Barry and Patty’s relationship on The Flash was poorly executed. It’s no secret that The Flash is male-dominated. When we look at the main cast from season 1, we had Barry Allen, Joe West, Iris West, Eddie Thawne, Cisco Ramon, Caitlin Snow and Harrison Wells. That’s more than twice as many male characters (five) as female (two). When we add in Martin Stein and Ronnie Raymond, the disparity becomes even greater. Even if we want to add Linda Park into that secondary category, we still have a huge gap between the two.

Cue season 2 and the introduction of Patty Spivot. She was a goofy but smart and driven cop looking to catch her father’s murderer. She and Barry bonded almost immediately, and the two got pretty serious pretty quickly. She had both a romance and a story of her own. After Patty joined Joe’s anti-metahuman taskforce, it seemed only a matter of time until she joined Team Flash. She got the chance to face and eventually defeat her demons in the mid-season finale when she was tempted to kill Mark Mardon but arrested him instead. What could be a better opportunity for her to be let in on the secret?

Cue the episode, “Potential Energy.” Barry worries about Patty being targeted and killed by Zoom, and Iris tells him he needs to bring Patty in on his secret. It’s what she wished he would have done for her, after all. And Barry agrees. Things are looking up. He tells his friends he’s going to tell her, and Cisco is all in favor of the idea. Again, positive sign.

But for some reason, it’s the words of Harrison Wells — words that don’t even hold up to logic (and our characters are scientists!) — that convince Barry to hold off from telling Patty he’s The Flash. Wells uses the antiquated comic book logic that telling someone a superhero’s secret identity will put them in danger.

So, the cost of this secret was a character that brought a lot to the show. Barry truly cared for her, and she would have been a valuable asset to the team. She could have provided another female voice in a room that added yet another male presence in Jay Garrick this season. Instead, she was unceremoniously written off.

Patty’s story was poorly handled, but it feels more like a symptom of a larger problem with The Flash than an issue of its own. Despite the small strides this creative team has made with their female characters, it seems the aforementioned lessons that have surfaced in the other shows have not made their way to The Flash yet. And that’s disappointing.