“Fallout” is episode fourteen of season one of The Flash.
In the previous episode, “The Nuclear Man”, the combined Ronnie Raymond/Martin Stein, or Firestorm, was becoming unstable. As in about to explode. Firestorm had removed himself to the Badlands but Barry and Caitlin had followed, with a quantum splicer that Dr. Wells and Cisco had created that would hopefully separate the pair. Firestorm became increasingly unstable, and Barry and Caitlin had to leave. Really fast, as Firestorm exploded in what looked a lot like a nuclear explosion.
This episode opens with them running in front of the blast wave from the explosion, successfully as it happens. Given how close they were to a nuclear explosion – the outskirts of the blast wave – Caitlin is justifiable concerned about the amount of radiation she and Barry have been exposed to. Only, according to Cisco, there is no radiation beyond the normal levels. So Barry and Caitlin run back and discover that Ronnie and Stein have separated.
At the end of the episode, General Eiling, last seen in “Plastique”, had detected the explosion. The general had not only recognised what caused the blast, but also believed that Firestorm was okay. When his men arrive on the scene, they naturally fail to find Ronnie or Stein, but do find imprints of two bodies. The general realises that Firestorm has separated into two people again. Clearly he knows a lot about the project.
At S.T.A.R. Labs it’s determined that Ronnie and Stein no longer have the ability to harness nuclear energy. They are oddly running identical slightly elevated temperatures though. Ronnie is clearly pleased to be separated from Stein, as he didn’t appreciate how the professor was controlling him when they were joined. So Stein returns home.
When Barry arrives back at the station, Joe tells him that he had been trying to call him. Not about the new hole in the Badlands though. Instead, Joe takes Barry back to his old house. In the previous episode, Joe had taken Cisco to Barry’s old house to see if they could find anything about the night Barry’s mother was murdered. Cisco managed to recreate three dimensional images of this, and they had found two bloodstains. These were analysed and, given Cisco’s earlier statement that there must have been two speedsters there that night, it did not come as a great surprise for one of the blood samples to have come from Barry. An adult Barry, as the Flash.
Joe had expected the blood to belong to Dr. Wells, but the other sample didn’t match. This was not what Joe expected and, indeed, seems a surprise. Wells is definitely another speedster and definitely has a yellow suit – at the end of “The Man in the Yellow Suit” he was revealed to have the tachyon prototype that Reverse-Flash stole. Even though he then sacrificed this in the previous episode to create the quantum splicer intended to save Ronnie and Professor Stein. So, was someone else in a yellow suit there the night Barry’s mother was murdered? Or is the blood on file not actually Wells’?
At S.T.A.R. Labs, Barry and Joe are discussing the possibility of time travel with the others. Dr. Wells says that it is possible, but problematic. His and Barry’s explanations are less than useful for Joe though; Cisco helps by comparing the explanations to The Terminator for one and Back to the Future for the other. Wells says that he can’t come up with a working theory on time travel; Cisco suggests someone who might be able to.
At Central City Picture News Iris asks why Mason Bridge has a blueprint for S.T.A.R. Labs. She mentions the accident, and Mason asks what if it wasn’t an accident? Which it may well not have been. Iris asks why Dr. Wells would want the particle accelerator to explode and whether Mason expects her to investigate her friends because he offered her a Danish. He says that Iris will investigate because she wants to know what really happened.
At the Stein house, Clarissa Stein asks Barry about her husband. He’s apparently dying for pizza – and Stein despises pizza. Ronnie, however, loves it. When Martin comes to the door he asks if Barry will oblige, and Barry does, getting a pizza really quickly. Barry is visiting the professor because, 25 years ago, he wrote a paper on time travel for the Oxford University Press. Professor Stein tells Barry that travel to the future, and the past, is possible, and asks where he would go to if he could travel in time. Barry tells him he believes he already has. Or will have. Which Stein finds exciting, saying that Barry must have run so fast that the kinetic energy build-up smashes a hole in the space time continuum.
Caitlin and Ronnie are getting reacquainted; Ronnie would like to leave town. At which point General Eiling’s troops crash the coffee shop and attempt to drug Ronnie. Barry intervenes, but the general was prepared for him, and he gets injured. Caitlin says she shouldn’t have been surprised that the general got involved, for in “Revenge of the Rogues” she had discovered that the military had taken Professor Stein’s research.
The general wants Firestorm, and really shows very little compassion towards anyone who gets in his way. Or who simply ceases to be useful. It also turns out that Ronnie and Martin Stein are not completely separate after all. It seems that they are both still linked.