Catching Up: The Flash Episode 503, "The Death of Vibe"

I'm going on the record right now declaring that this episodes title is (a) a lie or (b) better be a lie.

This season's big bad, Cicada, wants to finish what he started with Vibe: killing him. Why he picked Vibe over Flash, or even Elongated Man, we can't say. Guess a man's got to have his priorities. Meanwhile, Team Flash is on the hunt for Cicada, who we learn from XS is a sort of metahuman serial killer -- who was never captured; not by Team Flash, the Legends, even the League (yes, that's a reference to a future Justice League).

XS's plan to find Cicada involves bringing in a detective. And it's not Ralph, which has to sting. No, it's time to approach... the Council of Wells. Yes, the WORST idea ever to inhabit the Flash Writers' Room is back -- or at least one of them is back. And he refers them to yet another Wells we've not yet met: Sherloque Wells, consulting detective with a string of ex-wives to whom he owes alimony.

Honestly, I'm missing the Earth-1 Harrison Wells who wanted to kill them all at this point.

Sherloque does some fancy deductions and leads the team to a loner, who has his place booby-trapped -- which he also predicted. There's only one problem: While Flash and XS race this guy to the police, Joe West is taken hostage...by Cicada. There goes that brilliant deduction -- which shocks Sherloque, because this is apparently a case he's solved on multiple Earths already, and it's always been the same guy. Ah, but XS has changed the timeline -- Cicada never killed Gridlock or Block in her past, and he has here. Who knows what else has changed? This has introduced an entirely new set of changing variables.

Meanwhile, as Cicada tortures Joe to get him to lure Vibe to the scene, Cecile walks in and witnesses the event. Apparently her on-again / off-again telepathic powers are working at the moment, because Joe sends her the mental message not to call for help, because that's just what Cicada wants. But when Cicada turns up the juice, she does just that, and Vibe is the first to arrive. Flash is a split-second later, but too late to stop Cicada from pushing Vibe back into his breach and disappearing with him.

With almost no way to tell where Vibe is (because the suit he wears that delivers all his biometric data back to STAR Labs apparently doesn't include GPS), Sherloque has to prove his usefulness by deducing Vibe's location by the description of the trees and the sounds of the forest, pinpointing the location so Flash can run help.

Except Cicada is like a leech; he dampens the abilities of any metahuman near him, and Flash is bereft of his speed. Cicada is poised to kil them both, until Nora takes her dad's advice to take a moment to think. She enters Flashtime to do so, so she has some time to plan. 

And her plan...gets Vibe killed.

Or does it? You'll have to watch and see.

As the episode wraps, we learn about Cicada's motivations; he's a family man, and he has a daughter in the hospital. Even money says she's there because of a metahuman -- maybe even as a result of The Flash punching a satellite into debris.

And speaking of that satellite, Sherloque questions Nora obliquely about how she decided at that point to reveal herself, by joining in to punch the satellite. The implications are that it wasn't her idea, but that she might have been tempted into it by another person. Even though they both say that this could not, was not, true, the look on Nora's face says it all. So the mystery deepens.

And speaking of mysteries, Ralph helps Caitlin get one step closer to solving the mystery of her missing father.