“Pilot” is episode one of season one of The Flash.
This typically unimaginatively named first episode begins with a narration. The narrator says that it’s necessary to believe in the impossible. There’s a red blur speeding through the city below, and the narrator says that it’s him. Barry Allen, the fastest man alive. It goes back 14 years, and Allen says he’s been running his whole life, often from bullies. As he is doing now, but the bullies catch him.
The young Barry is at home talking to his mother, Nora Allen (played by Michelle Harrison, who played Diana Bolton in Continuum) He says that the bullies were picking on some other kids, because they weren’t cool, and that wasn’t fair. That night, Barry is in bed when there’s a noise from downstairs. Liquid starts floating out of a fish tank and, when Barry goes downstairs, his mother is on the floor with lightning flashing around her. Barry’s father tells him to run, and the next thing he knows he’s on the street.
Back in the present and Barry is running. There’s been a bank robbery, and the security guard is dead. Captain Singh wants to know if CSI has examined the scene yet – and Barry finally turns up. The captain wants to know what his excuse is this time, and he hopes that it is better than the previous excuse of car trouble – as Allen doesn’t have a car. Detective Joe West says that Barry was running an errand for him. Allen is really good at his job, identifying the make and model of car the robbers used simply from looking at the tyre marks.
Barry’s best friend Iris, Detective West’s daughter, arrives as he is still working on the evidence. She says she thought he was going to the test of the particle accelerator at S.T.A.R. Labs, but Barry needs to finish what he’s doing for Joe first (Barry also has a thing for Iris, which she really doesn’t see). Which he does, and the pair head to the lab, where Dr. Harrison Wells is about to speak. Then someone steals Iris’ laptop, which has her dissertation on it (remember, always use backups!). Barry gives chase but isn’t able to recover the laptop, but a newly transferred detective, Eddie Thawne, does. As a result of this, Barry is not at S.T.A.R. Labs when the particle accelerator is fired up.
Barry is instead at home – he is conducting his own investigation into the death of his mother; Barry’s father was found guilty of her murder, but he never believed this – and Joe and his partner are checking out the locations that Barry gave them for potential locations of the bank robbers, the Mardon brothers. On the news there is a report coming from S.T.A.R. Labs and then there’s a problem as a massive energy build-up lances into the sky and sends a shockwave through the city. The Mardons were escaping on a plane, which is knocked out of the sky, and Barry is hit by a bolt of lightning. He gets taken to hospital as a result.
Nine months later and Barry comes to with two people in the same room, Caitlin Snow and Cisco Ramon. This is clearly not a hospital – Barry has been in S.T.A.R. Labs for the past nine months in a coma. The lightning bolt affected him in some way; after that long in a coma, Allen’s muscles should have atrophied but his muscle tone has actually improved. Dr. Wells is now in a wheelchair and the labs are classed by FEMA as a Class 4 hazard. Seventeen people died and an anomaly from the particle accelerator send energy into the sky which seeded a storm cloud.
Barry had been suffering problems at the hospital; he apparently flatlined on a number of occasions, but Wells says that his heart was simply beating too fast for the EKG. So he was moved to the labs. As Barry feels a lot better, he leaves and heads back into the city to see Iris. When he is with her, time seems to slow down. Meanwhile, a bank robbery is being carried out by someone who appears to be able to control the weather – Clyde Mardon, who is believed to be dead.
Barry is having problems, because he’s moving really fast, so he returns to S.T.A.R. Labs for help. He has got new powers – and he’s only one person to have done so. There are more meta-humans out there. Barry also seeks advice from his friend, the Arrow (having appeared in Arrow previously, in the episodes “The Scientist” and “Three Ghosts”, which were originally intended to be backdoor pilots for this series before it got its own pilot, and there is some overlap between the scenes at the end of “Three Ghosts” and the beginning of this). Dr. Wells also knows a lot more than he is saying and is keeping secrets. With his new powers, Barry wants to help people.
This is the first episode, so things are still being built on. It’s an origin story largely, but it does set up some things to come.