Wild Predictions: The Flash Season 2

ZOOM, Is That You?

Last season, there was a lot of discussion about whether Hunter Zolomon, a villain created by Geoff Johns and one of a number of characters to take on the name and costume of the Reverse Flash or Professor Zoom, might be the bad guy.

Ultimately, that proved not to be the case. The Reverse-Flash they went with wasn't a Wally West villain, but vintage Barry all the way: Eobard Thawne.

This time around, the character's name is actually Zoom, so a lot of fans had wondered whether we would get Zolomon for real this time -- and if so, what would differentiate him from last season's threat.

While Thawne is generally discussed as the first Reverse-Flash, that's because Earth-1's continuity has always taken priority since the Crisis on Infinite Earths. There was, in fact, a Golden Age Reverse-Flash in the pages of Jay Garrick's Flash comics as well. A blue-masked, self-obsessed doppelganger of Garrick, Edward Clariss is generally called The Rival, and he actually might be our best candidate for a TV villain.

Why?

Well, there's all that blue lightning in the trailers for The Flash from Comic-Con, for a start.

Many fans have wondered what significance the blue lightning might have, and it's something that's appeared in The Flash comics periodically over the years. More often than not, fans have associated it with Cobalt Blue, Barry's literal evil twin brother, who appeared during Mark Waid's run on The Flash and who was actually an ancestor of Eobard Thawne. A lot of people -- occasionally myself included -- thought Eddie Thawne might turn out to be Malcolm Thawne, better known as Cobalt Blue, in the TV show.

There have been other times, too; in The Flash (1990), John Wesley Shipp actually played a twisted clone of The Flash called Pollux, who wore blue and had a blue speed trail behind him. Barry in recent years has gone for blue lightning twice: once during the Blackest Night and Brightest Day events when he could be seen wearing a Blue Lantern ring and uniform, and once during the Futures End event and its fallout, as an "evil" Barry from five years into the future was introduced with a blue costume and powers. That version of Barry was instrumental in the introduction of Wally West to the post-Flashpoint DC Universe, so when Wally was announced for Season Two of The Flash, it was easy to draw that connection.

But probably the most obvious answer remains Clariss.

Clariss was a professor at the university attended by the Earth-2 Flash, Jay Garrick. He believed he had recreated the formula that gave Garrick his speed, but the scientific community didn't believe him, driving him to madness and crime.

In the comics, the formula Clariss wanted credit for was a drug called Velocity 9, later retconned to have been invented by Vandal Savage -- who, coincidentally enough, will serve as the primary antagonist on DC's Legends of Tomorrow in its first season. It isn't, as far as I can tell, tied to the mathematical formula spoken by Johnny and Jesse Quick in order to gain them access to the Speed Force, although with Jesse joining The Flash this year, it may not be entirely unrelated on TV.

Clariss took to the streets in a darker version of Garrick's costume, and instead of trailing yellow lightning behind him when he ran, his blue, possibly becuase of the darker pants and blue face mask he wore. Clariss's formula proved to be temporary, and he was defeated when it was expended. He reappeared a few months later, and in battling the Flash, reached light speed and vanished.

Clariss, it seems, had inadvertently trapped himself in the Speed Force, where he remained for decades before being retrieved by Johnny Sorrow, who invited him to join the new Injustice Society -- in a storyline written by The Flash executive producer and DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, the driving force behind Zolomon. He would appear in another, Garrick-centric storyline in The Flash during the Johns era.

After returning from the Speed Force, The Rival was reinvented to have his face blurred by speed motion rather than simply wearing a mask -- something that many of Johns' speed-powered villains would echo. This could explain why Tony Todd will be only the voice of Zoom, rather than having one actor do both.

After his escape from the Speed Force, Clariss was able to possess other bodies, being that he was now a being of pure energy, which may also explain the need for a dynamic voice actor to do at least part of the work.

On top of all of this, of course, there's the Comic-Con teaser:

In that video, Jay Garrick comes to tell Barry, "your world is in danger," which seems that he has some expertise in whatever is going on. That he's apparently going to be a mentor-type figure to Barry backs that up, of course, but what if it's even more simple than that: what if it's primarily his Rogues and his big bad who are terrorizing Central City?

Anyway, it's a theory.

VIBE is Coming...

This one (and the next) are actually pretty obvious. We've seen in teasers for Season Two and even been told outright by Thawne in the Season One finale that Cisco Ramon is attuned to the vibrations of the universe.

What does that mean? Well, fans of the comics know that Cisco has done his time as Justice League member Vibe, whose powers are vibration-based. They flirted with giving us something about that in the first season, but it seems like a fait accompli in the second.

...So is Killer Frost

What the heck happened to Ronnie Raymond?

That's a question that we don't know the answer to just yet, but it seems he's out of the picture, as a recent teaser for The Flash seems to show DC's Legends of Tomorrow character Jay Jackson in the Firestorm costume.

Up until now, the network has tried to keep a lid on the nature of Jackson's character, but executive producer Phil Klemmer told ComicBook.com at Comic-Con International: San Diego this summer that he was "probably the last person Professor Stein (Victor Garber) wants to share Firestorm with."

What's all this mean for Caitlin Snow? Well, after she lost Robbie during the particle accelerator explosion, she became detached and, ahem, frigid. Could she go that way again? Certainly Barry saw something in the timestream during the Season One finale to indicate we'll get some version of Caitlin's Killer Frost character from the comics at some point.

Wally Could Replace Barry

This one's a real Hail Mary pass, and it's based on very little...but hear me out.

Wally West replaced Barry Allen following the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, when Barry "died" and was merged into the Speed Force. As noted in the introduction, Crisis was actually teased in the pilot for The Flash, in a newspaper from the future that proved to be a significant plot device later on.

Besides Barry, you know who spent a good chunk of time stranded in the Speed Force? Edward Clariss, whom we already suggested could be Zoom.

With Barry's time-travel in the Season One finale creating the environment for an incursion from elsewhere in the Multiverse, what if a version of the Crisis happens here, and the way for Barry to stop Zoom is to apparently sacrifice himself by throwing the two of them into the Speed Force?

How utterly crazy would it be if we got a story that seemed to kill off the title character and replace him?

...Well, we've got all the necessary parts in place for such a story, if that's what they want to tell.

Hinting at a Larger Multiverse

We've talked about this again and again -- but while a vocal group of fans really want all of DC's media to tie together, the company has thus far indicated that they have very little interest in that. They don't want The Flash and Gotham and Supergirl, all run by different networks, to be as constrained as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Daredevil.

Whether or not that's the right choice, many fans have suggested that with The Flash, Rip Hunter and a rumored Booster Gold movie all coming into play around the same time, we could see at least a hint of a broader multiverse that would allow fans to either explicitly or implicitly say that the extended DC film and TV universe is all a part of the diaspora of worlds that comprise the DC multiverse.

Hell, I kind of just go with that already. But if we suggest that there's more than two Earths -- say, 52 or even a theoretically infinite number -- we could creep slowly toward the possibility of a Supergirl crossover some day.