This week’s episode of The Flash was a doozy.  Over the course of two or three scenes, it moved the story of Barry Allen forward dramatically.  Cisco shot.  A tsunami poised to smash Central City.  Barry and Iris making peace with their feelings.  And the solution to that pending tsunami?  Run back and forth fast enough to stop it from hitting shore.  How fast?  Fast enough for Barry to make his first (and accidental) trip through time.  How far back?  To earlier in the episode.  And what a brilliant episode it was.

Time travel, as any fan of Doctor Who can attest, is a funny thing.  “Time can be rewritten” is a familiar refrain to fans of the Doctor.  Now we get to see if the same is true for the Flash.  I’m hoping that time travel doesn’t become a constant in Allen’s adventures.  I also hope it doesn’t become the easy way out for the writers, a way to have the cake and eat it, too.  Time reboots ultimately become plot cop-outs if they aren’t used wisely.  I think Barry will feel the weight of what he experienced but no one can remember much more heavily than a centuries-old Time Lord.  Here’s the preview for next week’s episode, “Rogue Time.”  Doctor Who, alas, won’t return until the fall.