This week's new episode of The Flash introduced us to Captain Cold, the newest crooked metahuman in Central City, who is now equipped to kill with a "cold gun" made by none other than Cisco. Barry Allen's friend and pseudo-sidekick in S.T.A.R. labs apparently created the gun in an effort to stop The Flash, just in case Barry woke up from his coma and abused his metahuman abilities. The gun mimics the cold of absolute zero, and we've seen firsthand the damage it can do by the way it slowed Barry down and pretty much froze his abs (His abs! Not his abs!!) Which leads everyone to wonder — what were Cisco's real intentions when he created this very deadly weapon?
The first alarm bell that this rings for me is that if Cisco knew to create this weapon to very specifically stop Barry long before Barry woke up, he must have had a fairly clear idea of what kind of powers were going to manifest in our friendly "streak." This is one more factor that supports the idea that Harrison created the metahumans on purpose, if everyone in the lab had that kind of foreknowledge.
But the more pressing question — why create a weapon that would decimate Barry? Even if he did turn out to be evil, they've at least shown all the other miscreant methahumans the mercy of getting to live and go to prison. It seems pretty drastic for Cisco, who seems fairly fun-loving and laid back on all other accounts, to make a "shoot now, ask questions later" kind of weapon that would have serious and instant consequences. It seems to me like we haven't heard the last of the origins of this "cold gun." And now that Captain Cold seems to be the only metahuman whose crime arc has lasted more than an episode, this is clearly not the last we'll see of him, either.
Image: Cate Cameron/The CW
