Flash Season 7's Killer Frost Twist Explains An Earlier Caitlin Snow Trend - Screen Rant

The latest episode of The Flash season 7 saw sparks (antagonistic and romantic) fly between Frost and Chillblaine — and retroactively explained an earlier Caitlin Snow pattern. Played by Danielle Panabaker, Caitlin Snow has been an integral part of Team Flash since the very beginning. As a genius-level bio-engineer, she worked at S.T.A.R. Labs and assisted the team in a scientific and medical capacity. Later, however, Caitlin was established as a meta-human in her own right. Developing an ice-based persona and respective powers, she ultimately ventured into the field and battled along alongside Barry Allen aka The Flash (Grant Gustin).

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Along the way, Caitlin also experienced several romantic subplots. After the tragic death of her first love, Ronnie Raymond (Robbie Amell), she was divisively given a new one each season. Principal among them was "Jay Garrick" (Teddy Sears) in The Flash season 2 and Julian Albert (Tom Felton) in The Flash season 3. In both cases, they turned out to be varying degrees of villainous. "Jay" was revealed to be a false guise adopted by the serial killer Hunter Zoloman aka Zoom. Julian, meanwhile, was the unwitting alter ego of Dr. Alchemy. At the time, it seemed as though Caitlin was merely unlucky in love. Based on The Flash season 7, episode 7, "Growing Pains," however, there might have actually been a deeper reason at play.

The episode marked the introduction of Mark Blaine (Jon Cor). Initially, Mark appeared as a charming bartender that stepped in to aid the reformed villain with information and then during a bar fight. It was made clear from the outset that there was an attraction between the pair. As such, The Flash season 7 set up a love story for Frost. By the episode's end, however, it was revealed that Mark was the very villain that Frost had been hunting. An obsessed cryo-geneticist, he'd lured Frost into a plot intended to replicate her powers and thus turn himself into the supervillain Chillblaine. Though the plan came successfully to fruition, Frost was able to defeat him. Regardless, even while locked in battle, the sexual tension remained palpable.

Danielle Panabaker as Frost Jon Cor as Mark Blaine Chillblaine The Flash Season 7

The spark between Killer Frost and Chillblaine makes all the sense in the world — after all, though Killer Frost's days of murder and kidnap are behind her, she has remained roguish at heart. She has always been a rebellious outlier and being drawn to bad boys would be firmly within that wheelhouse. In short, men such as Mark Blaine are very much her type. The exact opposite can be said of Caitlin, who has largely always been portrayed as strait-laced. Some of her aforementioned romances always felt incongruous, since her type is very much the kinds of heroes embodied by Ronnie Raymond. However, the latest episode of The Flash season 7 helped to clarify how they might have become into being — when one realizes that Frost may have been having more of a subconscious influence on Caitlin than it had previously seemed.

Killer Frost seemingly first emerged as part of a psychotic split. Ultimately, things were retconned to be more complex. In The Flash season 5, Frost was revealed to have been a part of Caitlin ever since she was a child. The show has never touched on what this new revelation really meant in terms of romance. Instead, it eschewed such subplots once the pair successfully started to coexist. That allowed the show to avoid the potentially egregious connotations that other body-sharing storylines indulge in.

With Frost now in possession of her own body, though, there is now a lot more freedom to explore such individual distinctions. What aspects of their past personalities actually come from themselves? Were some traits merely aspects from the other half, bleeding through? To that end, if Caitlin's previous romantic hiccups were indeed subconsciously influenced by Frost's preference for bad boys, them being separate could also mean that Caitlin might have better luck in the future — should The Flash season 7 or beyond ever revisit her own love life.

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John Atkinson (797 Articles Published)

John Atkinson has been a news and feature writer for Screen Rant since late 2018. Before that, he had articles published across a number of different outlets. A graduate of the University of London, John was raised on a small island by television and movies. As such, he pursued a career in screenwriting and film journalism when it became apparent that actually becoming Spider-Man was impossible. John's fondest wish is to one day produce a film of his own. Until then, he's more than happy to spend countless hours just talking about them. John's love of film and television defies genre and sometimes even logic. Nothing is off-limits to his passion - be it Marvel, DC, Rian Johnson's Star Wars, or Tommy Wiseau's latest cinematic offering. Away from screens, John can often be found in a park reading mystery and/or fantasy novels, jumping up and down at various music events, or thinking too deeply about Keanu Reeves' career and why Edgar Wright doesn't have an Oscar.