“Power Outage” is episode seven of season one of The Flash.
This episode opens 10 months ago, and a man has climbed a pylon as his two friends watch from below. The man on the pylon says that it is a great place to watch the particle accelerator turn on. Up there, he sees the energy wave from the accelerator stretch into the sky and start spreading out, and tells his two friends to get into the car. He gets struck by lighting and it arcs onto him as he falls to the ground some distance below.
In the present, Dr. Wells is in his secret room. He speaks to what is presumably a never-previously-seen AI, Gideon (voiced by Morena Baccarin from Stargate SG-1 and Firefly) and tells her to open his personal log. Wells says that Barry is using his extraordinary powers in everyday life to do ordinary things. Barry also persists in being heroic. Barry is then seen leaving Jitters only to get mugged, something that Barry thinks is hilarious and he tells the mugger that he has made an Olympic-level bad mistake. Which he was.
Dr. Wells continues and says that this is impeding the full scope of Barry’s abilities. He looks once again at the headline, ‘Flash Missing Vanishes in Crisis,’ that was seen in “Pilot”. Apparently the future remains intact. But what is the future Wells wants? This is still not clear.
When Barry arrives at the lab, Wells tells him that they have a deal. They would help Barry with his heroic activities if Barry helped them research his abilities. Dr. Wells wants Barry to go faster. Barry then gets a message about a homicide.
At the homicide, Barry is looking at an extra-crispy corpse when Joe and Eddie arrive. Barry says that it would take 2,400 degrees to charcoal the corpse that much, but none of the flammables in the area have burned. There are also arc blasts on the concrete from high ampage currents. The dead man was electrocuted.
Barry takes a photo of what is left of the dead man’s face to get an ID. Joe is acting rather subdued, but he doesn’t explain why; in the previous episode, “The Flash is Born”, Joe was visited by whatever killed Barry’s mother. This possibly-meta-human took the research and warned Joe to stop investigating. With a threat to Iris.
Cisco is able to identify the dead man, who worked at the Petersburg electrical substation. The dead man’s ID has just been used to enter the place, and is suffering from a power drain. When Barry arrives on the scene, a man – the one who fell from the pylon – appears to be drawing electricity from the substation. He says he has to feed.
This man manages to hit Barry with his lightning, and starts siphoning something from him. Something he likes and wants to get more of. When he hits Barry again, he manages to suck Barry’s powers from him again.
At S.T.A.R. Labs, Barry is actually running slowly for a normal person. The electrical man isn’t throwing electricity, he’s sucking it up from things. At the precinct, Barry tells Joe that he has lost his powers. Although Dr. Wells is working on it, they don’t know when, or even if, they will return. Wells checks the future again in his secret room, and it’s changed. As Barry leaves the precinct, William ‘Clock King’ Tockman, from the Arrow episode “Time of Death” is being brought in.
The electrical man, identified as Farooq Gibran, then shows up at S.T.A.R. Labs demanding to see Wells, who he blames for what happened to him – and his friends, who both died trying to save his life. Whilst doing so, he manages to drain power from a chunk of the city, including the precinct where Tockman takes advantage of the distraction to grab a cop’s gun and shoot him, before managing to take Joe, Iris and several others hostage.
So, Barry is stuck at the lab with no powers and an angry meta-human on the premises, and Joe and Iris are in danger with no chance of the Flash turning up to help. Dr. Wells has an idea that might restart Barry’s powers, but it’s risky.