The Flash season 3 episode 21 recap

In our last episode, we finally found out that Savitar — the speedster robot god — was actually Evil Barry Allen from the future. Why and how? Well, tonight we start getting some of those terrible pieces put together. Turns out that a time remnant version of Barry basically gets created as part of the effort to stop Savitar ... in the future. This time remnant Barry is basically treated as an outcast because he's both required to defeat Savitar but also becomes Savitar, and he's obviously super bummed about that.

So he makes a big evil robot suit and becomes his destiny. Yeah, this is all bad, but here's the work around that makes sense: The more time Barry spends stupidly messing up Time, the less Time can be controlled. Barry made so many bad Time Choices, Barry essentially ruined time. You know what? Yup, I buy it. I spent three years yelling at Barry for being bad at this, and finally even time ttself has to agree.

Cool.

As part of a not-that-well-thought-out plan, the team decides to destroy Barry's ability to remember things moving forward, as they create a plan to stop Savitar, hoping this means that future Barry won't be able to beat them to the punch. The result is that Barry accidentally gets an entire memory wipe, and holy cow we have an actual Fun Flash Episode in ways we haven't touched since season one.

Barry is delightfully awkward about not knowing his own name, the color of the skin of his brother, who he is romantically linked to, and even his super powers. The result is that everyone else in Team Flash gets to project their hopes and beliefs for Barry back onto him, while he seems to be dealing with a self-inflicted disaster on-par with the greatest meta villainy.

Also, Barry makes fun of his own headshots. We've got Meta, folks.