The Flash: 9 Things You Might Have Missed in Rupture

COSMIC TREADMILL

We see a good deal of the cosmic treadmill this week, and while it's still not Barry's means for time-traveling, certainly it's getting a more versatile workout when you make it into something that allows him to project realtime 3D holograms of himself to do crimefighting even while he has no powers.

FRINGE

No Fringe on Earth-2. Bummer.

More to the point, it's interesting that while so many things are similar on Earth-1 and Earth-2, and while so many characters have direct, 1:1 analogues, there are big chunks of history and popular culture that are wildly different. There, Beyonce is a Senator; there's no Fringe; and the war in which Zolomon's father served is one that didn't even happen on Earth-1.

WALLY

"I'm sure there's something out there that will satisfy your need for speed and helping people," Joe tells Wally.

And then the episode ends with...well, we'll get to that in a bit.

At any rate, Wally and Jesse Quick are both apparently on the road to super-speedster-dom. And that's not an easy road, especially with Zoom around, but this week we saw the most obvious foreshadowing of it yet...even before that ending.

RUPTURE

This episode introduced (and then killed off) Rupture, a villain who was the Earth-2 equivalent of Cisco Ramon's brother Dante.

We've seen Dante before -- as hinted in dialogue, he and Cisco were taken hostage by Captain Cold and Heat Wave last year -- but his doppelganger is another matter entirely. We hadn't seen him at all until this week, and nobody was more surprised than Cisco and Dante when he popped up.

It's also worth noting that in the comics, Rupture is actually Armando Ramon, essentially the "bad" brother while Dante and Cisco are the "good" kids.

PRINCESS BRIDING ME

"You killed my father, prepare to die" is probably the most frequently-quoted line from The Princess Bride, so when Cisco was still clueless as to Rupture's real identity or what had him so upset, he cracked the joke to ease tension.

It didn't work.

ANTIMATTER AND DARK MATTER

I'm pretty sure antimatter has been at least mentioned as being part of the original particle accelerator explosion, but it's primarily been dark matter that got most of the credit (I've heard "Dark matter wave" or "dark matter explosion" a bunch).

Given how poorly today's experiment turned out, though, the presence of antimatter is pretty significant.

Why? Well, that's the stuff that killed universes (and ultimately The Flash) in Crisis on Infinite Earths, a storyline teased by Eobard Thawne's future newspaper all the way back in the pilot.

In that storyline, it was the introduction of antimatter to the positive matter universe back at the dawn of time that made the immensely powerful Anti-Monitor aware of the positive matter universe's existence -- and made him want to conquer it.

FLASHPOINT

That apparatus they hooked Barry into looks a little like an electric chair.

This has led dozens of commenters, in the week since the first images of that contraption were released, to comment on the similarities between what they're trying to do here and what The Flash and the Batman of another Earth tried to do in Flashpoint, where they strapped Barry Allen into an electric chair to try and jumpstart the Speed Force in his body.

EXPECTO PATRONUS

So even before the "Expecto Patronus," [sic], a spell used in the Harry Potter franchise, was uttered onscreen, Harry had already dropped a Harry Potter reference when talking to Cisco about the Weather Wizard's wand.

Considering that the week of the Supergirl/The Flash crossover, there were references to Harry Potter in all four of the Greg Berlanti-produced DC TV shows, this has been a pretty Potter-tastic season.

wallywest14 said ... (original post)

The Harry Potter spell used is "Expecto Patronum", which produces a Patronus. The spell is not named Expecto Patronus as stated above

BARRY IS THE LIGHTNING

We've talked about this before -- when, in the pilot, Oliver Queen said that the lightning "chose" Barry.

In the comics, after his death in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Barry Allen merged with the Speed Force, and was able to influence the lightning that eventually struck himself in the past.

It was with his death -- temporary as that death turned out to be -- that Barry guaranteed that the legacy of The Flash would continue.