Parenting Gaffe or Time Travel Paradox?

This one’s kinda silly, but what are blogs for right? I’m rewatching season 5 of The Flash with the gang. And episode 4, ooooh, episode 4…. It’s driving me nuts. It did when I watched the first time without the kids, and now that I’ve watched it with the kids, I’ve gotta say, the one parenting scene just rings untrue. Spoilers below:

OK, here’s the setup, Flash and Iris’ adult kid, Nora aka XS, has come back from the future to visit her parents before she was born. She did it using her super-speed of course because The Flash’s kid. You might wonder if the thing that rings untrue for me is the time travel, what with all the physics I used to write about. It’s not.

In fact, Dr. Ronald Mallett, has shown that mathematically at least, time travel into the past is possible. Was his work peer-reviewed? Yep! It’s legit. Since then, he’s been trying to build such a machine. To Legion of Superhero Fans, yup, it requires a time beacon! You can only send signal back to times where the time machine was already setup, no further. Another aside to LSH fans, XS frequently references the Legion on the show!

Back to the parenting bit. Since XS has come back in time, she’s been, shall we say, cold to her mother Iris. It’s a driving plot point in the first three episodes. Finally, in episode four, we find out why. It turns out future-Iris implanted a meta-human power inhibitor in XS before she manifested her super-speed. She spent her entire childhood not realizing what she was capable of. XS thought it was a douche move, and so do I.

There’s much hemming and hawing during which Barry Allen assures Iris she must have had a good reason, and she’s not a bad person. Iris is convinced she was bad, to tell the truth I’m right there with her. But….

Towards the end of the show, Iris confronts Nora, to let her know that she’s certain she did it for a good reason, and Nora needs to just deal with that. Wait, what!? No, just no! As a point of time-traveling etiquette, if you’re going to do a crappy thing that you haven’t done yet, and don’t know all the details about, you do not under any circumstances confront the person you did it to—who has lived through it—to let them know you’re sure you did it for a good reason. You just don’t.

Then, it gets worse. Barry arrives on the scene, and in some kind of twisted version of parents presenting with a unified front—and that is one way this scene could make sense is that Barry & Iris aren’t parents yet, and don’t have a clue—agrees with Iris. If she did it, it must have been the right thing to do.

So, after an informal parenting poll with all two of the parents here, I came up with the following unanimous results. First, you don’t tell anyone, (much less your kids), that whatever that horrible thing you did in the future was, you’re sure you were actually right to have done it. And second, if a parent walks in and finds another parent being a douche, the correct move is to say, “Can I speak to you for a moment outside.” Quickly followed by “What the hell are you doing?” In other words if someone’s being a jerk to the kids, even one of the parents, the parents here agree: you take the time to figure out that bit of asshattery before you go in blazing in agreement to you don’t know what.

What are your thoughts? Are Barry and Iris simply inexperienced, is the episode just a hiccup in an otherwise great season, is it a time travel paradox, or something else?

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