessed by push-button. (But that will be overlooked by the names on the faceplate, which include "Bruce," "Hal," and "Diana.")

The most interesting bit here is what happens to Cisco aka Vibe during this adventure, which hints at just how far his powers can take him once he learns how to master them. And he may have to master them soon, because this episodes closing moments make things look pretty bleak for our Scarlet Speedster!

Takeaways from this episode include:
-- Supergirl
-- Jesse L. Martin can sing!
-- Supergirl
-- good guys are bad, and bad guys are inept
-- Supergirl

Stay tuned!