How The Flash's Caitlin Will Handle Her New Powers

Anyone who's been keeping up with The Flash this season knows that Caitlin Snow is dealing with the discovery of some brand new superpowers. How is she going to handle this? Well, it might not be so easy. Danielle Panabaker, who plays Caitlin, has revealed that she's going to have a lot of mixed feelings and confusion regarding her new found powers.

At first, she doesn't really know what to make of her powers. She's experimenting a little bit, as we saw in episode 4, and it's getting to the point where she knows she needs help and she's not ready to go to Team Flash yet, because I don't think she knows what she's going to say. So she goes to her mom as another expert in the medical field, and tries to get some assistance from her mom, but she's not quite as successful as she'd hoped.

Wow, well, this would be a transition that would be especially tough for most people. Going from regular old human to meta human would take a huge adjustment. As we've seen in the past couple of episodes, Barry's futzing with the timeline to save his mom has had some unintended consequences for the other members of Team Flash. At first, it looked like Caitlin had escaped the changes, but it turns out she's now been gifted with the same cryokinetic abilities as her Earth-2 counterpart, a supervillain who went by the name Killer Frost until Zoom killed her.

While we know that Earth-1 Caitlin and her mom don't have the best relationship, Killer Frost had a much rougher home life as she grew up, which is probably what, largely, led her down the supervillain path once she manifested the power to shoot freezing air from her hands. Caitlin, though, has hope and believes in the potential for good in most people (as evidenced by her quick partnering with not-really-Jay-Garrick last season), which should help keep her on the straight and narrow as her powers continue to grow.

After having met her Earth-2 doppelgänger, though, it makes complete sense that Caitlin would fear what the development of these powers mean for her future, especially considering that she didn't know Killer Frost before her powers helped turn her into a baddie. There would, indeed, be a lot of waffling from Caitlin about whether or not to let the team in on her powers. As Danielle Panabaker told Entertainment Weekly in the same interview, Caitlin can't quite decide what, exactly, to do about her new powers.

She's scared of these powers at first. It's not something that she wants and she's trying to almost prevent [them from] happening, because she's afraid that it will make her turn evil.

Aw, man, I feel bad for Caitlin. Of course it would be scary to have met a version of yourself that was evil and to now have something major in common with your worst self. We can all see how Caitlin continues to adjust to her powers every Tuesday on The CW at 8 p.m. EST.

Adrienne Jones
Senior Content Creator

Covering The Witcher, Outlander, Virgin River, Sweet Magnolias and a slew of other streaming shows, Adrienne Jones is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend, and started in the fall of 2015. In addition to writing and editing stories on a variety of different topics, she also spends her work days trying to find new ways to write about the many romantic entanglements that fictional characters find themselves in on TV shows. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Photojournalism.