“Things You Can’t Outrun” is episode three of season one of The Flash.
Barry and Iris are leaving the cinema and Barry is discussing ratings of zombie films and then goes off onto a tangent about real life zombies, a fungus that takes over ants and controls them. Iris herself has a new interest, the red streak seen around Central City. She is showing Barry a picture, but what the phone is actually showing is that Iris’ boyfriend Eddie is ringing her.
Whilst Iris is on the phone, Cisco calls Barry about a Code 237. Which is public indecency. Cisco says that he might have meant Code 239. Which is a dog leash violation. So Caitlin interrupts with ‘Bad man with a gun in a getaway car.’ Barry runs off, dumps the gunman in the back of the pursuing police car in handcuffs and gets back before Iris finished her call. He suggests food; she want to know how come Barry isn’t fat given the amount of food he’s eating. He says he’s taken up jogging (really, really fast jogging).
A meeting is being held in a restaurant after hours, of what looks like a criminal organisation. The windows have been bullet-proofed; the man leading the meeting wants their enemies to know that they aren’t afraid. Another man snaps a key off in a door lock. The man running the show starts talking about how their drivers are being convinced to rip them off. Then green gas appears and the first man starts choking. The gas makes its way to everyone in the room, causing them all to collapse to the floor.
The next day Joe comes to Barry with the evidence from the case for Barry’s mother’s murder, the one that his father is currently in prison for. He says that they are going to go through every scrap of evidence again. Then Eddie tells them that an entire crime family has been killed by poison gas.
At the scene, Barry says that the way the gas acted was odd. It went and killed people one after another – almost as if it had a mind of its own. Joe, realising what Barry is not saying, speaks to him in private. It seems that a meta-human was behind the attack, one who could manipulate gas. Joe suggests that they need help.
The help is Dr. Wells, Caitlin and Cisco. Joe wants to catch the killer, but he says that the prison, Iron Heights, isn’t really qualified to hold meta-humans. Wells says that the only ones encountered so far are dead; unless they plan to kill every meta-human, Joe does not believe that this is a good solution.
They need to create a place to hold people with superpowers, what’s suggested is the particle accelerator, which hasn’t been visited since the accident. There’s a flashback from 9 months ago, to the night of the accident. Caitlin’s fiancée, the head engineer Ronnie Raymond (Robbie Amell, The Tomorrow People‘s Stephen Jameson), died in the accident. There are some more flashbacks to that night during the episode.
Now, in “Pilot”, Dr. Wells was revealed to still be able to walk, and that he had an image of the paper from the future. No-one else knows this yet. In the post-logo scene of the previous episode, “Fastest Man Alive”, Wells had told Simon Stagg, just before he killed him, that the man was called the Flash (something he isn’t as yet) and that he needed to be kept safe. Dr. Wells clearly has knowledge of future events to some degree, so just how accidental was the particle accelerator accident?
The crime family was just the first murder, and the meta-human doesn’t control gas, he turns into poison gas. Catching, or even hitting, someone who can turn into gas is going to be a problem.