Nobody wants enlightenment shoved down their throat, but that’s what Clifford DeVoe (Neil Sandilands) intends to do on The Flash. With the villain’s satellites now in orbit, he’s closer than ever to erasing everyone’s intelligence — that is, if The Flash (Grant Gustin) can’t put a monkey wrench into those plans.
Yet with a power outage crippling the city and Barry trapped in DeVoe’s consciousness, this could be Team Flash — and the planet’s — last stand.
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Ahead of tonight’s Season 4 finale, “We Are The Flash,” Candice Patton, the show’s Iris West, spoke with CBR about the team confronting DeVoe, Iris’ own superpower and the identity of that “Mystery Girl.”
Jesse L. Martin as Detective Joe West, Grant Gustin as Barry Allen/The Flash and Candice Patton as Iris West on “We Are The Flash.”
CBR: Everyone has a role on the show. Does it feel like Iris has emerged as the team’s matriarch?
Candice Patton: For sure. If you think about Iris from Season 1 until now, she’s made a huge leap in terms of her importance and her role on the team. I do think she’s been accepted into the matriarch role of the team. That’s come with her and Barry’s relationship, and then subsequently getting married. He’s the Flash and she’s the wife of the Flash. They lead the team in that sense.
After getting a taste of superpowers this season, why was it important for Iris to go back to her journalistic roots?
I think it’s fun. I’ve always said I’d like to be a superhero on the show, just for the fans and myself. Iris is one of the few characters that is truly human, who is brave and heroic in her own ways without having superpowers. If everyone on the show ends up with superpowers, it becomes a different show. It becomes Legends of Tomorrow. We already have that show. It’s important on The Flash to keep some of the human aspects like with Iris and Joe (Jesse L. Martin). Iris has proven herself over the seasons of just being heroic without the powers, of being a great journalist, of being brave and being calm in the face of danger. It’s always been important to keep her in that lane.
On a series like The Flash, are you a believer that the pen can be mightier than the proverbial sword?
Yeah, I would like to believe that. We haven’t really delved into that a lot over the last few seasons with Iris being an on-and-off journalist. I hope that’s something we can continue to explore in the coming seasons. It’s a tricky thing for Iris to be a reporter and deal with S.T.A.R Labs. I don’t know how the writers will handle it, but I hope they can figure it out in a way to make her reporting important to the storyline and helping Team Flash.
This year, Iris outed DeVoe in a blog…
It was interesting on the writers’ part. Fans seem really excited that Iris is getting back to her roots. That all kind of started with her being a superhero and her realizing why she is on this Earth. She realizes while it’s fun to be a superhero, that’s not her calling. That is Barry’s calling. It reminded her of what her really calling is, which is to be a journalist. It’s exciting to see her get back into what makes her want to get up in the morning.
As a wordsmith, is that why Iris was the right person to hunt down Marlize (Kim Engelbrecht)? Iris presents a pretty convincing argument.
As we’ve said, Iris is a journalist. She’s really great with her words, but she’s also good at verbalizing her words, her feelings and expressing things. I think that’s why she makes such a great team leader. Everyone is so analytical, and she is the heart. She can speak truth to power and motivate everyone. We saw that in the last episode with Marlize. Iris has a really fantastic way with words and galvanizing everyone. I think that will help ending the season, with recruiting Marlize on our team to help stop DeVoe.
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