Good news! The meta cure is ready! In a… month! Barry takes it into the Speed Force for an hour to speed up the process and leaves the others in XS’ care. And that’s when things go wrong…

That’s actually being unfair to Nora. None of what happens until she triggers the time loop is her fault. It’s just a confluence of events that leads various members of a group of professional trouble seekers to what they’re always looking for. But once Nora goes back in time, suddenly, the episode takes on a much darker and far more interesting tone.

The Flash has always excelled at exploring the horrors of time travel but it’s never done it from multiple viewpoints before and that’s what we get here. Cisco in particular, who has a wide variety of terrible versions of the same date, begins to suspect something when he starts vibing events that no longer happened. Ralph, Sherloque, Iris, all of them get onboard refreshingly quickly and the ‘but what do you mean time loop?’ part of the episode is pleasantly short.

That also leads to the wonderfully gamed solution, where the team jump into battle knowing full well one of them will die but trusting that Nora will reverse time and use their powers to save the day. It works too and it’s a credit to Jessica Parker-Kennedy that she lands the episode as well as she does. This is a screw up of epic proportions and she knows it, and so do the others. It works because Parker-Kennedy is so good, the situation is so unprecedented. Best of all, because of the ending.

Two vital points happen there. The first is the scene where Barry tells Nora about the price of changing time. It’s a great parental moment for him and also a clear teaching moment too: Barry has changed the world forever by time travelling and he got incredibly lucky. His daughter was even luckier to not pay the price, yet.

Arguably more important still is the fact Sherloque deciphers Nora’s notebook. At long last what she’d doing is going to come to the fore and it’s going to cause some seismic shifts in Team Flash. The issue of Nora’s loyalty has always been a big part of the season but this puts it front and centre in an episode crammed full of enjoyable moments.

Verdict: Clever, subtle and a unique spin on a loved trope, this is another great episode. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart