Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for The Flash season 6, episode 16, “So Long and Goodnight.”
The empathetic metahuman powers of Cecile Horton have created a plot hole in the storyline of The Flash season 6. The problems go beyond how vaguely defined Cecile’s limits have been in the past, involving fundamental questions of just how her ability to read people works. Played by Danielle Nicolet, Cecile Horton was introduced as the District Attorney of Central City in The Flash season 1, episode 19, “Who Is Harrison Wells?” A no-nonsense prosecutor known in the criminal underworld as “Ce-Seal-Your-Fate Horton,” Cecile bonded with Detective Joe West as they both adjusted to doing their respective jobs in a brave new world where shapeshifting criminals made identifying and convicting suspects all the harder. The two fell in love and started dating exclusively, with Cecile getting pregnant at the start of The Flash season 4.
Cecile’s pregnancy opened a whole new world, as the stress of childbirth triggered her metagene and she developed empathic abilities. While it was originally presumed this was a temporary side-effect, Cecile’s powers remained after Baby Jenna was born. Indeed, Cecile’s powers on The Flash became stronger, allowing her to sense the surface thoughts and repressed emotions of those in close proximity to her. This super-empathy became so strong that Cecile quit her job to become a defense attorney in private practice, as she could no longer work to convict people her powers told her were innocent.
The nature and strength of Cecile’s powers have varied wildly from episode to episode. Early on, her abilities were more telepathic in nature and Cecile played a key role in stopping The Thinker in The Flash‘s season 4 finale. In seasons 5 & 6, Cecile’s abilities became more limited in scope and were based around her ability to sense strong emotions, though at a greater distance than her telepathic powers. This allowed her to act as an early warning system during the battle with Cicada (whose hatred of metahumans Cecile could sense from several blocks away) and to detect when Eobard Thawne had taken possession of Nash Wells’ body.
While these fluctuating power levels could have been easily explained away as a side-effect of her body adjusting after pregnancy, Cecile’s powers as presented in The Flash season 6, episode 16, “So Long And Goodnight”, raise questions as to what her limits are precisely. The action of the episode sees Cecile being paralyzed with pain as she’s abducted by the metahuman mercenary Rag Doll, whose body-bending powers leave him in a constant state of intense physical pain. In this case, Cecile’s powers kicked-in and incapacitated her before Rag Doll entered the room, hinting at how effective her powers are at long-range and establishing that there are drawbacks to her empathy. Yet earlier in the episode, Cecile didn’t sense anything odd about the Mirror World duplicates of Iris and Kamilla that were sitting next to her for several hours during a family game night.
While it’s possible there’s something about the nature of the doppelgangers under Eva McCulloch’s control that makes them impossible to detect telepathically or empathically (perhaps even reflecting Cecile’s own emotions right back at her) this does seem to contradict what we know of how the duplicates function based on earlier episodes of The Flash. The Iris clone, for instance, was shown unconsciously mimicking Eva McCulloch’s nervous hand twitch while pouring a drink. What’s more damning, however, is that both Joe West and Wally West have noticed something odd about the behavior of the fake Iris without empathy superpowers, yet Cecile has sensed nothing of the clones’ nefarious nature.
