(Author’s note: Sorry this one is late folks, I was traveling for work.)
Barry sits in his lab when he receives an urgent call from Iris, who is being shot at by assailants unknown. He tells her to jump out of the nearby window, and though she’s apprehensive, she does, and of course Barry catches her just in time. He runs back up to dispatch the two men Iris was chasing on a real estate scam. Back at STAR, everyone stands around the breach in the lab (the biggest one of the 52 breaches). They deduce it’s Jay’s way to get home but they can’t figure out how to make it work, even Barry running at it at full speed does nothing but send him flying. If they can stablize it, maybe they can make it into an actual door between their worlds. Joe sits at a bar across town where he’s joined by his ex-wife Francine. He bribes her to leave but she insists on staying and meeting Iris.
The next day at Jitters, Barry runs into Patty Spivot and you could cut the sexual tension between them with a knife. Barry joins the crew at their table when an unexpected acquaintence arrives, Lisa Snart, and she needs help. She saw her brother get kidnapped and The Flash owes him a favor anyway. Cisco is able to track Snart’s gun via cold imaging and finds his location. Barry runs there to find Snart with none other than his father. Snart freezes Barry to the ground, but luckily Cisco made some adjustments to the suit for this scenario and heats it up, melting the ice. When Lisa finds out her brother is working with their father she refuses to believe it, confiding in Cisco all the times that he attacked her when she was a kid. Leonard protected her all those times, now its her time to protect him.
Joe goes to CCPN to hit Iris with the bad news, but he is conveniently interrupted by good news that her report on the real estate scam is getting front page treatment. Barry finds Snart and tries to get answers from him. He knows they had a deal, but the uncertainty of his father Lewis means Barry will have to act, and Snart basically tells him “Bring it.” He gets a call from Joe, who explains to him that night the circumstances of Iris’ mother, that she isn’t dead and that he doesn’t know how to tell Iris. Barry tells joe that parental influence is what makes them who they are. Joe had huge impacts on him and Iris while the Snarts were affected by their own parents as well. He thinks he did the right thing at the time, but now he can fix it.
Lewis goes over the plan with Snart and their third crew member, who puts up a stink about a minute detail, resulting in Lewis taking out a device and blowing his head up Scanners style. The next morning, Patty, Barry, and Joe investigate the headless corpse and come to realize that it was blown off. Barry quickly figures out this was one of Snart’s crew members and that Lewis seemingly put the bomb in him, but there’s no way Snart would agree to work with his father even if he was implanted with a bomb, meaning only one thing… At STAR, Jay works on the wormhole and is brought a meal by Caitlin. They talk about his life back on Earth-2 and the work he did as a scientist, prompting her to lay out the theme of the series: superheroes don’t just save people, they help wherever they can. Just as Jay asks her to help him with the “Speed Canon,” Cisco calls out to her to reveal what we all suspected: There’s a bomb in Lisa’s head.
Iris goes to see Joe where he lays out the entire truth about her mother, that she was a drug addict that disappeared and rather than let his daughter feel like she’d be purposefully abandoned, he lied to her. He tells her that she’s alive and in Central City, prompting many a tear, but Iris forgives him for the whole ruse. Back at STAR, the team can’t figure out a way to excise the bomb from Lisa without it exploding which gives Barry the genius idea of infiltrating Lewis’ crew to help stall them out. He finds Snart and tells him he knows about the bomb in Lisa, and does a convincing job of playing “Tech guy” in front of Lewis, who allows him to join the job, which they’re starting immediately.
They enter a building disguised as janitors. Lewis is clearly trigger happy but Barry saves the lives of two security guards without even using his powers (remember what Caitlin said?). The team gets to another floor to find even more guards, which Barry quickly moves out of the way before Lewis can decide to exterminate them. Barry goes to the key pad and “hacks it” (by entering a ton of combinations before finally arriving at the correct one). Lewis thanks him for his work and shoots him, but Barry being The Flash, we see that instead of taking the bullet outright, he caught the dang thing. At STAR Labs, Cisco has concocted a compressed air gun to suck the bomb out of Lisa, as Snart and his father stare down some laser triggers in front of their score. Snart freezes the lasers, because why not, and his father cracks the safe to reveal a whole slew of diamonds.
Lisa playfully flirts with Cisco as prepares to extract the bomb, but Barry signals them to let them know he’s going to stall Lewis and Leonard so they can get the bomb out. Alarms sound and Barry enters the room, using his super stalling powers. Lewis tells Leonard to freeze The Flash or he’ll never see his sister alive again, just as Cisco pulls the bomb out of her. He lets him know his sister is safe, and Captain Cold earns his namesake by killing his father. Barry takes the gun from Snart and asks him why he would kill him even though Lisa was safe. He was just getting even for breaking Lewis breaking her heart.
Barry goes to see Snart at Iron Heights the next day and tells him he’s figured out his secret, he’ll do anything to protect Lisa. The two of them are at an impasse because they know each other’s secrets. Depsite his protests, Barry tries to convince Snart to become a force for good (and we know he will with DC’s Legends of Tomorrow set to air next year). Afterward, Joe reveals they’re moving Snart to the metahuman wing after Barry’s suggestion and tells him he told Iris everything, and she’s going to meet up with her mother. At Jitters, Barry and Patty run into each other once again and she gives him her phone number, but it’s definitely for work and not because they like each other, no sir. On the otherside of town, Cisco says goodbye to Lisa, who confides in him that he’s her first real friend before planting a kiss on him.
Later that day, Caitlin and Jay have finsihed up the speed canon and in order to test it out, Dr. Stein tosses a book right into the portal, and it doesn’t get spit back out. After saying a lot of science babble, Jay reveals it’s time for him to go home, but after some convincing by Caitlin and Barry to stay around and fend off Zoom, he agrees to stay. Stein seems okay despite his affliction last week but then bursts into flames like Firestorm, only they shift in color to blue. He passes out on the floor once again, and later that night something comes out of the Speed Canon, Earth-2’s Dr. Harrison Wells.
