Spoilers below for The Flash's "Run, Iris, Run."
Team Flash's efforts were mostly dedicated to tracking down the remaining bus metas, but Harry was more fixated on DeVoe himself in "Run, Iris, Run." Particularly the villain's intellect. He's well on his way to creating a powerful thinking cap to match his brainpower with DeVoe's one-step-ahead-ness, but he's reached his limit, and it took some convincing to get Cisco on board with helping Harry finish developing his device. However, we got all the warning signs in the world that Harry will probably not escape this ordeal in one piece, and showrunner Todd Helbing has us even more convinced bad things are coming.
After "Run, Iris, Run" recently screened for press, Todd Helbing took part in a Q&A with CinemaBlend and other press outlets. When he was asked about the danger of Harry's rapidly thrown together thinking cap, here's what Helbing said:
When you have a rage-a-holic use something...look, he's been struggling all season with trying to outthink somebody that's smarter than him. It's driving him nuts. It's sort of a slippery slope of what he's willing to do to be better than this guy, and it's gonna have a disastrous outcome.
Helbing specifically says "rage-a-holic," which is the same word that Cisco uses when explaining to Caitlin why he doesn't want to help Harry with the device. Because we're so used to Tom Cavanagh's other versions of the multi-universe genius, it can be easy to forget that Earth-2 Harry is generally quite hot-headed and pessimistic about things. So if the thing Harry is most optimistic about is developing a way to rapidly expand the synapses firing all that pessimism around, I'm not going to judge Cisco for his hesitance. Remember how loving and accepting Clifford DeVoe was when his intelligence was in its initial ascent? No, right? And that's just how Harry is on an everyday basis. And during the triple-speedster episode with Jay Garrick, Jesse Quick reunited with Harry, and the two actually shared a humane and compassionate moment, so now he's in prime position to face tragedy.
So there are three likely ways for Harry's thinking cap "success" to become as disastrous as Todd Helbing hinted at, even without the cap One, he could become instantly power-mad and destroy S.T.A.R. Labs and everyone inside of it. Two, he could become instantly power-mad with the intention of destroying things, only to have Vibe send him back to Earth-2, where he ends up having to battle his own daughter. And three, he manages to control the more destructive motivations of his new mental powers, only to have his body start deteriorating like DeVoe's did. You might have noticed none of those ended in "The Thinker getting stopped and captured."
It's much easier to think that Harry will end up hurting someone within Team Flash before he succeeds in taking DeVoe down. But it's hard to know if his intentions would skew as villainous as his current nemesis. And Todd Helbing wasn't game to offer any verbal hints one way or another. After he was asked, Helbing offered up a few moments of silence before finally saying:
No comment.
That sounds ominous to me. Will Harry be able to successfully get his thinking cap working before The Thinker can round up the remaining bus metas? Will those remaining metas have something to do with the "disastrous outcome?" Is the thinking cap one of those one-size-fits-all kind of helmets?
It might be a while before we find out where all these brain machines are going. The Flash usually airs Tuesday nights on The CW at 8:00 p.m. ET, but it won't be back on the schedule until April at some point. While waiting for its return, head over to our midseason premiere schedule and take note of what else is coming.
