A heartbreaking death, Mirror mysteries and a brand new Speed Force in Flash’s season premiere

It’s taken a while, but The Flash is finally back in action — and the retooled Season 7 premiere wasted no time diving back into all the storylines and cliffhangers left unresolved after Season 6 was cut short due to the pandemic shutdown. 

Spoilers ahead for “All’s Wells That Ends Wells,” the Season 7 premiere of The CW’s Flash!

This episode felt a little different when compared to prior season premieres, and there’s a very obvious reason for that — this episode was intended to set-up last season’s finale, not kick off a new season proper. You can feel where the episode was retooled a bit to make it all work, but that said, it still makes for a compelling premiere. Even if it was never intended to be a season opener, since there’s still a big face off looming with last season’s big bad Eva McCulloch aka the Mirror Mistress.

One interesting development: Fans expecting this episode to quickly wrap up all of last season’s storylines to set up the proper Season 7 plans instead got a reintroduction to all those loose threads, which is probably the right choice in the long run. They spent the back half of Season 6 setting up and telling this story, and it’s only fitting it gets a chance to properly play out, even if that finale is coming 10 months late.

Iris remains trapped in the Mirrorverse, though she is getting closer to finding a way to escape, and seemingly managed to send a message to the outside world that Team Flash will hopefully receive in next week’s episode. Eva continues to hunt down and take out the remnants of the evil Black Hole organization (at this point, she might singlehandedly take that group off the board by the time this story wraps). And OG Team Flash members Cisco and Frost are still on their separate missions from the end of last season, so the fort is being held down by the “B-Team” of Chester and Allegra. 

The A-Story: The main thrust of the episode is framed around the team’s continued push to develop an Artificial Speed Force to keep Barry charged up with super speed (when the episode kicks off, he’s at less than 1 percent of Speed Force juice). They finally get a breakthrough when Nash Wells realizes his multiversal Wells particles (all those hallucinations he’s seeing of the other versions of Wells) could power a new Speed Force. The only problem? He’d have to die to make it happen. He first tries to use Allegra’s powers to transfer the power, but it goes haywire and shoots all those Wells consciousnesses into Barry. It’s pretty hilarious for a few minutes, until it knocks him into a near-coma and almost kills him.

The CW

After some soul searching and chatting with the others versions of Wells who have served with Team Flash over the years, Nash decides to give his life to give Barry back his powers. It feels like a fitting end for Nash’s journey, finally finding some redemption after everything he’s been through, from his role in Crisis to the life he lived before that. Team Flash has turned plenty of Wells into good men, and Nash is only the latest in that chain. The gambit works, Nash is absorbed into the device, and Barry is tapped into a spiffy new Speed Force — which allows him a fun action set piece where he zips off to stop a bomb from blowing up a plane over Central City.

Nash’s death is a sad one, and it also very clearly feels like it was intended to occur at the end of last season (almost certainly because it was originally). It’s become a bit of a theme for a Wells to die or leave each season, paving the way for Tom Cavanagh to play yet another variation of the character the next year. That exit was deferred to the season premiere here, but don’t worry, some version of Wells will almost certainly turn up again soon — as Cavanagh remains a member of the cast for Season 7, despite Nash’s death.

Eva's reveal: Turning attention back to the lingering big bad, Eva also comes to a startling realization when she turns up footage of her disappearance when she was blasted into the Mirrorverse. Turns out her husband wasn’t lying when he said she died — as a version of her did die when the particle accelerator exploded. Which leads Eva to think that she might really be the mirror version herself. If the real Ava is dead, then what is she? Just a copy all along?

Last but not least: Cecile taps into a new ability with her empath powers! She can now project emotions back into people! She tapped into that power after fellow empath Top uses it on her. Who knows what else Cecile might be able to do? 

Next week: It looks like Cisco is back early! The episode also seems to focus in on Barry’s attempts to reach Iris in the Mirrorverse, so here’s hoping maybe this is where he finally busts her out of that creepy, fractal prison. There were three episodes left unfilmed when Season 6 ended, so it stands to reason next week’s episode could really tee up the action for a big conclusion to this arc in Episode 3.