Catching Up: The Flash Episode 416, "Run, Iris, Run"

When a powerful pyrokinetic metahuman shows un in Central City, Team Flash is certain they've found yet another of the twelve bus metas they've been looking for. But Erik Frye (OLIVER RICE) got his powers the same night The Flash did, and after attempting to rob a bank, he is suddenly bereft of his abilities.

The power loss is tracked down to a new metahuman, who actually is one of the ones from the bus incident: Matthew Kim (LEONARDO NAM) has the abilities to remove a metahuman's powers with a touch. But more than that, he can then place them into another person's body.

When Team Flash hunts down Matthew to protect him, Iris (CANDICE PATTON) insists that she go with Joe (JESSE L MARTIN) instead of Barry (GRANT GUSTIN), to prove to herself that she is still capable of field work. It's been bothering her ever since she spoke with Ralph (HARTLEY SAWYER) about his pensiveness in light of being one of The Thinker's intended targets. Ralph refuses to leave S.T.A.R. Labs, and is resentful that some attempts to stop Clifford Devoe have been shot down as too risky.

One such plan, devised by Harrison Wells (TOM CAVANAGH) is to replicate The Thinker's device he used to boost his own intelligence, as seen on surveillance cameras the night of the original particle accelerator explosion. However, Cisco (CARLOS VALDES) has already seen what the device has done to Devoe and won't see it done to Harry, who proceeds to develop it without Cisco's help.

Joe and Iris confront Matthew about his involvement at the bank, and he panics, grabbing Iris and trying to back away with her at scalpel-point. Joe buzzes Barry, who is there in a flash. The Flash then goes in to disarm Matthew, grabbing him while he's grabbing Iris. Matthew runs off, and when Barry tries to give pursuit, he learns he has lost his speed.

Which Iris now has.

The rest of the episode involves training Iris to use the abilities quickly, with Barry as mentor and running the monitors. She'll need to learn quickly, because Erik Frye's fire powers have been put accidentally into Jaco Birch (MAX ADLER), and he's about to burn down a good part of the city.

The episode has a decent amount of special effects, including the way Iris is instructed to put out the fire vortex Birch creates. We also do not, thankfully, get the expected speech from Barry about how hard Iris's job is running the monitors, so we're quite happy about that. We do not see any more of the mystery girl at Jitters this episode, but we may have gotten a glimpse of her superhero uniform, given the one Cisco has whipped up for Iris. The front piece bears a strong resemblance to a tornado, and it's postulated that the mystery girl from the future may actually be one of Barry and Iris's twins, Dawn Allen, who with her brother Don are The Tornado Twins. We'll have to wait and see on that.

Cisco finally relents to help Harry with the thinking cap on conditions, and using it they manage to track down the remaining two bus metas. That's a bit deus ex machina I think, but it does move things along, so deus the machina out of the thing and lets get going toward the super-confrontation that is to come!