'The Flash' recap: This is his origin story

Spoiler alert! The following contains spoilers for Tuesday night's episode of The Flash.

To move forward, sometimes you have to take two steps back, or in the The Flash's case, a whole season back to the first fast guy who ruined everybody's lives.

The bluntly-named episode, "The Reverse-Flash Returns," features the original blonde-haired, blue-eyed Eobard Thawne making a harrowing return to Central City (I'm assuming because having two Harrison Wells on one screen would just be too much magnetism for one TV to handle) to wreak havoc on Barry's life and remind him that superheroes just can't have nice things. Especially nice things who would stay in the city and forgive him for lying to her if only he would admit the truth. Ugh, that one's on you, Barry.

Time is a tricky thing

Harry's a bit cranky, Barry's a bit gloomy from running from his problems and Cisco's unsuccessfully diffusing the tension as the team tries to find out how to stop Zoom and the runaway ethanol truck that threatens to blow half of Central City. Turns out the truck was rigged by none other than Eobard Thawne, as a way of figuring out what time period he's in while luring out the Flash once again. Back at S.T.A.R. Labs, Caitlin and Jay report Turtle's dead body with Jay being rightfully suspicious of Harry.

At the CCPD, Barry's giving Patty the cold shoulder, but his wounded puppy act gets interrupted when Joe walks in even more wounded by his ex-wife Francine's rapidly deteriorating condition. He entreats Iris to visit Francine with him, but she is still slightly resentful toward her mother's desertion. At the hospital, she tearfully forgives Francine and makes it her mission to retrieve Wally so the West's can finally be a whole family.

Cisco keeps trying to get through to an even more disgruntled Harry, who gets to work on activating Cisco's Vibe trigger. After a bit of costume theater from Harry, Cisco vibes and sees that the Reverse-Flash is back. Barry confronts Reverse-Flash who is trying to kidnap Christine McGee, but in his shock of seeing the inexplicably alive Thawne, he gets easily knocked back, allowing Reverse-Flash gets away with McGee. Harry gives the briefest of time anomaly explanations possible — just stopping short of saying "wibbly wobbly, timey wimey" — telling Team Flash that he is a time remnant protected by the Speed Force, from the time right before he killed Barry's mom.

Fight the future

Fed up with Barry's self-sacrificial nonsense, Patty confronts Barry and learns that he's been assisting S.T.A.R. Labs on the down-low. Suspicious, she finally lives up to her detective title and discovers his superhero double life. Later, she corners Joe about the information, who blurts out a pitiful excuse and runs off like a professional.

Back at the lab, Harry tampers with Cisco's Vibe goggles to stimulate the fear receptors in his brain and allow for better control. Cisco enters full Vibe mode (which looks eerily like Professor X's mutant vision) and locates where Reverse Flash is holding Christina McGee. But he hones in on the vision just a second too late -- McGee has already served her purpose to Thawne and he kills her. Cisco and Harry report to Team Flash about his vision, but they realize that Cisco saw into the future, and with a fast-approaching deadline in sight, they get to work on finding the location.

With the scientists doing their work, Joe pulls Barry aside to tell him that Patty has found out about his Flash identity — but to be fair, Barry made is extremely easy. Barry gives Joe the same old excuse of protecting the people he cares about by hiding his identity, which, you know, totally worked with Iris and Linda Park. And it's not like Patty hasn't been kidnapped multiple times before.

Catch me if you can

Cisco triangulates Thawne's location and Barry rushes over to the site in the nick of time, knocking Reverse-Flash out of the way before he can kill Christina McGee, and destroying the time portal machine. Barry and Reverse-Flash play the most elaborate game of tag through Central City, but Barry easily catches Thawne and beats him to a pulp, unleashing all his repressed frustration and vengeful anger. Joe talks Barry down before he can beat Thawne to death, and they throw the Reverse-Flash in a cell.

Team Flash stop Barry from going down to the cell and finishing his beatdown, Harry warning him that he could alter the timeline. Disregarding Harry's warning, Cisco goes down to talk to Eobard himself, goading him and telling him to "remember I'm the one who put you in here" — and of course squeezing in a "Bye Felicia" at the end. But the confrontation doesn't feel so victorious — Cisco starts bleeding from the nose before and after he goes to talk to Thawne. That's not ominous.

Patty finally faces Barry about his secret identity but he keeps trying to lie and brush off her accusations. In the ultimate (but still rude and idiotic) act of self-sacrifice, he refuses to admit he's the Flash even when she tells him she'll stay and forgive him if he'll just say it. Patty breaks down and leaves in tears, prompting me to feel a sting of hatred toward Barry for the first time in this show.

'No one of consequence'

No one listens to Harry, apparently. Sore from his break-up with Patty, Barry goes to Thawne's cell and asks him, shielded by shadows, why he hates him so much. Thawne tells him how he idolized the Flash and even tried to become him, but was driven insane by the realization that he was destined to become Flash's enemy. He then decided to dedicate his life to taking everything the Flash loved from him (a running theme, it seems). In a rage, Barry spills that Thawne killed Barry's mother, but before anything more can escalate, Barry gets called back to the lab by Caitlin.

Barry arrives to a seizing Cisco, who is spouting fountains of blood from his nose. Caitlin sedates him but this causes Cisco to start phasing through the bed. Harry realizes that their capture of Reverse Flash is messing with the timeline and killing Cisco, and Harry urges Barry to use his speed to send Thawne back to his time. Barry refuses at first, but is swayed by the desperate team and the dying Cisco. Harry lets Thawne out of the cell, in an eerie face-to-face with the man who killed his alt-world counterpart. Harry utters the heartbreaking line, "No one of consequence" to Thawne's inquiry of who he is, and leads him to the pipeline of the particle accelerator. Barry and the Reverse-Flash successfully create the portal, sending Thawne back to the future and saving Cisco.

Back in therapist Iris' subplot, Wally finally comes to the West house and agrees to make good with his mom -- after several failed attempts by Iris to endear to his sympathy with talk about cars and her dead fiance (Eddie!). Anxious, he asks her to accompany him to the hospital, and she does.

Moral-of-the-episode time is here, and Joe steps up for that part to give Barry a lecture about making sacrifices. But Barry's already one step ahead of him, having made the biggest sacrifice by letting go of his revenge on the Reverse-Flash, and having so harshly rejected Patty. But Patty gives him another chance to say goodbye properly, tricking him with a call about a fake train heist to give her the parting that she deserves.

Flash Faves

• "Have you seen Barry run? He looks like a waddling duck."
• Jay introduces Caitlin to his Earth-1 doppelganger Hunter Zolomon, aka ZOOM (in the comics) who does battle with Wally West's Flash. Could this be a hint of Zoom's identity?
• Harry's eye roll at the bromantic moment between Barry and Cisco had me laughing for days.
• Patty's bait-and-switch had me really scared for a moment that she was evil. How could you make me feel that, Flash? Patty is an angel!
• I love Patty, but hopefully her departure to Midway City means that Iris will get more to do each episode than act as a glorified therapist.