Posted in: DC Universe, TV | Tagged: barry allen, Clifford DeVoe, cw, entertainment, flash, grant gustin, Neil Sandilands, television

Flash Season 4, Episode 7 Recap: Therefore I Am

Published Wed, 22 Nov 2017 09:45:27 -0600

by Dan Wickline

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This article contains spoilers for the Flash season four episode – Therefore I Am.

'Cogito ergo sum', which is Latin for, 'I think, therefore I am.' That is the famous quote from French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, whose philosophy was built around the idea of radical doubt. That nothing perceived or sense is necessarily real except the mind that is doing the doubting or perceiving. Basically, nothing is real except the consciousness that believes it to be real. Descartes was considered the fundamental thinker in the development of Western concepts of reason and science. This ties into last night's episode of The Flash in that it was the origin story of Clifford DeVoe aka the Thinker and the episode was called, Therefore I Am.

The episode pushed aside almost everything other than DeVoe's story and Barry Allen's growing obsession to stop him. It begins almost immediately from the end of episode six with Barry and Joe West at DeVoe's house asking his wife, who is also the Mechanic, to speak to him. We see that he is in a wheelchair and that they are, for all intent and purpose, a happily married couple of college professors. It is and isn't a facade. The flashbacks we go through showing DeVoe coming up withe concept cap that can make him smarter, his wife building the cap, the connection to Harrison Wells' particle accelerator and the fact they realized that it would explode and he wanted it to. Instead of trying to stop him, they used it to make energize his cap and in doing so increased his intelligence, but it also gave him a ailment that is slowly decaying his body to where it will shortly fail.

Through all of this we see Barry getting more and more obsessed. He so wants to catch the bad guy before someone he loves gets hurt. But DeVoe has him outplayed from every angle. He gets in trouble and suspended for harassing the Devoes. The rest of Team Flash thinks he obsessing. Iris thinks it has to do with the wedding. The flashbacks continue and we see that the chair he uses is what keeps his body from failing and he can only be out of it for so long. It taps directly into his brain and he takes off the top of his head… I haven't quite figured out how that works yet. Finally Barry just confronts him straight out, ignoring a restraining order. DeVoe reveals he knows that Allen is the Flash. He also admits to being a metahuman whose power is unlike anything he's had to deal with. That even his Council of Wells is not smart enough to defeat him.

It's a very interesting episode and sets up the rest of the season. Neil Sandilands and Kim Engelbrecht do a really nice job creating the relationship between the two and Grant Gustin pulls off the obsessed paranoid that was still in the range of the Barry Allen we know. You almost start to like DeVoe, and they do this by showing him doing nothing bad in the episode except outsmarting Barry. We never see what his plans are nor watching him commit a bad act. They're merely playing a game of chess that Barry has no chance of winning. What is his goal? Why is he doing any of this stuff? Perhaps we get the answer once again from Descartes: 'It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well,' and, 'the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.'

The Thinker plot line looks to move aside next week as the episode is part of the Arrowverse 2-night, 4-show crossover event, Crisis on Earth-X.

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