The Flash – and the rest of The CW’s Arrowverse of shows – are currently navigating a brave new world following the events of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. The crossover event essentially rewrote reality, and it looks like that’s led to some interesting new foes coming out of the woodwork. Tonight’s midseason premiere was certainly no exception, bringing back a costumed foe that we haven’t seen onscreen in years — and adapting her in a new context. Spoilers for this week’s episode of The Flash, “Marathon” below! Only look if you want to know!
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The episode saw Iris West-Allen (Candice Patton) continuing to investigate the conspiracy of Black Hole, an organization that seems to have ties to terrorism and metahuman smuggling. Throughout the investigation, Iris began to be targeted by a masked assassin, who was armed with a light gun from McCulloch Technologies.
After being seriously injured by the assassin, Iris began to investigate who the assassin could be, and quickly found her answer — Kimiyo Hoshi, a metahuman astronomer with the power to harness light, who had gone missing half a decade prior. As Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) began to suggest, there was a chance that Kimiyo’s powers were being harnessed and amplified through McCulloch’s gun. Allegra Garcia (Kayla Compton) suggested that Kimiyo was a doctor with the ability to control light, leading Cisco to proclaim that she’s the new “Doctor Light”.
In the pages of DC Comics, Kimiyo is the second character to wear the moniker of Doctor Light, albeit with a completely different M.O. than the other iterations. While both Arthur Light and Jacob Findlay often operated as antagonists, Kimiyo served as a superhero, often concurrently to the villains. The character debuted in issue four of Crisis on Infinite Earths, when she was reluctantly recruited to be one of The Monitor’s allies and guard a cosmic tuning fork. She made quite a lot of appearances in subsequent DC Comics events, most recently in Heroes in Crisis.
Kimiyo’s arrival brings in a decidedly-different Dr. Light from pre-“Crisis”, who was an Earth-2 doppelganger of Linda Park (Malese Jow).
“The past villains that we saw in previous seasons, they’re not the same villains anymore. They are different people. They might even have different abilities, which Team Flash is going to get caught unprepared,” showrunner Eric Wallace said in a previous interview. “It gives a freshness to it and even more danger to what would be a meta-of-the-week kind of story line. It becomes even more treacherous if you don’t know what the meta is, because that meta is a little bit more unpredictable.” Without revealing who we’ll see in addition to Amunet, he adds: “We’re going to dig deep. You’re definitely going to get villains we have not seen in a long time popping up.”
What do you think of Dr. Light’s (sort of) return on The Flash? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
