Rating: 7/10
After Barry has a nightmare involving Dr. Christina, she tries an experiment to analyze Barry’s dream. When that goes horribly wrong, Tina goes back and forth between being a violent psychopath and the nicest person ever.
I see what they were going for, a kind of Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde dynamic, but being that it’s all caused by an accident I think it’s kind of missing the point. I mean, it’s story, similar to Frankenstein, has a message that science just for the sake of science is dangerous. If they wanted to do that it should have been set up so Tina was really performing an experiment on herself that Barry or the other scientists in her lab warn her not to before it’s perfected, etc. It could even be as pseudoscience-y as how they play it here, but I guess they mostly just wanted Tina to turn evil and it doesn’t matter the means, or something.
I do like it when they have actors act as different characters or different ways, something that’s practically a staple of later Arrowverse shows (especially when the shapeshifter Martian Manhunter gets involved). So those parts were fun and interesting. I didn’t like that much of the focus was on Barry’s relationships, and it seems like he’s in a different one every episode. Last episode was Lockhart, now it’s someone named Lisa, and it always seems like they’re always leaving the city at the end of the episode. Nothing stays in these 90s shows. I guess that comes with the episodic nature of having to watch things on television. I’m glad we live in the age of Tivo and Netflix.
SCORING:
+7: Pretty alright
-1: Barry’s relationship dynamics really aren’t that interesting
+1: Evil Tina should come back sometime. Maybe she could team up with the Trickster?
