Crisis on Infinite Earths Changed How The Flash’s Season 2 Played Out

Following the events of The CW’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” a lot of things have changed. While the character-centric changes have been cascading through the post-Crisis episodes of Black Lightning, Arrow, Supergirl, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, tonight saw The Flash join the party — and things got really serious. Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) has been tracking some of the biggest differences between the pre- and post-Crisis Arrowverse, and on tonight’s episode of The Flash, we got a chance to look at some of his research. Spilled across a pair of large glass boards, Ramon broke down a timeline of events since Kara Zor-El (Melissa Benoist) landed on Earth in 2000, and what the newly-reconfigured geography of the DC Universe is like.

One thing that the episode addressed is exactly how The Flash‘s second season went down. Why would that be confusing? Well, because it required something that no longer exists: a multiverse.

In the second season of The Flash, the DC multiverse was introduced. While the hero battled villains all throughout his first season that had been created by the same particle accelerator explosion that gave Barry (Grant Gustin) his own abilities, season two pitted him against villains from Earth-2.

Zoom, the season’s big bad, roared over to Earth-1, but he had company. Villains battled Team Flash all season long, almost exclusively jumping here from Earth-2 to get to the good guys.

According to Cisco’s white board, though, it was simpler than that in the reconfigured history. Whereas season one had the particle accelerator explosion, season three’s Flashpoint anomalies, and season four’s dark matter-bathed bus riders, season two now had a single, easily-explained source of powers for its villains: the singularity.

The singularity was accidentally caused by The Flash and Reverse-Flash’s battle at the end of season one, and had to be stopped in the season 2 finale before it consumed the city. Ronnie Raymond (Robbie Amell) gave his life to stop it, setting up story for both The Flash‘s Caitlin Snow but also for DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

Now, it seems, the same kind of “energy anomaly” that gave people powers in those other seasons is being applied (at least in theory) to the singularity, explaining how season 2 could happen more or less identically, without the need for a multiverse.

The Flash returns from its post-“Crisis” break tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, followed by a new episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow at 9.